Today is Alien Day, a completely made-up observance of the ALIEN film franchise. In the spirit of the season, please enjoy this three-page fan comic "Finders Keepers" in which two men make a very foolish mistake. Written sometime last year with art banged out start to finish last week.
To be honest, this was all just an excuse to draw that final page.
Posted April 26, 2025
Today’s newsletter crew got the final pages of HERETICAL: CHROME SANDS. The story wrapped up at 24 pages — not counting the cover. I kicked things off in mid-January, and by early April, it was done and dusted. Three months, start to finish.
For a little perspective: the first HERETICAL tale began as rough sketches back in 2015 and didn’t see the light of day until last December.
Also in today's newsletter: a three-page ALIEN fan comic about two guys who make a BIG mistake. "Finders Keepers" will be released on Alien Day 2025 this upcoming Saturday, but you can read it now — if you subscribe!
Posted April 23, 2025
I came across Steph Ango's wonderful Flexoki color palette and fell for the warm, saturated colors that are meant to evoke ink on paper. Also, I immediately wanted to try it for webcomics.
This is sort of contrary to stated purpose of Flexoki, which is web typography and user interfaces. Still, I wanted to give the extended palette a try since I like working from a limited palette (I already spend too many indecisive moments farting around in color pickers) and the colors are specifically for the web. Which means all the standard caveats apply when using RGB colors for a future CMYK print job.
There are many ports for different applications, but none for Clip Studio Paint, so I grabbed the list of hex values and converted them into a CSP color set file. If you want to try it, download it below.
Flexoki Extended for Clip Studio Paint (3K .zip file)Update: This is available at GitHub now. Download the latest ZIP file here.
Note that the Flexoki "paper" and "black" colors should ideally be used as base (e.g. backround) colors. You won't get the same results with pure hex/RGB white and black (I've tried).
I should note that Flexoki is open source under the MIT License.
Posted April 21, 2025
Why wait another eight years? The first ten pages of CHROME SANDS, the sequel to HERETICAL, is going out to Neat Hobby! newsletter subscribers next week! You can be one of them if you subscribe!
Otherwise you'll have to wait until all 24 pages are finished. Which is fine, but c'mon, aren't you curious?
Posted March 27, 2025
This post is the follow-up to "How To Be More Interesting During A Technical Interview" that's been languishing in my drafts folder since 2015. I've dusted it off and re-written it a bit in the hopes it helps somebody.
The title of this post is actually paraphrased dating advice and I believe it's applicable. Stay with me, I promise it'll make sense eventually.
What's a positive sign that a date is going well? Great conversation. How do you make great conversation? By being interested.
This is different being interesting. If you weren't interesting, you wouldn't be on this date. Or in an interview room.
How To Be Interested:
10 listen attentively
20 ask questions
30 GOTO 10;
The, uhm, polite and terse feedback on the previous post suggests to me that survivor bias and imposter syndrome are still robustly represented in the tech industry. Which is okay. This stuff is hard.
I've had some follow-up thoughts in draft mode for awhile, and given the Current State of the Industry it seems like good time to address a few common concerns.
I think you'd be surprised at what interviewers can and are willing to share.
Remember, you're trying to start a conversation, not perform corporate espionage[1]. It's perfectly reasonable to want to know if you're going to be spending your time solving problems or putting out fires.
If you're worried about non-disclosure, just say that! "I'd like to hear a little bit about your tech stack, if that's permitted," or "if this topic is confidential, we can talk about something else." Any experienced interviewer should know where the line is.
That said, respect that line. Be interested, not nosy.
Oh, and if you're anxious that you'll offend your interviewer by asking these types of questions, let me just say you can't do any worse than candidates who ask softball questions or no questions at all.[2]
You don't need deep experience to have a conversation between peers, and you don't need to have solved any of these issues yourself. In fact, think twice before offering solutions. They should hire you for that!
By flipping the script, you're getting crucial insight into how the team or company operates. Just be sure you're actively listening and look for opportunities to ask follow-up questions. Maybe you've never had a job with an oncall rotation. Great! You're about to hear about what that's like here. Maybe you haven't had to gather requirements on your own. Awesome! You're about to hear how they do that here.
You're not doing anything different than your interviewers are by asking your own STAR-esque questions. You're just leaving out that "tell me about a time when—" part.
And if your interviewer does ask about your own experience, you can always say something like "I haven't experienced that situation yet myself, what's that like here?"
(All of that said, you should probably work on having opinions.)
Please don't be mad, but I don't believe it.
Why? Because you're in tech, and tech folk LOVE to talk tech! They have opinions. You've never debated the merits of some language or framework or Linux flavor with your classmates? You've never spent a team lunch discussing how to deal with some gnarly legacy code? Server vs. client-side? "ɡɪf" vs. "jɪf"?
One of my teams spent part of an afternoon talking about whether one should ever put comments in their code.
You can do this because you've already done this. Take advantage of this energy! Leverage the addictive properties of tech discourse!
Now you've found some common ground. You're no longer the candidate who crammed on sorting algorithms all weekend vs. the interviewer who hasn't thought about sorting since their own interview, and is preoccupied with why their deployment pipeline needs manual intervention several times a day. Now you're compatriots, fellow travelers — peers, even!
By asking questions that imply you're interested in discussing and solving problems, you're signaling that you're not just keen to get a job, but you're someone they should want to work with.
Be interested. Engage. Converse.
A super-secret stealth-mode startup might balk at answering in detail. But then, they may not have actually built anything significant yet (and if they have, it could be bootstrapped with hot glue and duct tape). ↩︎
And if you're around long enough, you're guaranteed to encounter folks that radiate some truly toxic vibes. Better to discover this now before you accept an offer. ↩︎
Posted March 17, 2025
The third animated Neat Hobby! comic was an adaptation of "Sea Shanties for Modern Mariners" and wow I had to do a lot of work on this one. Not that it wasn't fun! I had a blast making it! But to make it a proper length video I had to add more sea creatures than the original comic had, which meant a total of ten different voices I had to come up with. And also a bunch of music, because it's a shanty!
