Internet People I've Never Met

There are a bunch of things I do today that originally came from “internet strangers”. Maybe this is true for you too.

So what follows is a list of people I have never met, but have substantially and positively impacted my life in one way or another.

Financial Independence: A way of thinking about (and explaining to others) frugality and investing
E-Biking: Inspiration and instructions for the “badass DIY electric bike” I built and have ridden to work every day for years
Shared Prius-es: My brother and I both follow this guy. He has an article that makes practical car recommendations. By chance, my brother and I both bought the same year and color of Prius, and due to our shared history with “Back to the Future”, both named her “Dolores”.

Work Travel Idea: Planted a seed that long term laptop-based work travel is possible
Vans: The idea that living in an RV or van was something you could do if you wanted to. I ended up with 2 vans and an RV because of this.
Travel philosophy: only one bag, “quick drying” is an important feature of clothes, and that merino wool clothes are the best
Gear / BIFL thinking: Specifically, Buffs – amazing, versatile, weird

Work Travel, Push: The practical push (via NomadList.com) to actually go to “digital nomad” and live/work in Thailand/Vietnam/Bali/Budapest.

Leadership: The first leadership/management I ever read. Managing Humans shaped my ways of thinking about the teams I work with.

Web apps taken seriously: I wish I could find the original article, I think it’s gone now, but I remember reading about using Backbone and just getting the clearest picture about how to restructure our whole app at the time from… well from no structure at all into something with an intentional vision. Now, probably, it’s obvious you’d treat JS as a real application, but at the time, for me, it was a revelation. I would credit him with setting my technical career on a good path.

Structured Design Thinking: Web Form Design was the first design book I read that ever really seemed objective and logical to me. It’s all about first-principles tradeoffs and using the right visual solution for the right thing, and that has stuck with me I hope forever. The section on form field label alignment I can still picture, from years ago.

To each of these people, thank you for putting new ideas ways of living into the world.

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