Personal Notes

I’ve been pretty busy this year!

I recently have been experimenting with baking Philadelphia-style soft pretzels. Since I live in Australia now, a good pretzel is hard to come by. In the grocery stores, there’s usually only 1 or 2 brands of snacking (hard) pretzels in the chip aisle. Elsewhere, you can buy soft pretzels but they are usually the german/bavarian style from a bakery which doesn’t really scratch the itch. So, I set out to figure out how to bake them my way and the results have been pretty good so far.

Offline, I had a great summer exploring NSW and taking a few small trips around the area. We found a great swimming hole in the Royal National Park called Winnifred Falls, check it out if you’re in the area. The trail down the swimming area is partially on a fire trail and not very scenic, but the swimming area is certainly worth it. It is, however, salt water but the water is very deep and even has a rope swing available for you to jump in.

Projects

I have quite a few projects in the mix. It’s been an exciting year so far:

Modus is live

Together with Marian from Miscellanea Studio, we built Modus: an independent report and rolodex of 380 Australian womenswear brands. Every single brand has been hand-curated, tagged, and categorized across 12 dimensions including Design Codes, Market Segment, Customer Focus and more.

Video: Modus walkthrough (coming soon).

Tabba is growing!

I’m making minor improvements and fixing bugs as they come up. I’ve not had much time (or desire) to do a lot of marketing for Tabba, but luckily a few people have organically posted about Tabba which has caused a steady trickle of people checking it out and finding it useful.

• It all started with a post on Twitter by Kenneth Dsouza which reached about 2,000 of his followers. I am not an active twitter user anymore so I missed this post until I saw the visitor count on Tabba picking up quite a bit. I don’t know Kenneth IRL but I remember him from our days posting on Posts.cv – thank you Kenneth!
• After that, Oliur mentioned Tabba in his newsletter The Manual which caused a massive spike in my traffic. Oliur’s newsletter is highly recommended
• Next, Rahul mentioned Tabba in his Hulry newsletter, saying: “I’ve installed plenty of new tab extensions on browsers, but none of them has stuck because they lose utility over time. This might be different.”. Thanks for the kind words Rahul!
• Oliur then launched a standalone website for his Link Lowdown and included Tabba on here. I still get a few clicks here and there from this site.
• And finally, the Curious Procrastinator mentioned Tabba in issue #80 with a hilarious tidbit saying “Useful for people who basically live in their browser and do not need six separate apps just to note a task, check a timezone, and find the copyright symbol again. Also the hour-by-hour view of your year is mildly unsettling, which is part of why it works.”

It’s incredibly gratifying to see people share something I built. If you’ve not tried it yet, Tabba is a new tab replacement that adds a suite of mini-tools directly to your browser. No account creation, no analytics/tracking, just install it and you’re good to go. Please reach out if you have feedback or ideas for what you’d like to see added.

Website for a typeface designer: Douglas Hayes

Doug’s website officially launched back in February, and he’s had a great reception from those in the design community. As of today, his site has received visitors from 29 countries around the world.

For the next evolution of Doug’s site, he will begin selling his own typefaces that he has been working on. This was always on the roadmap but our priority first was to get his portfolio site up and running. For the next iteration, we’ll be integrating Fontdue to handle the ecommerce aspects: shopping cart, checkout flow and payments via Stripe. Looking forward to getting this live in the coming weeks.

Learning

The more I use AI-assisted coding tools such as Cursor, the more I am exposed to actual code and learning more about web development. Instead of prompting for 100% of the changes I want to make, I have been feeling more comfortable parsing the code itself, editing things, and seeing what effect my changes have. Sometimes things break and I CMD+Z a few times, but that’s the process of learning. It’s a bit of trial and error and sometimes it’s not very efficient, but it’s gratifying to learn and attempt to teach myself something as an extension of designing static mockups in Figma.

Pro tip: When writing code with AI, I will have the agent implement a feature and then write a markdown guide explaining how it all works and links up with the existing infrastructure of the app.

I hesitate to call myself a developer by any means, but I feel like I am inching closer and closer to the world of design engineering. I actually enjoy the frontend aspect of coding, getting really into the CSS, making interactions feel really nice. It’s been fun and I’m excited to see where this technology takes me.

Collaboration & Networking

I’ve submitted my pitch to present at the next Cursor Sydney Meetup, which will be returning in June 2026. Register here to attend, it should be a good night of networking and learning how other people are building with Cursor + AI.

Tools & Resources

Interesting links I’ve come across

• I added myself to Bullish On Australia - looks like an interesting directory of people building stuff in Australia, which is where I currently reside. If I’m being honest, the design of this website reeks of vibe code aesthetic but I’m glad somebody is building something as a way of networking and connecting people down here. I was able to add a listing for without creating an account or any type of verification, which begs the question: can I simply add a listing for anyone if I have links to their website/linkedin etc.? Seems like some more thought needs to be put into this site in order to protect users from someone adding them when they don’t want to be on the website. There ought to be some more robust verification.

Some new design tools I’ve been testing/evaluating:

• Onlook: Probably the most promising out of this bunch. Will give this a try in the coming weeks. I’m looking for something to bridge the gap between figma and code and speed up my workflow. Looks awesome so far. I had tried this app back in 2021 but I wasn’t yet working off of my own codebase, and so now that I have a few live projects in the works, I am feeling more confident to give this a go.
• Paper.design: A friend shared this with me. I tried it out, feels nice enough to design in, however the lack of (as of May 2026) design tokens is a non-starter for me. I refuse to hardcode colors into a design mockup when I already have a design system with a color palette in multiple themes/light & dark mode, etc. as well as a semantic layer of tokens.
• Nordcraft: I found this via the “For you” tab on my Bluesky. Looks interesting but I haven’t had too much time to explore here. I like that you can link it up with a backend/supabase etc. and also be able to import design tokens via JSON file. Will revisit this should the need arise for a new project.
• Subframe: Another one on my list but I haven’t had the time to try this yet. Writing it here so I remember to check it out!

Upcoming

Going to be a busy Q2:

• Launching the ecommerce features for Doug’s site so he can start selling his own typefaces.
• Doing more marketing and making incremental updates to Modus, especially with Australian Fashion Week coming up later this month.
• Exploring more advanced features for Tabba, including better data viz, refreshed todo lists with better prioritization, and potentially cross-device sync so people can use Tabba on multiple devices.

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, visually pleasant, and actually kind of funny at times.
• 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.