Do tools become popular because they enable labor arbitrage? Maybe. But I don’t think it’s so simple. All tools are meant to lead to some kind of efficiency– they help us do more and do more complex things than before. If they didn’t it wouldn’t be much of a tool.

In all cases, improved efficiency and efficacy like this can be turned into some form of lowering labor costs.

Of course, Baldur isn’t saying “things that make work easier” are what cause labor arbitrage. Instead, it’s tools that enabled reduced specialization that seem to grow, in his view, problematically. But this just feels like moving the goal posts on an age old argument about “higher level languages”.

Are abstractions good? Often. Is reducing the amount of code and deep understanding you need to solve a problem a good things? Often. I’m so glad we don’t have to solve every problem associated with authorization from scratch and have much more safe defaults these days. I’m also glad we can write for the web without maintaining our own TCP/IP stacks or server (software).

I think it’s hard to point where the line is between “abstraction” and “labor arbitrage”. I’m not surprised at the sort of bimodal distribution on tooling – some aggressively unconcerned, and some aggressively concerned– because (at least in the modern Anglosphere), nuance seems dead. But I think that everyone seems to define the line between what is a useful higher order abstraction and what is labor arbitrage based on what was a “tool” during their formative time in tech and what came afterwards.

It’s Douglas Adams all over again:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

What am I hoping to do with writing on the web? Well, for one, it’s an outlet for my thoughts that I want to remember and return to. But that alone is a diary or a journal. These are also thoughts that I hope others will read and engage with in some form or fashion. These are ideas that are satisfying to me because sometimes whispering our thoughts quietly to ourselves is important and sometimes shouting them into the void is important and sometimes we hope the void shouts back.

For years, I had Google Analytics on my personal websites because it was free and worked fine. But for various reasons, I got turned off by the service and the idea of analytics for a bit. So I turned everything off. And being hosted on Micro.blog, despite crossposting to Twitter (when it was available) and Mastodon and just about wherever else, I broadly didn’t know about readership, followers, etc. Interactions were my main measure of reach– do people choose to reply to my posts on their platform of choice?

I think that’s largely my goal– I want to know if people are responding to my writing on their platform of choice.

But there’s a huge problem with this idea today– webmentions. Webmentions is a shit show of a standard. It seems to only kind of work. It definitely confuses and perplexes many writers who are bought into the IndieWeb in spirit but are not writing their own (seemingly always PHP) CMS to implement standards. Folks who are writers first and non-developer tinkerers are met with bad plug-ins, inconsistent behavior, poorly documented inconsistencies, and a whole manner of things that cause them to give up ¹. Still, others have decided the very idea of a webmention, especially extended to social posts, and specifically displaying that others have linked (publicly) to your blog post is a privacy concern.

Why are webmentions a problem? Because if I want to know that people are responding to my writing on their platform of choice, I want to know when people write on their blogs and link to my content. Of course I do… my own blog is my personal platform of choice for commenting on the web! Webmentions was supposed to solve this– when someone links to my site, they add the right classes to that link and their server lets my server know that they’ve linked to my site or a specific post. Brilliant– pingbacks/trackbacks for the open web. But it’s just not working and it’s not complete enough. Adoption is low and horribly inconsistent. I’m glad I receive webmentions, but they are exceedingly rare.

Which brings me to my defense of analytics and my own use of tinylytics.app. I don’t care about the number of “hits” my blog gets. Considering how many places I post my content and my own hope that RSS is how most people read my site, hits are almost certainly no more than directionally accurate about readership. What I do care about are referrers. Without webmentions proactively telling me when folks on the web mention my content, I can see if anyone who read that post clicked on the link to my site and ended up here. I have discovered at least three blogs in the last year that linked to me that I now follow through this method. Somehow they found what I wrote. They linked to it, either with short commentary or even a fully on response, and then, because at least one person clicked the link over to my site, I learned about their blog post.

