@liam_o
Music & culture writer
Music critic, occasional novelist. Vinyl on the turntable, paperback in the bag. Dublin's club scene is more interesting than London's, fight me.
The FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement has produced two opposite distortions. One half of the community insists FI requires a million dollars in low-cost-of-living markets and three million in San Fran…
If you have ever wondered what beauty editors actually use day-to-day, after the cameras are off and the press lunches are over, the honest answer is: shockingly little.Five things I have repurchased every year for the …
Speed and snappiness are not the same thing. Speed is the actual time it takes for a system to respond. Snappiness is whether the user perceives that response as instant. The two diverge more often than designers acknow…
"Mobile-first" was a useful corrective in 2012. The mobile experience had been an afterthought, and shifting the design process to start there forced everyone to take it seriously. It worked.Then it became dogma. By 201…
The SEO playbook for the last decade was: find a keyword with high volume and low difficulty, write a piece targeting it, repeat. This worked. It is no longer the most efficient way to grow.The shift, which has been gra…
For the last two years, the SEO conversation has been dominated by panic about AI overviews. The panic was justified for thin-content sites. It was misplaced for everyone else.What actually changed in 2026: the SERP has…
People ask me about this all the time, and I always end up rambling. So here is the timeline as a numbered list. The dollar amounts are real.Month 1. Built the MVP in three weekends. Posted it on Reddit. Got eight upvot…
The most common failure mode for design systems I have audited is the same one: a color palette that looks rigorous on Friday and falls apart by Wednesday. Three months later, the team is using fifteen shades of grey be…
