Hey, friend!

Phew. I can finally breathe.

We've spent the last 10-12 months busting our butts working with our friends at FocusLab to re-brand Tighten from scratch. At first, we just thought we wanted a new web site; then, we thought we just wanted a new logo; but we quickly we realized we wanted to re-work it all, the whole way back to the very beginning.

Dan and I, aided by Keith Damiani as the project lead for the rebrand on our side, dug deep into the core questions of who we are as a company and why this company even exists. We had done some of this same work when we were first starting the company, just the two of us, in our second office above the Lakland Bass company facility (fun story: I play a Lakland bass!), but now, 10 years in, we've had a lot more experience and a lot more time to prove out some of those early ideas.

My favorite feedback we've gotten so far about the web site is from my friend Phan An:

"I love reading websites, and the new Tighten site is one of the most pleasant reads in years. Great work…" -(tweet)

The new brand, logo, and web site are beautiful. The designers at FocusLab and Tighten are brilliant and inspired and amazing, and the programmers at Tighten worked their butts off to bring the site fully to life.

But I'm most proud, partly because I had the most involvement here, in the writing. Check out the method page. Check out the manifesto. Learn not just about how talented our designers are, but who we are and why we are and how we think others should be.

I'm proudest, not of the writing, but of what it reflects. This is who we've been and who we've become, traits and convictions we've fought hard to discover and hold true to, finally written down in one place for the whole world to see, and, I hope, be inspired by.

One of my goals over this next year is to share this vision we have with as many people as possible. I hope you love reading it, and that you're inspired, too. Check it out, at tighten.com.

 

What Else?

Tighten Blog

  • React Hooks for Beginners: Managing State

Tighten YouTube

  • Tammy Robinson: Self Care for Programmers

Matt Stauffer YouTube

  • Building a Business You Want, with Adam Wathan
  • Changing Your Story, with Rissa Jackson

Links

  • Overriding vendor classes | Downing Tech
  • Server-side Rendering for Inertia.js | Laravel News
  • Alpine.js Focus Plugin | Laravel News
  • Laravel “Pipe Through” Collections Method | Laravel News
  • A package to quickly send Slack alerts in a Laravel app - Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript
  • Tailwind CSS Laravel Package | Laravel News

Things Worth Learning

  • Building a Business You Want, with Adam Wathan
  • Changing Your Story, with Rissa Jackson

Popular Tweets

  • Check it out: a trailer for the official Laravel documentary! There will be an official launch party on March 2, which I'm super excited to be hosting, so make sure you make plans to join us on that date! (You can sign up to be notified, if you want, at the end of the trailer.) (Tweet)(Quote Retweet)
  • This is so freaking clever. (Tweet)(Quote Retweet)
  • Adam is brilliant. We all know this. And he's long been very quick to share everything he learns as a programmer. But in this interview he was also incredibly transparent about the difficulties of building a business. I'm so grateful and honored he was willing to share so much! (Tweet)(Quote Retweet)

That's it for now!

Until next time...

Your friend,
Matt Stauffer

 
 
Matt Stauffer
1807 W Sunnyside Suite 1G
Chicago, IL 60640
You're receiving this email because you signed up for it at mattstauffer.com
Unsubscribe