Sid Shetye
Engineer, founder, and writer
Sid writes about technology, engineering, security, family, and the ideas that connect them.
33 posts
About
A three-person studio that writes things down
We design and build websites for small teams. Anti-random is where the working notes end up, because the useful part of a project is almost never the screenshot.
How the notebook started
The studio opened in 2019 with one laptop and a spreadsheet of leads. The first year taught us that a website is rarely a design problem: it is a decision problem with a design attached. Which font loads first, which section gets cut, what happens on a four-year-old Android phone on hotel wifi.
For three years the answers lived in a private repository. Every time a client asked why a page felt slow, or why we refused to add a fifth typeface, the reasoning was already written down somewhere. Publishing those notes cost us nothing and saved the same explanation twice a month.
Anti-random is that repository, cleaned up. Some entries are build logs with numbers in them, some are arguments about type, some cover the unglamorous half of freelancing: scoping, quoting, being paid on time. All of them come out of work we actually did.
How we work
Three rules we have not yet found a good reason to break.
Measure before arguing
Taste settles nothing about performance. We publish the before and after numbers, including the times a change made things worse.
Ship the boring version
The boring version launches on time, survives a redesign and still works with JavaScript off. Cleverness is what we add once the boring version is live.
Write it down once
If an answer takes more than five minutes to explain, it becomes a post. Clients get the link, we get our afternoon back.
The three of us
Short bios, honest job titles, and every post each of us has signed.
Working together
We take on three or four projects a year, mostly redesigns for teams of under twenty people. If the timing lines up, tell us what is in the way.
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