The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Essays / personal

Ninjas and Robots

ninjasandrobots.com

Ninjas and Robots | Engineer, Designer, Founder | Founding Engineer at Census (acquired by Fivetran) | Ex-CEO Highrise | Y Combinator Alum | Made Draft

Essays / personalAI / MLSoftware / engineering practice

’95’00’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
216 from 3 Jan 1995 to 17 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (17 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://ninjasandrobots.com/feed

2026 15

  1. ChatGPT in Safari: Use Your Account, No API Key
  2. Maze
  3. Inconsiderate Asshole
  4. PageForth. An AI News Reader for Mac That Doesn't Need RSS
  5. Pay Gruber
  6. How Not to Peak
  7. Paul Graham Flagged For AI Use
  8. Have you bought a car lately?
  9. AlliHat With More Models
  10. Move The Friggin Cone
  11. AlliHat. Claude on Safari.
  12. Can you make Claude cry?
  13. It just takes a minute
  14. Make more cheap garbage
  15. Don’t Be a Goldfish

2025 7

  1. No one is reading your fucking slides
  2. The Dumpster Dive Principle
  3. The Naked Man Problem and the Secret to Never Forgetting Numbers
  4. The Outage You Couldn’t Sleep Through
  5. Superman Is Less
  6. Rudy Was a Fluke
  7. Atfllm

2024 4

  1. Hate The Process
  2. Life Coach AI
  3. I’m doing this because this is what I got.
  4. Launching something new: Tres Cosas

2019 6

  1. I am a failure
  2. Another Hallway
  3. A/B Testing YouTube Videos
  4. My New Startup: Locomotion
  5. Wabi-sabi
  6. The Mere-Exposure Effect: How Casey Neistat Makes Pop-Songs

2018 2

  1. Somersault - A vlogging camera for your phone.
  2. Google AMP: A 70% Drop in Our Conversion Rate

2017 5

  1. I don’t have enough
  2. Breakthrough
  3. Lazy creative
  4. How to be interesting
  5. Peaked?

2016 4

  1. Mickey D’s - What startups and small business owners can learn from the giant’s struggles
  2. What should I name my company?
  3. Poison
  4. I’m not good enough - Discouraged

2014 32

  1. Monsters and Thieves
  2. A new high
  3. Why are some people so much luckier than others?
  4. Now That I’ve Created Something, How Do I Spread It?
  5. What are you drawing, Lily?
  6. Draft Announcements: a Chrome App, inline calculator, and more…
  7. The Art of the Ask: How to Get on the PGA Tour or a Phone Call with Tim Ferriss
  8. 10 Things I Learned from Paul Graham at Y Combinator
  9. Dots
  10. How can I find someone to help me?
  11. Draft Announcements: Better sorting, duplicate documents, and more…
  12. How to get business ideas - remove steps
  13. A 40 billion dollar t-shirt
  14. How to get free, pre-released copies of your favorite authors’ new books
  15. Draft Announcements: Comment switching, sortable to-do lists, and more…
  16. Self-defense
  17. Chances
  18. Compromise
  19. Continue reading →
  20. Tell yourself better stories
  21. Draft Announcements: Offline access!
  22. Ignorance
  23. Lost Momentum
  24. Draft Announcements: Write even better, Twitter Cards, and more…
  25. Writing Lean
  26. Draft Announcements: Comment out writing, auto-simplification, email documents to Draft
  27. Grow your Twitter audience with Nombre
  28. Draft Announcements: Presentations; publishing to Basecamp, Svbtle and Ghost; and Minor revisions
  29. Abe
  30. Teach yourself out of business
  31. Not Wanted
  32. Continue reading →

