Paul Stamatiou

Crash Course: Design for Startups

A detailed brain dump about how to go about starting web design for startups. Including design process, inspiration and required reading.

Stocketa – An app I designed, built and never launched

A dive into the app I designed, built and never launched. Stocketa was a personal project developed to serve as a simple stock portfolio tracker for casual investors. The app was built using Swift and SwiftUl and offered a custom UI, comprehensive transaction tracking, and a variety of features.

Getting Started with Security Keys

How to stay safe online and prevent phishing with FIDO2, WebAuthn and security keys. A look into YubiKeys, TOTP authenticator apps, passwordless and more.

Building a Lightroom PC

Why I switched to Windows 10 from macOS and built a water-cooled and overclocked 5.2GHz 6-core PC for photo editing with Adobe Lightroom Classic CC.

Storage for Photographers

There comes a time in every photographer's life when they must ask themselves what to do about all those photo RAWs filling up the tiny-compared-to-spinning-platters SSD on their primary machine.

Getting started with Raspberry Pi – Building a Digital Photo Frame

What you can do with a tiny $35 computer and how I built a digital photo frame

Storage for Photographers, Part 2

How a 12TB Synology DS415+ NAS changed my digital life: Data is eating me alive. Every gadget these days can shoot photos and record video. I captured 275GB of photos and videos on my last trip. Just one trip! And I'm just a hobbyist photographer with a mere 12MP camera. If you shoot with any regularity and a 20MP+…

Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

An in-depth blog post talking user retention and lifecycle email marketing for startups.

Developing a responsive, Retina-friendly site (Part 1)

This post is part of a series documenting the design and development of this blog, including responsive mobile first web design.

The Coding Zone

There are a few things you'll need for a productive programming session.

Simplify

I used to be a slave to my startups. If I wasn't working, I had a perpetual feeling of guilt that I should be working. I had a revelation one day when I realized I didn't have to read everything I found on the Internet.

Startup Fundraising is a Time Sink

"Which one of you is going to be doing the fundraising?" queried a calm and collected Tom Robinson while in a loud venue one Saturday evening at a Startup School after-party. Tom had good reason to be relaxed that evening. His startup, 280 North, had been acquired by Motorola for 20 Million a few mo

How To: Hosting with Amazon S3, CloudFront and Route 53

How to host your static website like Jekyll with Amazon S3 static website hosting and CloudFront CDN. This will make your website much faster and more responsive to visitors all around the world.

Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes

Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes: Sharing my journey of downsizing my digital storage, letting go of terabytes of data, and moving away from a NAS setup. I decided to use an external Thunderbolt SSD enclosure and an M.2 NVMe SSD to store my data locally. For cloud backup and encryption, I used the Arq…

The Startup Diet: How I Lost 35 Pounds While Working Overtime

I recently decided to change the way I was taking care of my body. It should be no surprise that I am always on my computer – at least 12-15 hours per day. I am 5' 9" but used to weigh an undesirable 170-175 pounds. Most of this was brought on during my first years of college. I entered college as a

iPad 2: Thoughts from a first time tablet user

Well I picked up an iPad 2 and have finally come to the conclusion that my years of gadget yearning should have taught me long ago. It is all about the apps and experience.

Developing a responsive, Retina-friendly site (Part 2)

This post is part of a series documenting the design and development of this blog, including responsive images and working with HiDPI assets.

Android is better

I started using a Nexus 4. I was going to go right back to my iPhone after a week. I was designing more and more Android interfaces at Twitter and realized I needed to more intimately grok Android UI paradigms.

Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS

Have you ever wanted to get more out of your home network, like adding a NAS, without ponying up for expensive hard drives with Ethernet built-in, Time Capsules, Drobos or the like? While some newer routers come with a USB port allowing users to add a hard drive or printer on the network, they are c

Craft

Thoughts on elevating product quality

How To: WordPress to Jekyll

I decided to migrate my blog from WordPress to Jekyll. I designed a new layout, imported my database and created some custom features to get it all to my liking.

Code School is Amazing

My thoughts on Code School, an interactive online marketplace where you can learn to code directly in the browser.

Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

A chat with Votizen co-founder Jason Putorti. I am particularly interested in how startups work, their internal processes and culture, rather than their external pitch and product features.

Startup Culture

It's with a culture where people can thrive and tackle problems they find interesting. It's not with offering standing desks and beefy computers; every Silicon Valley startup offers that.

Atlanta to San Francisco: What I Learned Moving Cross-Country

Notifo (YC W10) gets a Co-Founder... Me

Just over 5 weeks ago I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to seek new opportunities. I had no idea what I wanted to shift my full-time focus to and began connecting with people, researching and interviewing with a handful of companies — ranging from huge web presences all the way down to tiny star

Review of Intel's New X25M SSD (same one Torvalds has) in a new MacBook Pro

It has almost been a year since I wrote about the future of computing and how I thought that it was all about Solid State Drives (this was before I became infatuated with the cloud). Well I finally got my hands on one. It's Intel's new X25-M 80GB SSD and it is among the fastest consumer-aimed SSDs o

How To: Getting Started with EC2 (for beginners)

Amazon EC2 is among the more potent items in Amazon's web services arsenal. You've probably heard of many of the other services such as S3 for storage and FPS for payments. EC2 is all about the "elastic compute cloud." In layman's terms, it's a server. In slightly less layman's terms, EC2 lets you e