And they're all singing! That's a lot of mouths to animate! When I was done I watched the final cut about one kabillion times, and then took a long break. Still my favorite of them all.
If you'd like to see some of the tricks I used to make this one, subscribe to the Neat Hobby! Newsletter and follow the links!
Posted March 12, 2025
"Non-player Characters" is one of the most popular comics I've made and once I'd finished "Continuity I knew I was gonna animate it next. I had to do four voices, and you can tell by the dwarf's voice occupying an uncanny/horrifying spot between Inigo Montoya and Shrek that I'm not particularly skilled at accents. I made a joke at the time that I was trying to make the knight sound heroic like Superman, but ended sounding more like an imitation crab meat Space Ghost (RIP George Lowe).
If you'd like to see some behind-the-scenes stuff, subscribe to the Neat Hobby! Newsletter and follow the links!
Posted March 10, 2025
Last summer I got extremely into animating a handful of Neat Hobby! comics. It was the perfect distraction for someone like me: art, animation, video, music, and voice acting! I did the animation on my iPad using Clip Studio, the same program I use to draw comics and I wrote and recorded the music and all the voice acting in Garageband.
If you follow this site you've probably already seen one of these: I released "Yurēi-mazing" last Halloween. I had big plans to do about ten videos, but ran out of steam halfway through. I think once I figured it all out it just didn't hold my attention. Which is ridiculous because twelve-year-old me would've sold his Huffy bike and Micronauts collection for the chance make his own animated cartoons, something I can now do on a tablet while watching TV. It's not too late for twelve-year-old me to jump in a time machine and come kick my ass.
Here's the first animated Neat Hobby! from last summer: "Continuity." By the way, Neat Hobby! Newsletter subscribers not only saw this last summer, but also got to see behind-the-scenes stuff like animatics and proof-of-concept videos. You can too! If you join us!
Posted March 6, 2025
In January I published some code that connects a Buttondown newsletter to Eleventy to create a Patreon-like "soft paywall" for your free and paying Buttondown subscribers and encourage more subscriptions. Now you can do the same for Wordpress, with this WP Buttondown plugin.
Eleventy is fantastic and still my current go-to for making websites, but ya gotta be pretty nerdy, love to write JavaScript, and know your way around a terminal. As of this year around 43% of websites are Wordpress sites, and the process for making plugins is well-documented, so it was sort of a no-brainer. Creating the plugin settings dashboard was the most complex part.
Anyway, check it out here!
Connect your Buttondown newsletter to your Wordpress website and encourage subscriptions with subscribers-only content. - scottandrewlepera/wordpress-buttondown-plugin
GitHub
PS: there's a new version of the Eleventy/Buttondown code that adds the ability to put whole pages behind the subscribers-only gate. Eventually this will work its way into the Wordpress plugin, but I have other priorities.
Posted March 4, 2025
The last few years have been, uh, notable for Big Tech layoffs and industry disruption. New grads are struggling to find jobs, and are now competing with freshly laid-off engineers with more experience but less flexibility. It sucks.
I don't have a ton of strategy to share and I'm not interested in Thought Leadership (deragatory). But I have spent over 20 years interviewing candidates at a big ol' FAANG company. I couldn't tell you anything about the hiring process you couldn't find yourself (pro tip: stalk subreddits), but I do have observations and opinions. So maybe I'll share them here in hopes it helps someone.
I posted the following short article to Medium in 2018 in response to a pattern I was seeing in interview loops. Candidates would generally do well, but when it came time for Q&A, they'd ask safe, deferential questions. It seemed like a squandered opportunity to engage with the interviewer as a peer.
I rewrote the article in 2023 with the intent to start a new tech-focused blog, but that didn't happen. I've had some follow-up thoughts in draft mode for years, so I might post those later.
“Do you have any questions for me before we wrap up?”
This your chance to make a lasting impression on your interviewer. It’s an opportunity to show your prospective employer you're interested in solving real problems, for real people. That you care about your work and the humans at the opposite end of the tech stack.
It’s also a chance to learn something about how your prospective employer operates. Maybe there’s a pain point you can help address, or a process gap you can help fill. Maybe you’ll see some patterns that indicate how happy — or miserable — you’ll be if you accept an offer.
Over two decades of interviewing candidates, the ones that stood out were the ones who tried to engage me in a conversation about things I cared about. Below are some conversation starters I jotted down from memory. Feel free to use them, and create your own.
What’s your worst day like here? How do you manage it?
If you could change one thing about your tech stack, what would it be? What’s blocking you from implementing this change?
What are some common pain points for your customers? Are you working towards solving them? Why or why not?
How do you respond to customer complaints? Do you have a system for customer-reported issues? How has that been working for you?
How does your team handle requests for new features? Do you have a process?
How do you evaluate new technology for use? What are your criteria for adoption?
I see from your [source code|press release|company blog] that you’ve adopted [a particular technology]. What decisions led you to that adoption? How successful has it been?
Tell me about your deployment methodology. Are you able to do continuous deployment? If so, how? If not, what is your release schedule like and what determines it?
How does your team handle code reviews? Do you have standards or criteria for reviews?
When was the last time your company or team had to migrate to a new tech stack? How did you approach this? Would you do anything differently now?
How do you handle professional growth? What does the typical developer career track look like at your company?
What’s the ratio of [engineering|product|project] managers to developers? Does this ratio work for you?
What’s one thing someone would need to know to be successful here?
Posted March 1, 2025