# Benjamin Tumbleson
> A collection of thoughts from tech consulting, startups, and everything in between.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. Use `/llms-full.txt` for consolidated page and post context.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).

## Pages
- [About this site](https://www.bentumbleson.com/about.md) - Benjamin Tumbleson is an independent publication launched in August 2024 by Benjamin Tumbleson. If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. Your subscription makes this site possible, and allows Benjamin Tumbleson…

## Posts
- [On moving to San Francisco, the city of serendipity](https://www.bentumbleson.com/on-moving-to-san-francisco-the-city-of-serendipity.md) - My personal reflection on life in San Francisco from a Midwestern. The opportunities, the energy, and the uniqueness of the city offset against the forces that make it a hustle.
- [Do a lot of things](https://www.bentumbleson.com/do-a-lot-of-things.md) - I've found, and seen, that the best way to grow as an individual is do a lot of things. You never know what you might find when you don't stand still.
- [Initial Impressions of Figma Slides (beta)](https://www.bentumbleson.com/observations-from-figma-slides-beta.md) - Figma Slides released approximately a week ago. Here's my take on the product to take, including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
- [Experiments with the Google Slides API to recreate slides](https://www.bentumbleson.com/experiments-with-the-google-slides-api-to-recreate-slides.md) - Let's investigate using the Google Slides API the reliably save and recreate slides. The API is certainty powerful, but not without limitations.
- [Do you know your Uber PNR?](https://www.bentumbleson.com/do-you-know-your-uber-pnr.md) - PNRs and other similar constructs represent legacy patterns that may not be relevant to the consumer today. Can we decouple these concepts between the consumer and the enterprise while breaking dependence across industries?
- [Building a Golden Tee Fore Cabinet: Part 3 - Fix Trackball](https://www.bentumbleson.com/building-a-golden-tee-fore-cabinet-part-3-fix-trackball.md) - If you've tried to use a trackball with MAME you may have hit an issue related to stuttering inputs created from an analogue input. I think I've found a solution worth sharing.
- [Building a Golden Tee Fore Cabinet: Part 2 - Hardware and MAME](https://www.bentumbleson.com/building-a-golden-tee-fore-cabinet-part-2-emulation.md) - Documenting my journey emulating Golden Tee Fore! in MAME on custom hardware.
- [Directionally correct and not precisely wrong](https://www.bentumbleson.com/directionally-correct-and-not-precisely-wrong-sasd.md) - Work is often undertaken on a basis of its perceived value, but it's often in hindsight, without the "fog of war" that reveals false starts.
- [Building a Golden Tee Fore Cabinet: Part 1 - Idea and Design](https://www.bentumbleson.com/building-a-golden-tee-fore-cabinet-part-1.md) - I set out to build a Golden Tee Fore custom showpiece cabinet - follow along as I explore my inspiration and design, including things to look out for on your own project.
- [macOS Big Sur - Fix Fuzzy External Display (Force RGB Mode)](https://www.bentumbleson.com/macos-big-sur-fix-fuzzy-external-display-force-rgb-mode.md) - Fixing a fuzzy or blurry display on macOS Big Sur by forcing RBG mode on external displays.
- [Handling stock splits in financial applications](https://www.bentumbleson.com/handling-stock-splits-in-financial-applications.md) - When stocks split, there's a host of underlying changes put in motion to maintain data integrity, both in the past and in the future. I'll explore this thought process from one on my own projects.
- [Adventures in database query optimizations (hint: avoid N+1 problem)](https://www.bentumbleson.com/adventures-in-query-optimizations.md) - Unoptimized code can lead to poor database performance. I learned some of these lessons the hard way. Let's explore the N+1 problem, efficient forEach loops, production table sizes, and useful logging from a project of mine.
- [Stop designing for edge cases](https://www.bentumbleson.com/stop-designing-for-edge-cases.md) - I'm confident that I'm not the only person who has sunk a lot of time into designing these that may never be seen. I'll share an example from a recent project.
- [Invisible Engineering | Case Study: Google Stock Price Results](https://www.bentumbleson.com/invisible-engineering.md) - It can be easy to become blind to the amount of engineering that goes into websites and applications that seem so simple in premise. It's this concept of invisible engineering that is so fascinating to unbox. Here's a case study of accessing stock prices from Google Search.
- [Make Asana More Valuable: Product Study](https://www.bentumbleson.com/asana-product-study.md) - I believe opportunities exist to mature Asana's product functionality to make it more valuable to leadership and executives that drive and support project work and execution. This case study explores a few strategies.
- [Cards in Web Design: Balancing Simplicity and Value](https://www.bentumbleson.com/cards-in-web-design-balancing-simplicity-and-value.md) - "Cards" are a fantastic trend in web design that come with a host of benefits that have contributed to a proliferation throughout the web and application design. Follow along on my own experience designing a "card" for a financial application.