Without analytics on referrers, I’d never know these people were a part of my small circle of the internet in conversation with my writing. So for now, I’m all in on having analytics. It’s one of the few reliable ways to know that someone had written about your content. I still want people to respond on their platform of choice, and I don’t want to lose their voice or conversation.

April is a good month for “good enough”. Most years, including this one, April is when I celebrate Passover. During the seder, we sing an over 1000 year old song, Dayenu – “it would have been enough”.

This year “enough” has been on my mind. My parents are nearing retirement and I am nearing middle age. Both of those feel like milestones to think about “what is enough”.

I feel bombarded with messaging about “enough”– all the new crop of pop-financial advice is about “enough”. Die with Zero, Living Your Rich Life, and FIRE are all, to a degree, about understanding what is “enough” when it comes to money. My own experience, being fortunate enough to see my income and wealth grow over time, is it’s hard to feel “enough”. My mind knows that I can live with less fear, but my body still feels nervous, like ruin and catastrophe is always around the corner.

My two nervous systems have a different idea about what is enough.

I’ve continued to struggle with my weight and my body like I have all my life. For me, it’s not what I eat so much, but it’s about portion control. I am hungry– often. It’s hard to feel satisfied. I want to be entertained by my food and can’t make myself have a purely instrumental relationship with food.

My mind and my stomach and my body all have different ideas about what is “enough”

I let this blog post sit in almost this exact state for most of April. I sat on my blog redesign for almost 6 months before just releasing it as is for the same reason.

My energy level to write and my idealized version of this blog post (and blog) have different ideas about what is “enough”.

This month’s indieweb carnival is actually about “good enough”. But I don’t really have problem with the “good” part– I have problems with the “enough” part. If it’s enough, it’s always good. And my problem is really about allowing myself to recognize and feel when we’ve hit “good” so that I can say “enough”.

The pandemic forced a change. I was no longer commuting a mile to an office each day for work, work happened at home. I lived that life before I moved to Baltimore, but at that time Elsa and I lived together in a small one bedroom condo and my desk was in the bedroom. Working from my bedroom was not always great. But this time, we had a large house and I could set myself up at home. Previously, I had a small desk on the top floor where Elsa kept her office. Working from home full time meant making a more permanent space, hopefully with greater separation between Elsa and myself.

So we made an adjustment I had thought about for some time, moving all of our gym equipment out from one of the smaller bedrooms and up to the loft where my desk was. Down went my desk into the bedroom and I now had a dedicated room at home for me. It is clearly my office, but it also opened up another opportunity.

From the time I was 14 until college, I played guitar for hours every day. Slowly through college, I played a bit less all the time– it’s hard to be loud in dorms and apartments, but I still played all the time and was deeply invested in my identity as a guitar player. But grad school came, and so did work, and suddenly I basically stopped, almost entirely. I know that this happens to a lot of folks, but to this day I remain surprised. Guitar was a huge part of my identity, not just a thing I did sometimes. I played in bands all throughout high school. I obsessed over gear. I used to drive to find new guitar shops or even return to ones I frequent to see what new used equipment was there and play for hours. But a part of living is shedding parts of ourselves to make room for new things and somehow guitar was a casualty.

Like many folks who rediscovered hobbies during the pandemic, guitar crept back into my life. In this instance, however, I’m not so sure how much of my playing was about having time. I think a fair bit of my resurgence came from having space. As I put together my office, rather than fill the walls just with art or furniture, I hung my primary electric and acoustic guitars. They were now right behind, in reach, in a room with a door. Just that difference was enough to start me playing a bit again.

I’ve never taken up guitar like I used to–there’s very little which I can dedicate even one hour a day to. But I’ve been more consistent than in years. Some weeks it may only be twenty minutes of noodling, other weeks I pick it up for a bit every day. Slowly, I’ve at least started to redevelop and maintain my calluses. I don’t play nearly as well as I used to– I can feel the difference in my dexterity and confidence– but I’m getting to passably close to where I was.

