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Alex Rainert

Alex Rainert

Product & design person, introvert, Liverpool fan, easy laugh. Recent: Head of Audio product @ NYTimes Past: foursquare google itp@nyu. This is my home on online and a place to capture my thoughts.

The best $150 you can spend as a product person looking to grow: Lenny’s Newsletter (and the extended Lennyverse)

The best $150 you can spend as a product person looking to grow: Lenny’s Newsletter (and the extended Lennyverse)

Lenny Rachitsky has, over the past 5+ years built what I consider to be the best community and content around "Product" writ large - covering various aspects of the craft of product management, strategies for product growth and finally, and often most interesting to me, valuable perspectives on the psychology of being a product manager/product leader. It all started with a great subscription newsletter and a subscriber-only Slack community. The subscription only costs $150 per year and if being

Leaning into Design as an education superpower

Last week Jason Kottke shared this awesome <10 minute video on how tattoos work (hint: it’s all thanks to your immune system 🫡 ) While I do have a passing interest in tattoo art (here's a fun piece from The Atlantic that explores The Words People Write on their Skin), the reason this video made such an impression on me is the stunning animation and storytelling in service of learning. I did a little digging and the creator, Kurzsgasadt, has other great looking videos covering Why We Need to R

Stompers - count your steps and kick some ass

Stompers - count your steps and kick some ass

Stompers is a social step-counting app I've been enjoying for about a month now. The concept is simple, quirky, and ultimately has been effective at getting me to do something valuable we all need to do more of - move. The app has a distinctive, decidedly lo-fi cartoony comic book visual style. Like many step counters before it, Stompers does a good job of reflecting the amount you move every day. However, this is not intended to be a single-player game. Stompers is fun because you do it with y

Remembering how to write after Twitter broke my brain

Remembering how to write after Twitter broke my brain

I used to LOVE blogging. I blogged regularly from 2000 to 2010 across a few different sites - for awhile about internet and pop culture, then about design and tech called and eventually moved over to Medium (those posts have been imported here) I never did it to build a giant audience or to make any money. It was just super fun to write about random stuff with my friends and share it with what was likely an audience of each other, maybe our moms and a few other bloggers. It didn't matter. I lov

🚧 Coming Soon

I'm working on making this little site my new home on the internet. It's been awhile since I felt compelled to put in the effort to build - and maintain - a presence on the web again. Over the past 15+ years I've poured a lot (too much) of my energy, time and attention into Twitter as my de facto home on the web and over the course of 2022 became increasingly disenchanted with that path so here we are. Back in the early aughts I used to regularly blog (go Waaayyyy Back: monoki.

All writings

Recommendations

Readwise Reader: The read-it-later app built for power readers.

I've used a variety of read-it-later products (Instapaper, Pocket, etc.) and what I love about Reader is that I can pull all my reading in one place - later reads, RSS feeds and Kindle highlights.

Things - To-Do List for Mac & iOS

I was a longtime user of Omnifocus and the Getting Things done framework. Eventually I was drawn to Things' incredibly simple and polished approach to tracking Todos, both work and personal.

All recommendations