Hey, I’m Brian

This week we shut down Spec.fm, a podcast network I co-founded in 2015. Sarah wrote a reflection on the last five years of operating the network, lessons we learned, and how much money the company made.

Design Details will continue as an independent podast – new episodes coming in 2021!

Over the years, I’ve been curating my list of favorite tools, apps, and independent software. Let me know what else I should try!

My Bookmarks list keeps track of interesting things I’ve found on the internet. The lack of organization made it hard to decide what I should share and made it hard to quickly navigate to a category of content. Now Bookmarks are organized by Reading, Portfolios, and Personal Sites.

Over the years domains and side projects accumulate. It takes mental overhead to keep things updated, running, and paid for. I’m going to start slowly integrating personal projects like Security Checklist into this codebase as a more future-proof way to tinker.

So far, so good! The migration was painless (except for a few cases where outdated tutorials led me down the wrong path for CSS purging solutions). But here we are: as I slowly start to memorize the syntax, I feel like I have super powers.

Are any designers out there making good passive income outside of your day job? What are you trying?

There were some really inspiring ideas in this thread about how to generate passive income as a designer. I didn’t realize there were real businesses being built on top of Figma plugins.

After spending the summer with my family in Colorado, it was time to head home. We took a long 2-week route back to San Francisco, driving through Salt Lake City, Boise, and Bend. We fell in love with Bend and the surrounding area.