For the first time in over a decade, I’m starting to play with other people again. The last few Saturday afternoons I’ve piled into a small basement with my guitar and amp and hung out playing with a drummer, two keyboardist/synth players, and another guitarist. And we’ve been improvising over a few things and writing some new music. It’s music I’d listen to, and I’m having a blast. Yesterday we played for almost 15 minutes straight off of a small riff I wrote in April of 2020. It was just something I recorded to my phone because it sounded cooler than I expected. I was playing it to practice my picking and timing, and now I’ve got my own song (really our song now– it’s gone so much beyond my start point) stuck in my head.

It’s funny. My senior year of high school I went to the gym to lift weights at least a couple of times a week. I was playing volleyball every day after school in the spring. And most weekends, and even some weekdays, I got together with friends and played guitar and wrote music. Twenty plus years later, I’m going to the gym 3 days a week to lift weights. I’m playing volleyball 2-3 nights a week. And most weekends, I am getting together with friends and playing guitar and writing music.

I am not sure if the 20 years I spent (largely) away from these things would have been better if I tried to keep it up. I think it was important for me to grow out of the things I loved to do for a while. But about 6 years ago I started lifting weights again. And about 3 years ago I started playing volleyball again. And although I started playing guitar at home a bit more starting 4 years ago as well, it’s really just the last few months I’ve started playing with other people and writing music again. All of these things are utterly recreational. I can do them entirely with a joy and ease that I didn’t have when I was younger. I have returned to them all way more willing to be silly and without expectations. And I’m just having so much fun.

A Partial Redesign

Site redesign is at least partially done. I realized right now that my idea of only showing seven days of posts on my home page doesn’t quite work.

1. I’m not really sure how to filter to the last seven days of content effectively.
2. I don’t post every day, and the site won’t be rebuilt if I don’t post.

Still, I like the idea of having seven days on my home page, with some days just saying “No posts were written on this day” for any previous days and “No posts have been written yet today.” for the current day.

There’s almost certainly a way to do this with date math in Hugo and triggering regular builds, but I don’t think it’s worth it. This is an idea I’ll keep in mind. Much like my desire to have working URLs for things like /year/ showing all posts in that year, /year/month showing all posts in that year-month, and /year/month/day showing all posts on that day, this is one of those Hugo limitations that makes me consider writing my own CMS.

Notable Changes Around Here

I have been playing with this design locally for a while. I came to like it so much, I swapped to this color scheme on the site like 6 months ago. Today, I decided things were at least “close enough” to move things to the main site.

The primary changes are:

• I am using a fixed width font now across the whole site for all content. This font is Berkeley Mono, which I paid for and have used as a my main fixed-width font locally for quite a while. Please don’t steal it from my site– you need a license to use it, which you can purchase from US Graphics.
• I am using background colors on my headers. I like them so much, I hope it’ll encourage me to write posts worthy of having headers down to H4.
• I’ve added some block drawing/block characters to the dates on the homepage, taking advantage of some of Berkeley Mono’s cool built in stuff. I have also switched from a more human “April 14, 2024” to ISO8601 (2024-04-14) dates to continue with my retro, almost brutalist flair.

Pages that Flex the Design

I think my Archive, which I’m not generally fond of, looks great now. I’m also happy with Uses. One of my favorite posts, Delimited files are hell also looks pretty good. I think it shows off how nicely code blocks blend with and stick out from the rest of the site. This was a major concern of mine going to a fixed-width font everywhere.

Where it falls down

I still don’t love my index page. It feels crowded. I know how much work has gone into it over time, but it’s still not quite right. One idea I’m playing with is removing the site title entirely and possibly moving the navigation to the bottom or to a menu button. Neither seems quite right.

