servant leaders
To me, credibility as a leader is fundamentally whether you’ve convinced me our interests are sufficiently aligned and whether you have the skills & motivation necessary to keep them that way.
Author: Lincoln
family metaphors
Your company isn’t a family. Every time I hear someone describe their workplace as a family, it’s a red flag. It means one of two things: You’re squeezing people, or you’re earnest but inexperienced.
product moats
Shipping new features feels like it’s increasing the “moat” around your product because just look at all the time and effort it took. There’s just one problem: Features aren’t a moat.
open investments
I recently read “Why I wouldn’t invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one” by Wolfram Hempel and started to write a very long comment, but decided I’d just publish my own counterpoint instead.
build off
I’m lately watching The Great British Bake Off. When I thought about why you couldn’t do a similar show about programming, I realized the hurdles to televising it are the same hurdles teams face anyway.
intractable problems
Why do I think so much about how people interact online? We’re at a rare moment of a tectonic shift in one of the great mysteries of the world: human society.
real community
I don’t think many of us understand what a community is or how to support one. We’ve built a lot of software to help people talk, and very little to help them build community.
unsemantic versions
Are you old enough to remember Firefox 2.0? It was a huge deal. Why did semantic versioning kill “big deal” releases and what could we do instead?
10x developers
The myth of the “10x Developer” is rooted in pure technical fluency and short-term growth metrics, and it’s a dangerous narrative to sustainable teams and products.
one year
Some months ago, we decided I would be the one to take Kyle’s computer and put it to use. Today felt like the day I could remove the PC without doing further damage to my soul.
using forums
Offering community managers a forum to build a community is like giving a project manager a kanban board. Yes, they can make it work. But is there really a “kanban market”?
context puzzles
What is software development really if not a sprawling, borderless puzzle for which the lid with the big picture on it is long gone? To me, it seems obvious that the biggest hurdle to team-based software development is how difficult it is to communicate well.
binary consensus
Most substantive community work is about consensus seeking, and software is naturally very bad at this. How do you put humans at the center of community software? Don’t build better algorithms, build better workflows.
black box
The greatest sin of any developer is thinking they are cleverer than the users of what they build. “I can guess what you want.” In truth, guessing what someone wants is far easier than helping them achieve what they actually want.
platform syndicate
Platforms exist to remove interaction barriers between users. The folly of platforms is believing they can entirely rely on algorithms to control & shape human interaction.
attention management
It’s very easy for me, now, to cite how ADHD affects me daily. I hope me sharing this helps folks identify similar traits in themselves or others they care about.
tipped scales
Last week I spent a full day refactoring something and my brain went to that mythical “zone” for the first time in a long while. I was burning again with confidence I’d forgotten.
project folders
With only a week left until my new job begins, I’ve begun tidying my office and virtual desktop for a new day-to-day pattern.
social graph
When’s the last time you heard anyone talk about the “social graph”? It turns out it was all just another way to sell ads and nothing more.
mental models
Designing software that doesn’t account for human mental models is unethical. It gaslights people into thinking they’re incapable, and the domino effects of that are incalculable.
delicious clicks
The most dangerous idea on the web is that it’s for search engines.
square one
Maybe it’s just a story I’m making up, but this Web doesn’t feel like the dream we were all working toward. What are we doing here, anyway?