It’s been quite some time since I updated my Now page, but here’s what I’ve been up to:

Projects

New website for a type designer

New website launched for Douglas Hayes, a super talented type designer that I’ve known for years, going back to our days at UArts. This is Doug’s first website, and I was super grateful for him to ask me to bring his portfolio to life with a bunch of custom type testers and eventually, the ability to put his fonts up for sale. This website was made possible with no fewer than 30 components, and a bunch of custom styling built on top of Astro. We actually built this site once in Webflow and started hitting some limitations, and I eventually found it much more convenient to build a static site and go from there.

My first product launch

I launched my own product! Tabba is a new tab replacement that turns your browser into a mini-suite of productivity tools, including an hourly time grid, todo list, timezone planner, and more. I had a lot of fun designing and building this and the response has been great.

Check it out at tabba.so and drop me an email if you end up trying it.

A platform for the Australian fashion market

Together with Marian from Miscellanea.studio, I’m designing and building on a new fashion analysis and data platform named Modus, launching soon! Modus will make it easy for fashion brand owners and professionals to map, analyze, and understand the women’s Australian fashion market.

New portfolio website

New personal portfolio site has been launched!

Learning

• Astro.dev: My first two projects on Astro were for Tabba and Douglas Hayes.
• Vite for building my web apps, static websites, and chrome extensions for rapid testing and iteration. Previous to this, I was making changes directly in my code, building the app, refreshing over and over again.

Collaboration & Networking

I did 12 beta tests with colleagues and friends. Most of these were done via google meet video call and some were done asynchronously.

Recommendations

A few things I’ve enjoyed recently:

• Links and websites
  • enclose.horse: an excellent web-based game that gets a new puzzle daily. simply create walls which give your horse the largest possible grazing area. I actually look forward to checking out the puzzle every day
• Movies
  • No Other Choice: I watched this over Christmas with my family and it was really good. Great storytelling, good amount of humor and and visually pleasant
• Music
  • El Guincho - (Chica Oh) Drims: This album, released in 2010 has continued to be a really fun listen, and catchy as hell. Since the Bad Bunny halftime show, my wife has been listening to a lot of music in Spanish, which reminded me of how fun this album is.

Upcoming Goals

• Launching Modus soon!
• Trying to be more visible and post more about my work

Personal Notes

It’s the start of a new year, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to publish a new Now post. Writing this update from my home in Sydney.

I’ll share a fun thing I did at home this past holiday season: Create a folder/playlist of all of the Christmas episodes of all the TV shows/movies that we like at home. It was really fun to revisit some old christmas King of the Hill or The Office episodes while I am doing chores around the house, and I particularly enjoyed jumping back into the Mad Men episode where they find out Lee Garner Jr. will be attending the Christmas party. I’d kind of forgotten about this episode, and it was interesting to just jump back in to a 6-season show just for 1 or 2 episodes. (Who says we need to rewatch an old show in order? Or even rewatch the entire season?)

This process of watching a curated list of shows kind of reminded me of the original TV experience where everything would be themed (commercials and shows alike) for whatever season you were in – Halloween episodes in October – and so on. Since streaming has replaced cable television programming, some things are lost and some things are gained.

Projects

I’m currently designing a portfolio website for Douglas Hayes, a typeface designer based in New York. Doug has an amazing body of work with clients spanning from Bon Appetit to Tidal Magazine and we are working on designing his first-ever website! The first phase (launching later this year) is a portfolio site, and later this year we’ll be adding some ecommerce tools so Doug can sell his own fonts. Watch this space!

Collaboration and Networking

I started posting on Bluesky. I have had my Twitter handle (@joshpindjak) since 2007 and stopped posting during 2021-2023 or so. I grew tired of using Twitter, and after recent changes to the platform, it’s become downright unenjoyable to use. I could go on and on about the changes I saw over the years, but I think that’s a topic for another post.