Ideas and criticism welcome

My design skill is the worst– I have enough taste to know things aren’t as polished or “correct” as I’d like, but not enough skill with CSS or design to get that final spit shine. So I’m more than happy to take ideas on how to improve things. I am glad to have moved almost entirely to using a few CSS variables versus all the hand tweaked sizes I had splattered all over the place. It’s not a solid as I’d like, but with a bit of help from some online calculators, this is about the prettiest top-of-the-CSS file I’ve ever written:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13

:root {
  --color-primary: #21A179;
  --color-content: #ffffff;
  --color-background: #1E1E24;
  --color-links: #8093f1;
  --color-visited: #ef476f;
  --color-inactive: #81ae9d;
  --size-step-0: clamp(1rem, calc(0.96rem + 0.22vw), 1.13rem);
  --size-step-1: clamp(1.25rem, calc(1.16rem + 0.43vw), 1.5rem);
  --size-step-2: clamp(1.56rem, calc(1.41rem + 0.76vw), 2rem);
  --size-step-3: clamp(1.95rem, calc(1.71rem + 1.24vw), 2.66rem);
  --size-step-4: clamp(2.44rem, calc(2.05rem + 1.93vw), 3.55rem);
}

And yes, this section is partially to have a code block in this post because reasons.

Today I learned about the :has selector. This is helping me keep times aligned on my index page when some posts have titles and some do not. Posts without titles get margin-top: var(--size-step-4) for the time stamps. But using this handy selector, I can set the margin to the next size of H1 elements when there’s a title:

1
2
3

.date:has(+ .post-title) {
  margin-top: var(--size-step-4);
}

I’ve been holding on to a response to Greg Morris’s post about how some things are just too easy now. I have a pretty large set of ideas around how rapidly removing friction and transaction costs in an increasingly digital world has had a host of negative consequences. I don’t think these consequences largely outweigh the benefits, but I do think many of us are scrambling with uneasiness or unhappiness with our destination post-internet connectedness. It’s important that we think about how the things have played out and come up with new culture and structure to refine the world back toward a better compromise.

I just haven’t had the brain space to sit, write, edit, and really explain my thinking. It’s an easy conversation over a beer, but a hard one to put out in writing.

Sure enough, Greg comes back today with a post about embracing complexity. Of course, because this one goes meta about blogging and the internet, it feels way easier to respond to.

Now, let’s consider responding to a social media post. As previously mentioned, this task is overly simple, allowing users to quickly tap a button and share their thoughts with minimal effort. I believe adding complexity to this process, such as requiring a more thoughtful response posted on one’s blog, could balance the effort with the desire to engage. While it might not eliminate all frivolous responses, it could significantly reduce them.

He continues later:

This complexity reduces my posting frequency since I now require significant motivation to write and publish, leading to many potential posts remaining in Apple Notes.

I am confident that this is a complexity I do not want to embrace. If I make it hard to post to my own website, I don’t. That may not be so bad– the world is not worse off for my lack of posting. But what’s crumby is that I still often want to write or say something. I still often want to share a photo or a thought. And for me, if that complexity exists on my blog, eventually, I will decide to still post but somewhere else. And I think posting somewhere else is much, much worse most of the time.

So for me, posting somewhere I control and on my own site has to be easy. Ideas that want to be expressed that are simple are simply posted. Thoughtful responses are complex enough. Being thoughtful is not easy. Making the mechanics of sharing a thoughtful post complex doesn’t enforce being thoughtful, it ensures being thoughtful feels like a waste of time and effort. It’s one more thing I have to do after the hard work of writing. If I make blogging hard, I won’t blog, quality be damned.

I do think a whole host of things have been made easy to ill effect. I don’t think it’s great that work can contact me all of the time. I think it’s worse that this is a pervasive ability, so that customers/clients are always connected and this can impose a sense of needing to “keep up” with that pace as well. I think about systems and processes we build to do things a thousand times that I wish we’d just do once, with higher quality– the world is filled with this. Most of the things I view as problematic have been areas where we’ve managed to massively increase the pace of our world.

