Dealing with Asshole Customers

I’ve always taken great pains to be exceedingly fair, responsive, and back-bending in the way I interact with my customers. I firmly believe it’s best for business long-term if you always give your customer the benefit of the doubt and treat them as you’d want to be treated. But recently, for reasons I don’t understand, I’ve been getting email after email from customers who are, quite frankly, being assholes to me from the very first contact. This type of customer has always existed, but in recent months the frequency that someone is a jerk to me before I even have …

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My Favorite Chair

I’m a bit of a snob. I don’t just like nice things, I like the best things. That’s not to say I spend extravagantly or throw my money around, it’s just that when presented with buying a good product or saving my money a little longer and buying a better constructed, great product, I’ll usually pick the great product. It’s why I bought an iPad rather than a Kindle Fire, it’s why I shop at Seven rather than Gap, and it’s why I use proper noise-canceling headphones rather than Apple earbuds. My point is that I generally take my time …

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Importing Jekyll Posts into WordPress

Nearly four years ago I switched my main site over to Jekyll. It’s been great. But late last year I decided to make that site and its blog purely about my software business and move all of my non-work posts over to my tyler.io domain so I could have a personal site again. To encourage myself to write more, I built the site with WordPress so it would be easy to publish. That meant I needed a way to convert and import all of my old Jekyll Markdown posts into WordPress. I found a few scripts that exported WordPress into …

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Switching from GitHub to GitLab

I’ve been a happy paying customer of GitHub since early 2009. But yesterday, for a few different reasons, I deleted all of my private repositories and moved them over to a self-hosted installation of GitLab. I didn’t make that decision lightly, as I’ve been very happy with GitHub for the last five years, but here’s why… First, I’ve started working on a new Mac app. Every time I start a new project, unless it’s open source, I create a new private repo for it on GitHub. This project happened to be my 21st private repository on GitHub. If you’re familiar …

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