Bluesky, on the other hand, has been a breath of fresh air. You can have multiple Feeds for different topics, and there are better features like account labeling and block lists to help make your experience using social media actually enjoyable.

I find myself following more people that post about topics that I’m actually interested in. I am reading people’s blogs again. I’m reading interesting news articles again. I feel like this app is actually helping me find the things that I care about, instead of making me angry or outraged about something.

A pro tip: Mute keywords that don’t bring you joy. There are some topics that I do not wish to constantly read about. Life is too short, enjoy the time you spend on your phone.

Tools and Tech Stack

Coding with Cursor → Claude

I have been liking the quality of code and small apps I can spin up quickly using Claude. However after switching back and forth, copy and pasting code back and forth, it becomes tiresome after a while. Not to mention I frequently hit rate limits in Claude. So I’ve been trying out Cursor as a replacement. Let’s see how it goes.

Learning how to make mini Bluesky apps

After spending some time on Bluesky, I dove down the rabbit hole that is AT Protocol. I’ve been seeing people make tools and so, of course I gave it a go. I didn’t create anything worth shipping publicly, but I was able to get a few tests working on my localhost, such as:

• A basic user analytics dashboard
• A way to analyze the people you follow and how frequently you interact with them
• A way to search your “liked” posts, which currently isn’t supported on the Bsky app

Personal Notes

I’m writing this from my home in Sydney, Australia.

It’s the beginning of summer in the southern hemisphere, and I recently did some hiking in the Blue Mountains, which is about 2-hour drive from the Sydney CBD.

Projects

If you’re reading this, you’ll notice that I created a Now page! This is my way of easing back into publishing updates and adding some incremental updates to this website. Here’s what else I’ve been up to recently:

Together with Miscellanea Studio, we launched a new massive article/report/codex titled Back to Basics: The Hoodie Reflex, written by Marian Park. This was a months-long writing and research task, with the last few months devoted to designing and developing 70+ custom visuals and built entirely in Webflow. Congrats to Marian for launching this!

For my day-job, I am designing a new platform to detect and prevent customer churn for Upollo.ai. I also manage our marketing website and write a fair bit of content on the Upollo Blog.

I’ve also started planning a new website design project for a type designer friend/colleague that I have collaborated with before. Looking forward to launching a new portfolio & type tester website in early 2025!

Learning & Development

I’ve been finding LLMs such as Claude helpful when doing certain tasks, like basic coding stuff, formatting data (such as CSVs), copywriting and editing existing copywriting, and generating ideas for ads.

Learning the basics of D3.js for miscellanea.studio – we wanted to create these interactive mindmaps and this was a great way to do it. I used Claude to create a custom data schema to fit a client’s requirements (e.g. accounting for custom text formatting, as well as adding a bit of text hierarchy to certain nodes).

Is it worth learning Figma Slides at this point?

Tools and Tech Stack

I’m heads-down in Webflow at the moment. Lots of client and personal work has been taking place here.

I’m getting back into 3D printing and 3D designing. I am currently receiving an error on my Bambulab printer and need to install some replacement parts to fix it. The eventual goal is to be able to design and print my own moulds for purposes to casting objects out of wax, concrete, and so on.

At work and at home, I’ve also been playing around with some Marketing tools as well:

• Customer.io: I recently wrote a guide for Upollo for syncing customer Churn Scores to the Customer.io platform to aid in your outreach efforts.
• HubSpot: On a similar note, I wrote a guide for syncing Upollo’s user Churn Scores to HubSpot.
• Microsoft Clarity: I use Clarity both professionally and personally. It’s a great way to see user activity and figuring out where people are getting frustrated or hung up. It’s a great addition to basic stuff like Google Analytics.
• MailerLite: At Miscellanea Studio, we send emails using MailerLite. We wanted something super-simple and lightweight. Over the years, I have grown tired of bloated platforms like Intercom and Mailchimp. So far we’re quite happy with MailerLite.