- [Human Capital: Assets or Liabilities?](https://www.bentumbleson.com/human_capital_assets_or_liabilities.md) - Imagine that you are an executive of a manufacturing company in any industry with a physical product (think automotive, agriculture, technology, consumer goods, etc.) As an executive, do you treat your own product inventory as an asset or a liability? How about your people?
- ["Vision" - A study of a new Plaid Product Offering](https://www.bentumbleson.com/vision-a-study-of-a-new-plaid-product-offering.md) - Finance is not "one size fits all". How can a leader in FinTech expand their offerings to enable segmentation and continue to reduce friction? Here's a proposal for a new product - Vision - I'll explore the potential value and use cases to consider.
- [How daylight savings time impacts international meetings](https://www.bentumbleson.com/how-daylight-savings-time-impacts-international-meetings.md) - When working across time zones, it's easy to forget how daylight savings affects meetings with parties all over the globe. Here's a visual guide and examples to help to frame the problem.
- [The next precision input device: touch (and pen)](https://www.bentumbleson.com/the-next-precision-input-device.md) - When thinking about precision input devices - a mouse, trackpad, pen, or finger - which represents the future? Let's unpack approaches from Apple and Microsoft.
- [Making Rocket Science Cool](https://www.bentumbleson.com/making-rocket-science-cool.md) - This last Sunday, October 7th, I tuned in to watch SpaceX's SAOCOM 1A Mission, set to deliver a Argentinian satellite to low-earth orbit, designed to gather soil moisture information. This is SpaceX's 17th launch this year, and they're on track for at least another ten before the end of the year.
- [Compounding 101 - learning JavaScript along the way](https://www.bentumbleson.com/savings-calulator-v1.md) - Compounding is such a magical concept in numbers and particularly finance. As I step further in building skillsets in web design, I'll build a reactive compounding calculator with a visualization using Vue.
- [Empowering investors with Robinhood](https://www.bentumbleson.com/empowering-investors-with-robinhood.md) - Robinhood has a tremendous opportunity to utilize the brand recognition, trust they've built, and exceptional design talent to complement their own products by providing financial literacy and teaching core investment strategies and philosophies to a largely uneducated, but interested audience.
- [Approaching the problem](https://www.bentumbleson.com/approaching-the-problem.md) - Like I explained in my introduction, Building from Scratch, a challenge usually has more than meets the eye, and I think part of what makes a tech consultants, product managers, solution architects, etc. good at their job is understanding the depth of a challenge and what might go into a solution.
- [Building from scratch](https://www.bentumbleson.com/building-from-scratch.md) - A small challenge to myself: if I want to build a web app from scratch, where do I start? A blank canvas is challenging, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
- [Conversations, not broadcasts](https://www.bentumbleson.com/conversation-not-broadcast.md) - Feeling nostalgic about the internet of the past, I explore forums as a sense of community, influencers seeking validation, and how a world of big data - bringing everyone closer together, makes it harder to maintain a sense of community.
- [A better way to board an airplane](https://www.bentumbleson.com/a-better-way-to-board-an-airplane.md) - In the world of things that cause unnecessary stress, boarding a plane is one of them. Everyone boards a little differently, and they all suffer from the same issues that leave the boarding process feeling inefficient and ripe for restructuring.
- [How inefficient am I?](https://www.bentumbleson.com/how-inefficient-am-i.md) - When work has no baselines, how do you measure productivity and efficiency? And what if you're billing for that time? No answers here, just a thought process.
- [India: Retrospective](https://www.bentumbleson.com/india-retrospective.md) - A travel blog of my time spent in Mumbai, as a part of a two week business trip I took in February of 2018.
- [Is productivity linear?](https://www.bentumbleson.com/is-productivity-linear.md) - Sometimes it’s unclear how, if at all, the work you’re doing at a task level is contributing to a final product. One’s productivity might as well be zero, until you find the right route forward. If you were to graph the completion of a task/epic over time, I would venture it is far from linear.
- [iMessage and the silent takeover of SMS](https://www.bentumbleson.com/iphones-and-blue-chat-bubbles.md) - Ever flinched from a green bubble in your iPhone chat? Time to thank Apple to taking SMS hostage, ensuring conformity along the way. I get it - it's tough to leave the Apple ecosystem, but have you considered looking over the walls?

## Optional
- [RSS Feed](https://www.bentumbleson.com/rss/)
- [Sitemap](https://www.bentumbleson.com/sitemap.xml)
- [Full content of pages and posts](https://www.bentumbleson.com/llms-full.txt)