Postlight Insights

BY Paul Ford Publications
Articles from Postlight.com by Paul Ford
Articles originally published on Postlight.com.

85 Sections

Here Is Postlight

Postlight was founded by Richard Ziade and me, Paul Ford. We’re a big company — nearly 40 people — for our age (zero years old). We are a team of ...

Helpful Talk Tips!

Right now I give a lot of short speeches and presentations, meaning that I stand in front of an audience with a clicker in hand and speak to slides. I ...

Enter the GIFBattle.zone!

Two months ago the engineers, designers, and product managers at Postlight (our web-and-app agency in NYC) had a conversation about how the best part of ...

Technology Intern Salaries, Considered

A tweet by Tiffany Zhong, a VC, recently made the rounds and generated a great deal of discussion; it was even aggresplained (or exgragated) by Vox. An ...

Risks We Accept

On February 17th, SB Nation, which is part of Vox Media , published a 12,000-word story that was bizarrely sympathetic to the convicted rapist Daniel ...

Fun Photoshop File Format Facts

The way we used to be A typical computer file has some kind of format — a set of rules for how it should open, what can be changed, and what data gets ...

When the Chips Are Up

Bloomberg Businessweek has a profile of the executive manager who oversees Apple’s secretive microchip development wing. He’s an Israeli Arab Christian ...

Global App Madness

Executive summary: App economies This article in The Verge by Casey Newton is a useful primer on where apps are now. It tells the story of a small company ...

Tracking Down a Cat GIF

I was struck by the level of detail in this amazing GIF of a cat destroying everything, forever: I saw the image first on Mlkshk. Curious, I looked the ...

I Miss Staging

Photo by Струјајое The days of setting up your own CMS and publishing all your stuff on your own site are, for now at least, over. Your CMS isn’t social, ...

Meet Tay

It’s a big time for bots, as readers of this blog know. They’re in our Twitter and our Slacks. Never one to lag too far behind, Microsoft released to ...

Laughter Doesn’t Scale

It’s April Fools’ Day on the Internet! Once, years ago, this was a fun day when people made stupid, nerdy jokes. Take, for example, “A Standard for the ...

Commenting on Data Leaks

Still life with Leeks (Carl Schuch) Have you heard about the Panama Papers? Or seen the Panama Papers website? Or seen the #panamapapers hashtag? Or read ...

Between a Double and the Deep Blue Sea

Things were much easier then There’s this company called MaxMind. If you were a web nerd in the early 2000s you probably know them: Since around 2000 ...

Meet the Lux Framework!

A few years ago I was working for a very lean web startup. The team consisted of myself and my father and neither of us could write code. Sure I dabbled a ...

Consequence Management Systems

There’s an activist and columnist named Shaun King. He writes from a progressive position about social justice and race, which makes him a target of much ...

Not OK, Computer

The middle-aged band Radiohead has mostly erased its Internet presence—Twitter, Facebook, website, etc. Here’s the news (breathless!) from Pitchfork: ...

What Giants Can’t See

Sculpture, “Riese” by Ervin Hervé-Lóránth, 2015, Berlin-Mitte, Germany CC BY-SA 3.0 The web platform has entered a period of relative stability — HTML5 ...

Automatic for the Sheeple

The famed venture capitalist Peter Thiel further sealed his identity as a Silicon Valley supervillain by revealing that, yes, as had been reported, he ...

Are You My Digital Product Studio?

Like any liberal art prone to budget cuts, the advertising industry is autothanatophilic — erotically attracted to its own death. So there’s lots of juicy ...

Cutting Ship Risk

The most monosyllabic way to summarize the job of software product management is: “cut ship risk.” Software projects all start as golden towers of dreams ...

The Street View From the Cheap Seats

As previously pointed out, there are interesting things happening in open-source geo right now. So here’s another interesting thing: OpenStreetView, which ...

We’re Bullish on AMP

Google is now planning to show AMP links everywhere in its mobile search results — that is to say, in a place that probably drives a lot of traffic to ...

Twine as a Process Modeling Tool

Twine is a tool that lets you make point-and-click games that run in a web browser—what a lot of people refer to as “choose your own adventure” or CYOA ...

Three Algorithm Reads

“How algorithms rule our working lives,” by Cathy O’Neil, in the Guardian: These algorithmic “solutions” are targeted at genuine problems. School ...

A New New New Thing?

There’s an inevitable news cycle around Apple events: The company launches something, like the iPhone 7, building on or deeply integrated with their ...

Making It Work: Instant.me

A few months ago, Time Inc. — the home of some of the biggest consumer publishing brands in the world—asked Postlight if we could help build a new kind of ...

My Co-Founder, the Skittle

I am the co-founder of a 38-person New York City software company called Postlight. The other co-founder, Rich Ziade, was born in Lebanon. In the ...

Postlight at a year!

We’re having our one-year anniversary tonight, and launching Postlight Labs. It’s been a lot of preparation—we’re in our new office, announcing some new ...

Facebook and the 2016 Election

Facebook is, to its chagrin, part of the conversation about the outcome of the 2016 election. Here is a list of some special moments that we have all ...

Get Me Central!

As we all now know, we live in an age of massive centralized digital platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft LinkedIn, and the like are the conduits for a ...

Shut Up and Take My Money!

Before the holidays, the people of Postlight came up with a list of charities. I liked learning about all the different causes supported by the people who ...

Going Deep on a Checkbox

Yesterday I wrote a little bit about the experience of giving money via charitable websites, and I criticized not-for-profit websites that ask their users ...

Against Storytelling

My co-founder Rich Ziade and I are out in San Francisco for a conference. The hotel we’re in is very…designed. I think the designers wanted the rooms to ...