And yet, when it comes to socializing, and I do view blogging as a form of socializing, I can’t help but to think how much lonelier a friction-filled world would feel.

On a recent Accidental Tech Podcast member special, John Siracusa walked through his window management strategy. It was a fun episode, going over how John tends to have many (I think honestly over a hundred) windows open at the same time on his Mac using a single space and monitor. He does a lot of window sizing and arrangement that allows for easy click handles because of how windows freeform overlap that’s pretty neat. I can’t say it’s having a big impact on how I work, but I can say it made me think again about how I set up my computing world.

Similarly, on the most recent episode of the same program, the “after show” (not gated) was about why two hosts, Marco and John, don’t use multiple monitors. I found myself largely nodding along at their rationale as someone whose journey was quite like Marcos– back in 2005, I was using 2 x 17" LCD monitors and desperate for space, but somewhere around the 27" monitor time I switched to a single monitor with no desire for more.

Unlike John and Marco, I heavily use a macOS feature called spaces which is a part of the feature known as Mission Control. This feature is more generally known as “virtual desktops”. If you haven’t used virtual desktops before, the best explanation I can provide is imagine having two screens and setting up your window just so. Now imagine instead of those screens being physical an always present, you can use a keyboard shortcut or gesture to swap those screens. Now imagine there is no limit to the number of these screens you have. That’s virtual desktops.

I first used virtual desktops in the fall of 2006 at the Sun Lab at Brown University. There was some Debian-flavored minimal Linux distribution used on each of those computers used for computer science classes. ¹ The default window management system was a very plain setup of fvwm. But one thing that was there by default was a 3x3 grid of nine virtual desktops. I wish I had taken a lot more with me from that computing setup than I did, but one thing I immediately wanted to emulate were these virtual desktops. I immediately downloaded some cracked software to do this on my Windows machine, and it was one of the driving forces that led me quickly to use Linux at home.

I still miss when macOS permitted spaces to be setup in a 2x2 grid rather than a ribbon of infinite spaces. And I still miss the 3x3 grid setup I used for years. But I know so many people who use Macs and never use spaces. So I thought I’d document a little bit about how I use them here.

Big Picture

I’ll describe a bit about each of my four “desktop types” below. But overall, I have an “email” screen to my left, a “primary screen” with the majority of my communications and browsing, followed by any number of “focus” or “work” screens to the right, ending with a set of “fun” screens that contain things like Music or other apps I occasionally switch to for control purposes.

Email

I use three apps right now for email– Mail.app, Mimestream, and Outlook. This is because my personal email is on Fastmail, I have some email accounts on Gmail (including my old work account) and my new work email is Outlook only. I used to just have Mimestream and Mail.app on this page, but the addition of Outlook is a new necessity. I don’t mind Outlook the app very much, but I do hate the service. That said, I put email all together because it’s a thing I want to intentionally go to, not a thing I want in my face all the time. That said, I do frequently need to go to email, so I like having it close at hand. During the workday, when I’m not in any focus modes, my work email can send me a notification on my Mac– not my phone, and not my watch. I can decide from there to head left, take care of it, and back right out of email. Out of sight, mostly, and mostly out of mind.

Primary

I spend a good chunk of my time on my so-called “primary” screen which is actually very work light. This is actually my “communications center” where I have Slack, Messages, some social media for scrolling, and my main browser windows. Any time I’m doing work that’s web-based or communications oriented, this where I live. As a manager in these modern times, most of my work is communications or web oriented. Any form of non-focused work happens here, and it’s my “home base” for computing. It’s messy, and there’s a lot of ephemeral stuff that ends up on this page, but the above diagram has most of the “almost always open” stuff on it, roughly how I arrange things.

