Matt Haughey has a great how-to over at LifeHacker: How to build your own backyard deck. A few weeks ago, Matt and his wife decided that while they were going to leave to professionals the construction of a large deck up against their house, they wanted to try to build a smaller, corner-of-the-backyard deck on their own. After doing a bit of research on deck pier systems, Matt found Deckplans.com, and was able to use the company's online app to design their deck, a process which ended with the automatic generation of both a materials list and custom PDF assembly instructions. He's pretty happy with the results; here's hoping for updates later on to let everyone know how the deck stands up over time!