The Beautiful TI-108

The Internet is inundated with lists, but nonetheless I think it’s a good exercise to make personal lists of great things. For example in the past I’ve ...

Be Our Guest!

I wanted to put together a short guide for people who have been asked to be in the media—whether called for comment, asked to appear on a podcast or TV ...

Decentralize It!

There’s a good research report that was just published. It’s called “Defending​ ​Internet​ ​Freedom​ ​through​ ​Decentralization: Back​ ​to​ ​the​ ...

On Being a Good Platform Citizen

A while ago the Obama Foundation (Full disclosure: they are a much-appreciated Postlight client!) asked an important general question: “What makes a ...

“Irony Doesn’t Scale”

Last week, my co-founder Rich Ziade wrote about what he’s learned and experienced over the last two years of running our product studio, Postlight. Which ...

Big Data, Small Effort

An awful lot of really interesting public data is made available in CSV format. This is good and bad. If I give you a CSV file, you can open it up in ...

Driving Traffic

It was very interesting to see that BMW has re-launched as a magazine. Above, you can see what it used to look like. And here’s how it looks today: ...

Postlight End-of-year Giving 2017

Last year, after our first full year of operation, the people of Postlight identified 33 online charities that we like to support. (Predictably, this led ...

Know Your Ecosystems!

I used to be on T-Mobile, but I went into a customer service hole so frustrating that at the end, every time I even looked at my phone, I felt disgusted ...

Make the Logo Bigger

The measure of a good brand is what it can do. It’s a bit of cultural code that you can continually expand and execute in new context. Viral, but in ...

Our Gently Aging Avatars

Every week or so someone I know on social media, but not in my daily life, updates their avatar, and suddenly they’re three or four years older than they ...

A Knight Piece of Work

At the end of last year Alejandro de Onís, the Director of Digital Strategy and Design at Knight Foundation, reached out ...

CMS ❤ CRM

At Postlight we build software for lots of different industries (custom search engines, financial APIs, a birding app for the Audubon society, ...

R.I.P.C.

Imagine that: A whole global product strategy was contained within a two-letter initialism. PC. You didn’t even have to have the best product!

SHIP IT!

Postlight is a company that builds digital platforms and products, and like every firm we like to market ourselves and tell the world how great we ...

Do the Brand First

I've learned this the hard way, too many times. Clients come to Postlight and they say, "We need to stand up a new version of our website…" Go on… "—and ...

Our CMS, Ourselves

When we started Postlight, we quickly found ourselves in a pickle, with 25 full-time employees and our major client announcing chapter 11 bankruptcy, one ...

Put a Saddle on It

There's a Netflix show called The Toys That Made Us with an episode about He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toys. He-Man toys were ...

Carrot Centralization

One of the joys of my job is I get to talk to hundreds of people about their technology problems. Some hire us; many don't. But it's extremely interesting ...

All Managed Up

I used to hate people managing up to me. I'd feel like I was being shepherded, but over time I started noticing that a lot of the time it wasn't people ...

After App Stores

You saw that Apple Arcade will allow you to have access to lots of games for a monthly subscription, correct? No more in-app purchases. Just a bunch of ...

The World’s Worst Calculator

The CEO is not supposed to code, but nonetheless I’ve been having fun shipping out a three-weekend project, which I call “Account.” It’s a storytelling ...

Black Lives Matter

Postlight is a company of 60 people in New York City and around the world. We build software for clients. We are unified in our belief in progress. From ...

Build Time Versus Strategy Time

I've been watching the TV series W1A on Netflix. It's a three-short-season comedy that aired between 2014 and 2017, produced by the BBC. It's also about ...

Dogfood for Everybody!

Postlight is a digital strategy firm that builds software for clients. As go our clients, so go we. We've been surprised to find ourselves growing in the ...

Thinking Like Microsoft

Sometimes you should just stop everything and look at some new big digital artifact to see what it tells you about the world. That's how I feel about ...

Why We Love Enterprise Codeless

Last week Google released a new product called Tables, which takes square aim at (i.e., looks exactly like) "codeless" development and workflow-management ...

Tech After Trump

Eventually, the current chaos will subside. What will the tech industry look like over the next four years? What should we expect? These aren't ...

Block by Block

Twice a year we bring everyone who works for Postlight to New York City — from around the U.S., and from Beirut, with their families if they choose — and ...

Baking Your Layercake

If there is one lesson I wish the tech industry could learn about itself, it’s that most people wish we would talk less and listen more. Because the state ...

Pleasant Office Things

Not long ago I wrote about the secret geographies of the office for Wired. I was a little surprised by the reaction. I expected people to yell at me, like ...

Demo Your Values First

I like to watch software company videos, the more enterprise the better. At worst they're hilarious, and at best I might learn something — usually a ...

Climate Change Starting Points

Since stepping down as CEO of Postlight, I've been learning about climate change. This work is harder, in many ways, than my work as CEO. Climate ...

Learning Things From Internet Videos

Working in technology, I’m always on the hunt for new ways to explain things. Not long ago, I asked Twitter if anyone could recommend exemplary ...

The Chorus of Complainers

My son has been teaching me to play a Very Popular Video Game. As anyone with kids knows, screen time is premium — plus bedtime was coming — so I set a ...

How to Product Manage for APIs

When we think about software, what we imagine is based on our own user experience, consisting of the interface, buttons, and words that we can interact ...

The Postlight Charter

Our Mission and Values The Postlight Charter ON THIS PAGE: Who We Are Our Mission Our Values Who We Are Postlight is a premium, full-service ...