2013 69

  1. Draft Announcements: Better comments, collaborator reminders, and tables
  2. Draft Announcements: Gifts, Member Lounge, More Analytics and a Sneak Preview…
  3. Marketable for Devise
  4. Skip Class
  5. Draft Announcements: Team Folders, Import/Export updates, and NaNoWriMo support.
  6. No one listens to me
  7. I don’t have any connections
  8. Draft Announcements: Job Board, Draft Sites, Editor Flow, and more.
  9. Continue reading →
  10. David and Goliath
  11. Grunt Work
  12. “Does that help?”
  13. What’d You Say?
  14. Draft Announcements: Hemingway Mode, Word/Google Docs Support, Kindle Export, and more.
  15. Go Long
  16. A litmus test for your idea
  17. Lucky
  18. I am not a designer
  19. Bootstrapping in America
  20. Continue reading →
  21. In Beta Podcast
  22. Rails Performance Help: Tracer Bullets
  23. Stuck
  24. Downward
  25. Draft Announcements: Folders, Daily Word Count Report, Reject Changes, Wordpress Drafts, and more.
  26. How to become a better writer? Fail like a comedian.
  27. Stay in the building.
  28. ProgrammableWeb Interview: Nathan Kontny’s Draft Takes on Google, Microsoft, Apple.
  29. Thank you, John. Thank you, everyone.
  30. Pricing a new product
  31. The Zeigarnik Effect
  32. My new BMW
  33. Is success or failure brought by chance or through one’s own actions? How I learned to build products people care about.
  34. In Writing Platform Push, Draft Lets You Collaborate Then Publish Anywhere
  35. Draft Announcements: Github-style Markdown Todos, WebHooks, REST API
  36. A Handyman’s Toolbox
  37. Three mistakes I see web designers make over and over again
  38. Innovation
  39. How Draft Grew Paying Customers by 200%
  40. A lonely table
  41. Draft updates: audio/video transcription tools, comments alongside changes, improved social analytics reports, and more…
  42. Those who teach…
  43. Writing a Cover Letter
  44. Paperclip
  45. Mountain
  46. A long time follower told me the other day, “You’re a good writer, but you shouldn’t use profanity. You don’t need that. It ruins your writing.” I want to show you something. This is a chart from Draft’s social analytics, showing traffic to this blog going back to its beginning: April 5, 2012. As yo
  47. Be Alone
  48. Draft updates: bidirectional sync, Blogger publishing, upgraded accounts, and more.
  49. Herd
  50. Impossible
  51. I don’t want this day to end.
  52. Rails AB Testing - Simple Abs
  53. Lead with Pain
  54. Draft: Write Better Report. Plus many other handy tools added.
  55. During
  56. How to innovate. Focus on jobs to be done.
  57. Draft Everywhere
  58. The Audacity of a Ninth Grader
  59. I Can’t Sing
  60. Write Better - Draft
  61. I fall a lot
  62. Design Inspiration from Svbtle - The trouble with being efficient
  63. Cohort analysis - User retention in a Rails application.
  64. Draft Preview: Uber for writing
  65. Improving Open Rates - Look like the Taxman
  66. Draft. Version control for writing
  67. Gamification at Jimmy John’s. Sandwich chain innovates on a commonly used game mechanic.
  68. New Business Ideas: Alienate people
  69. Group email address. An original idea?

2012 71

  1. Faster Rails partial rendering and caching. 78% improvement of test application
  2. Continue reading →
  3. Personal Development: Lessons from Charles Tillman
  4. Thank You
  5. Facebook Pages: Why I don’t like Nest thermostat or anything else anymore.
  6. Please believe in the wisdom of our crowd.
  7. 10000 hours
  8. Retractable tarp system for trucks - an innovative idea
  9. Rails Caching: A problem with etags and a solution
  10. People to Follow on Twitter
  11. Square Pants
  12. Continue reading →
  13. Out-teach your competition. Innovating on arugula.
  14. Lines
  15. “Write drunk; edit sober.”
  16. Get more traffic - Celebrate others
  17. 5-hour Energy - A stupid startup idea
  18. Every day try to do one thing you couldn’t do yesterday.
  19. Move time
  20. Is a boat still a boat if it can’t float?
  21. “Create something. Share it. Even if it sucks. Stay on it until it doesn’t anymore.”
  22. A lesson from Curiosity
  23. Get Busy
  24. Finding Nemo
  25. How to bust your Rails etag cache on deployment.
  26. Cardboard and tape
  27. Design a product that turns weaknesses into strengths
  28. Do you practice?
  29. How to be more creative by using a memory palace
  30. Continue reading →
  31. What do you want to be when you grow up - if you grew up backwards?
  32. How I find ideas in trivial details. The guy who stares at screws.
  33. A tiny redesign of Basecamp’s homepage from 37signals with Bootstrap Design
  34. Lower your expectations
  35. The unpredictability of success
  36. Someone surprised me
  37. Do you ever imagine things?
  38. Microwaves are only good for…
  39. 175 million people are a little happier each year
  40. Bill Murray on taking chances and saying “No”
  41. Something genius at the local coffee shop to improve customer loyalty.
  42. My Princess Boy. What a pair of running shoes taught me about tolerance.
  43. The behavioral psychology behind the Coldwater Creek promotion?
  44. What a high school junior can teach us about working backwards towards success.
  45. Turning an obsession into gold
  46. My mistake last week. A lesson in how not to upset 8 out of 10 people.
  47. Write like you talk. You’re a better writer than you let on.
  48. Google, I’ve had enough. How about a Compromise?
  49. What’s the appropriate age to start telling a young woman to grow a pair of balls?
  50. “My body area is private” - Software with personality.
  51. Happiness from a few rules
  52. HTML5 Page Cache with pjax + Web Storage + Firebase
  53. How to get more followers on Twitter. I just increased my following by 335% in 7 days.
  54. Continue reading →
  55. I have no idea what I’m doing
  56. Know a good joke? Miles could really use it.
  57. The Irony of Girl Scout Cookies
  58. Mentalist trick to win a game of Werewolf (or Resistance)
  59. Continue reading →
  60. 10 Rules for Startups
  61. Inspiration in the most unusual place. The buried life.
  62. Lean into it
  63. More on the science of persuasion and getting a new job
  64. Using the science of influence to look for a new job
  65. Continue reading →
  66. Didn’t know much about Target, but they have so much of my money.
  67. Looking for something to do for Easter on Google…
  68. Hello. I’m Nate.
  69. Does Wrigley even have electricity?
  70. When and where does taste matter? It doesn’t seem to for Macy’s?
  71. Big Bang Theory quotes

1995 1

  1. Dear “Natronation”