If you’re a software product designer or product manager, it’s time to make friends with that intimidating black box called the terminal. This application is becoming essential when utilizing LLMs and AI assistants beyond the chat prompt. Think of all those times Claude tells you to “run this command in your terminal” and you suddenly feel like you’re messing about with the innards of your computer. Beyond AI tools, terminal fluency will make you more productive and informed when working with your developer counterparts.

In the ever-expanding universe of AI and LLMs, there’s a “buzz” acronym going around that may just save your team from chaos, inconsistency, and the dreaded “AI debt.” It’s called Model Context Protocol (MCP), and no, it’s not trying to take over the Grid like its namesake from Tron. (Though it might be just as powerful in the right hands.)

Last week, a conversation with my financial advisor sparked something unexpected. He mentioned struggling with an automation challenge—extracting data from files within zip folders that were automatically delivered to a specific directory.

Rather than pointing him to an off-the-shelf solution, I realized this was a perfect opportunity to flex my Python skills and collaborate with AI coding tools to build something tailored specifically for his needs. Within just a few hours of working with Replit and an LLM assistant, I had created a small, focused application that solved his exact problem.

At the end of January, I embarked on a journey to experiment with AI coding assistants while creating a SaaS product. Within three weeks I launched EasyUserPersonas.com - a tool that generates detailed user personas for product development teams.

This week in useful stuff we have a guide to Flex Box, some useful web UI tools, backgrounds for Bootstrap development, some nifty logos for you to use as placeholders and our first installment of Git Repos to Star, The Book of Secret Knowledge.

Enjoy!

This week’s useful stuff has a little of everything for the modern software product designer. Enjoy and share alike please!

Useful tidbits from around the web that are sure to help you in your digital product design ventures. Have a wonderful week!

Hey, everyone! Welcome to the second week of 2024 – and guess what? I’m dusting off my keyboard and bringing back the Weekly Web Find, something I haven’t done in over three years. Think of it as my new year’s resolution, but with a techy twist!

This revival is all about being open, thoughtful, and consistent in the digital treasures I share with you. It’s a fresh start, a new chapter, and I’m thrilled to dive into this with all of you.

At the beginning of the summer I began a project that I believed would take me about a month to complete. Now, at the beginning of November, I am finally shipping version one of this project. Join me for a retrospective look at making my personal site a Hugo generated static site.

What Have I Learned

First, Hugo’s ease of use is a bit deceiving. On the surface it seems to make short work of putting a static website together. You add content in the form of markdown files, and provide templates written in HTML, along with some Go Lang functions and methods peppered in there to provide the “automation” of static site generation.

I have been thinking about moving away from Wordpress and convert this site to static HTML generated by some kind of framework. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is the security leaks that come with using Wordpress. Going static will also mean virtually no updates needed to the server, no database updates or the need for any specialty plugins. So this month I have given myself the challenge of migrating this site away from Wordpress, and learning Hugo to generate a static HTML version of my blog. Before I get into this I want to just point out, this is not a tutorial or walkthrough. More of an opinion from a designer/front-end dev.

Wallpaper Wednesday is a practice I have not done for many years. In the early days of Indy Hall I would put out a digital wallpaper each week. This helped me stay fresh with design and the suite of tools I use on a regular basis. It also gave me the freedom to explore concepts I normally would not be able to while completing client work. I am humbly attempting to revive this practice with this initial release of the new Wallpaper Wednesday.

Been a minute since I published one of these. Below are some sites I found during my travels around the internet, that digital product designers and fellow technophiles may find helpful or interesting.

Haikei App

https://haikei.app/

Haikei App is the evolution of two web projects by Z Creative Labs (https://zcreativelabs.com/). It is a FREE web app that helps produce unique SVG design assets for use in your web projects.

Testing the viability of a product or service can be tricky. However, in my experience, I have found that if you explore the answers, provided by two fundamental questions, you can get to a final proof of viability. As well as gain a great foundation for the success of your business, its marketing goals and its customer support.

Question 01: What problem does your product or service solve?

The best products and services in history are supremely successful because they proverbially, scratch a certain itch, felt by enough people, to make a viable market. At times this market is well established, other times it is brand new. Either way, asking yourself if your product or service makes the problem easier to deal with or disappear completely, is a fundamental step.