Focus

I have any number of “focus” screens at any given time depending on my work. This is often Nova, RStudio, or iAWriter, for general coding, R coding, or writing. But it also can be a ton of iTerm 2 windows, browsers, or any combination of the above. This is space for focus tasks. By putting this to the right of “primary”, in my brain, moving left is moving “up” the distraction tree. Moving right is largely moving into more focused, digging in tasks. I almost never have more than three focus desktops and I strive for a single one. This is the one thing I’m meant to be working on, with everything setup to focus on that once I’m in that space, and no other distractions. If I need a browser for my work, the browser window in this space is only task related browsing.

As a general rule, if I expect a task to take more than 30 minutes, I move it into a focus space.

The exceptions to “right is focus”

All the way to the right, at the end of my chain, are applications that I lightly interact with but want open. Things like Apple Music or MarsEdit often live out here open in their own spaces. While I’m showing these windows as “overlapping”, these are often one-space apps. I sometimes want a full view of my calendar in Fantastical to do more complex scheduling. I sometimes want to browse Apple Music versus just hitting play/pause/love/next (all of which I can do from a keyboard layer or the Stream Deck). I sometimes want to write a long blog post.

Conclusions?

I’m not sure if I have any, but this is a rough view into how I work. I’d love to hear from others about their setups.

I wish I could have used the actual ASCII versions of the images above, but I was not willing to rework my site theme to make them appear well. These were all made with Monodraw and exported as SVGs. I then used neovim to replace rgb(0, 0, 0) with rgb(255, 255, 255) so that they would work with my dark-mode only website. All of this is bad and I feel bad, but I didn’t have the patience to figure out a better option on a Sunday afternoon.

I actually think Apple loves that you can use a Mac and iPhone this long and still be happy. It’s probably about the edge, because in today’s world security patching alone puts a huge burden at some point. But I think Apple wants its products to last and loves having users talk about their 8 year old Mac.

How many 8 year old Windows laptops exist?

How many people can talk fondly about even a four year old non-Mac laptop? Very few. Meanwhile, excluding the bad keyboard era blip, keeping a Mac for four years has been an easy choice since the SSD switch. Even 6 years is pretty easy for anyone who is just a bit careful with their laptop to ensure longevity.

I buy a new machine roughly every 2.5-3.5 years. I find this is the sweet spot for residual trade in value and meaningful upgrades. But it’s been a long time since I’ve felt a need to do that. Part of my loyalty to Apple products is precisely because they last. I think Apple knows this.

Gracie is still with us, though her decline continues. Multiple times I’ve thought, “If this is not one day, but two days like this in a row, it’s time.” Holding the power to decide when life ends and death begins for someone you love who cannot express themselves is challenging. We are playing a mix between dog nurse, dog psychologist, and dog priest. This kind of extended end time takes its toll– I don’t sleep well because every movement she makes at night means she could be getting ready to vomit or need to go for a walk to avoid an accident. That’s not literally true six of seven nights a week, but it only takes one night to set my nervous system on high alert.

She has had quality visits from my sister and my parents. We brought Elsa’s mom home a bit early– she’s arriving today– so that she can have quality time with her as well. When we made that decision, I was certain Monday or Tuesday would be the day, but now I’m less sure.

The big news is that Allovue was acquired by PowerSchool in January. This marks a transition after almost exactly ten years working on the same project with the same people. In a lot of ways, the work isn’t different– we’re aligned on mission and vision, especially in the near-ish term, and I’m working with the same team. But in other ways, everything is different. I’m going from being a clear leader at small company where every bit of history and every decision was one I witnessed or partook in to being a middle manager in a very large company. I remain optimistic and I am continuing to adjust. Being in management in general is kind of tough here, because I’m trying to help people navigate the change while going through it myself.

I have continued to deepen my Elixir knowledge, bit by bit, and it remains a language that makes me feel happy. The speed with which I can move from idea to prototype is great. It’s easy to look at complex code and consider how to pull it a part and make it better (almost too easy to spend all of my time tweaking and refactoring). It’s a pleasure to read. You can write garbage just like any other language, but the underlying elegance and expressiveness is impressive. You can go very far only understanding basic data structures and using Ecto. That’s the way I think it should be – for me, programming has always been about shuffling data around and Elixir jives with that, so it jives with me.

