You are not your user. Except when you are.
"You are not your user" is fundamentally good advice. It's also occasionally wrong, but in a very useful way.
Mike Bifulco
Developer Advocate & Startup CTO
I work as a co-founder & CTO at Craftwork — I'm a founder & product builder with background in design and development.
Find me on Bluesky @mikebifulco.com, Threads @irreverentmike or Mastodon.
LATEST
CSS Tips Part 2 - text-wrap: pretty will make your text feel intentional
Go beyond balance. Learn how text-wrap: pretty improves readability, reduces awkward breaks, and makes your UI feel more polished.
Dunning-Kruger for Vibe Coders
The first thing AI teaches you about coding is confidence. The second is why that's a problem. Let's talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Lessons I Learned the Hard Way
Your brain rewires itself based on what you practice. If you stop practicing hard things, you slowly lose the ability to do them.
Learn to Love the Rebuild
Refactoring isn't a necessary evil -- it is the job. Why the best product teams rebuild constantly, at every scale.
💌 Tiny Improvements Newsletter
Subscribe and join 🔥
My weekly newsletter for product builders. It's a single, tiny idea to help you build better products.
Once a week, straight from me to you. 😘 Unsubscribe anytime.
Get in touch to → Sponsor Tiny Improvements
Just Enough Is an Ongoing Practice
Stable products still need maintenance. Defaults and shiny features quietly tax systems over time, and efficiency is a sign of craftsmanship, not penny-pinching.
Optimizing Your Next.js Site's Fast Origin Transfer and ISR Reads
Next.js Link prefetching quietly burned through 15 GB of bandwidth on my Vercel-hosted blog. Here's how I fixed it.
My 2026 Developer Tech Stack
The tools I use as CTO and product engineer at a Y Combinator-backed startup in 2026.
The Zeroth Loop: They Don't Quit, They Forget
Most habits don't fall apart because people quit. They fall apart because they aren't sticky.
Science-Backed Secrets of Long, Happy Lives
A guide to the habits of high longevity people.
The Science of Spotting Hidden Product Ideas
The best product ideas hide in plain sight, in your habits and everyone else's. Watch what people actually do, not what they say they want. Build for that.
Browse by Topic
***