Roach

Cockroach, not unicorn.

Building products. Engineering what I believe in.

I’m a product engineer who loves making useful things and telling the stories behind how they’re built. Honest build notes, product thoughts, engineering lessons, and the occasional bad idea that survives production.


All writing

Productivity

Give your best energy to your most important work

Time is not equally useful all day. Protect your personal peak-energy period for important work, and leave routine tasks for lower-energy hours.

Productivity

Study together without turning focus into a video call

Quiet focus rooms add the helpful feeling of studying beside someone without camera pressure. Set a goal, run your own timer, and let the room fade behind the work.

Life

When a song brings back a memory

A quiet playlist brought back the rain, dashboard lights, and safety of a childhood car ride. I opened Focus Journal before the memory could disappear again.

Productivity

Play YouTube in the background with your iPhone locked

Play a YouTube video in Lume Flow, lock your iPhone, and keep listening without an ad breaking the flow. Picture-in-Picture and a timer cover the moments when the screen stays on.

App journey

Colodaily: the overbuilt version is still the live one

Colodaily began with Kamo’s How to Draw Almost Every Day and a question about whether I could build an app at all. I learned React Native and Expo on the way, overbuilt the first version into something nobody asked for, and it is still the one on the App Store today.

Productivity

Focus sessions that survive a real day

Most focus systems assume a calm day. Here are the three rules that keep a session alive when your morning gets hijacked — plan the session, shrink the first move, and resume instead of restarting.

App journey

What I got wrong building Lume Flow alone

Eight months shipping a focus app solo, and I got the hard part backwards. Notes on finding the loop before the features, why “together” isn’t a social feature, and the scope list I’d keep.

Arcade

Why a 4-minute arcade game beats scrolling

A short arcade run resets your attention in a way a feed never does. The three properties that make a break actually restorative — and the five things to look for in a good four-minute game.

Life

Small systems beat big resolutions

Big resolutions fail on ordinary Tuesdays because they need a good day to work. How to turn a wish into a default: shrink it, anchor it, and make missing a day cost nothing.

What I’m building

Lume Flow

Focus sessions with a plan, quiet rooms you can work alongside other people in, private notes, and short games for the break. Free on iPhone, iPad and Apple silicon Macs.