I’m a content designer at Microsoft. Read more in About.
I got my start in writing with 200 blog posts. Between 2006 and 2016, I wrote an average of 2 technology posts a month, mostly about SharePoint. I'm the co-author of two books published by Microsoft Press.
Design for people For the first time in maybe a decade, I attended a local, in-person, community-organized conference where I wasn’t a speaker. I had a front-row seat at Town Hall Seattle for CascadiaJS 2026, and the change of pace was exactly what I needed — no slides to rehearse, just two days to listen, ask questions, and meet people. CascadiaJS has a reputation as the warm, slightly silly, deeply human corner of the JavaScript world, and it lived up
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Today, March 2nd, we’re celebrating 25 years of Microsoft’s set of software and services branded as SharePoint and the community that’s formed around SharePoint. The first install My own personal journey with SharePoint started when I was a manager of software development at a startup in Evanston, Illinois. Our team developed the web-based delivery platform for our company’s main product: data about print ads, mainly in newspapers. My manager, the director of IT, and my former roommate in college, suggested
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My journey to content design began with technology consulting. In 2008, as a technology consultant, I started writing about SharePoint. By the time I joined Microsoft as a content developer in 2016, I’d written 200 blog posts and co-authored two books on SharePoint. As a new Microsoft employee, I wrote the first articles about the new SharePoint apps. Eventually, I took responsibility for writing the words in the app, as well. SharePoint’s a critical, but often hidden part of Microsoft’s cloud
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Understand Microsoft’s Fluent design system better with hands-on experience with the developer components of the system. If you’re like most designers I work with, you’re familiar with the Figma components of the design systems your product teams use. Another step you can take to learn about the design system is to work with the developer components, too. When you stretch your skills into this new space, you’ll understand the capabilities of the system better. The next time a developer tells
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Unlike Twitter, Mastodon developers use an open-source model. Open-source means, if you take the effort to, you can see the source of the messages you see on screen. Because Mastodon is an open-source app developed on GitHub, you can create an issue when you see something wrong. The following screenshot highlights some text I see on my Mastodon home page, “Pinned post”, followed by a screenshot of the same string, in code. The next screenshot shows the same message “Pinned post”, in the file
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Today, October 16th, 2020, nearly 1.4 million registered voters in King County, Washington should have their ballots and voting guides from the state and county. The amount of information can be overwhelming. If you’re like me, you have 39 different items to vote on. Take some time to read the words on the printed pages you’ve received. Voting is one of the top ways to make your voice heard in the United States. We’re so lucky to live in cities
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Disputes delayed early reporting On January 27th, 2020, Dr. Camilla Rothe discovered Germany’s first case of the new coronavirus. The case involved one person at risk for the virus. According to the New York Times, the visitor from China had “no coughing or sneezing, no signs of fatigue or fever.” Coronaviruses were only known to be contagious from people showing symptoms. Confusion over the words used to describe this case caused delays. Thousands of people who caught the virus from
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Update, December 11th, 2020: Me, my wife and daughter have enjoyed 2 years off Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. I feel more connected than ever to the people I care about without the distractions of their business. I’d love you to join us in defunding them by deleting your accounts. Here’s a graphic from Professor Scott Galloway that might understand how badly Facebook is misleading people who use their properties. Update, August 9th, 2019: It’s been more than 8 months since
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If you know 5 people under the age of 20, chances are, you know someone who’s played Fortnite. Epic Games, creator of this free, massively scaled, multi-platform game, is making billions of dollars from in-app game purchases. How did a game that didn’t exist at the beginning of 2017 come to dominate the gaming world before the beginning of 2019? In some ways, Fortnite is the ultimate software as a service success story. Whatever device you own, you can download
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I created my first Linux Azure VM this weekend. I chose the option to secure it with an SSH Public Key instead of a password. Creating a password would have been easier. SSH public key will be much more secure. It took some learning to get it right. First Step – PuttyGen for creating the key After choosing the ssh key option, the Azure portal required entering a public key. On Windows, PuttyGen was the tool suggested to create the
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