I’ve been sitting on a partial redesign of this site for quite some time. I became so annoyed with myself for having not completed it that I went ahead and applied the new (darker) color scheme a couple of months ago just to feel like I made some progress. Maybe it’ll actually roll out in 2024.

One thing that’s changed definitively is I now use Nova for almost all of my non-R code. I was much more heavily using neovim before, and I still do whenever I’m already in terminal land. I’ve just found it really hard to get things working how I like in neovim for a few key features. Nova’s vim binding support is terrible, and I still find that very frustrating, but the rest of the app sits much better with me than VS Code has, even if I’m missing out on the extension library.

We’ve got some upcoming trips to Chicago, Providence, and Nashville I’m looking forward to. The plan is still to go to London in July, although it appears we’ve chosen the absolute peak of the peak of travel season so I’m starting to second guess myself on that one.

Lately, I’ve had a hard time with consistency. My diet has been inconsistent. Getting to the gym and volleyball has been inconsistent. Reading has been inconsistent. Writing on my blog has been inconsistent. I’m hoping I can start to find some kind of groove again in the next few months.

A couple of days ago marked ten years since I met Jess at SXSWEdu.

She wrote this reflection on LinkedIn. My own reflections are below that.

10 years ago today I tapped Jason Becker on the shoulder at a conference between taco breaks and the rest, as they say, is history.

Casual observers think Jason and I agree on everything. This has become a running inside joke because the truth is that we have frequent, vehement disagreements in the same direction. We argue intensely with-and-not-against each other about problems and solutions. If we’re accused of sharing a brain, we must each have complementary halves because we often approach problems from polar opposite perspectives– but we know two heads (and at least one whole brain, on a good day) are better than one. And because we trust that the other has thought deeply about their perspective, we work hard to understand each other’s position. Together, we end up with a more complete understanding of a problem and get aligned on a path forward.

For two people who love numbers, we never keep score; we’re playing an infinite game.

If you love your work, I hope you’re lucky enough to find someone (not Jason, sorry, find your own co-conspirator) who puts up a good fight; this kind of creative tension is how good ideas become great and bad ideas end up in their rightful place in the discard pile.

Jason, thank you for being my best sparring partner and the one who showed me the value of a great editor and co-creator. You’re the five to my three. I’m glad I tricked you into working for Allovue all those years ago.

🥂 Cheers to making things together, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

(These are the only two occasions Jason has worn a tie in the past 10 years– April 2014 and December 2023. Yes, Jason’s first official day of work ended up in a cannabis grow facility. We might make a guest appearance in a documentary about it. It’s been a JOURNEY, ok?)

My thoughts:

Spending ten years pursuing the same vision at the same company takes passion, determination, and belief. I have only been able to have all three because something more precious came along with it– partnership and friendship that always challenges me and that refuses to accept the bar I set for myself.

The first time Jess Gartner and I met, we spoke for about five minutes. I remember telling Elsa I just met someone with a great idea. And this may be apocryphal, but I remember also telling Elsa it was a great example of why I was never an entrepreneur myself. For all my love of strategy and problem solving, I never seemed to think of an idea that was worth doing. I know for sure I thought, “She found something worth doing.”

The second time Jess and I met, she flew to Providence to have coffee with me. In a classic Jess Gartner move, she claimed she had to “be there anyway” (bullshit). She told me that day that she saw “C-level potential in me” before I knew what that meant.

So much of my own success of the last ten years comes from Jess seeing things in me I didn’t know were options. And then she makes them happen before I even catch on to her plans. I like to think I do a bit of the same when it comes to ensuring our company and product deliver on her, and now our, vision.

Thank you.

• I write the things I feel like writing
• in a place that feels easy to write
• with posts available in places that make it as easy for others to read my posts as I want it to be to write them
• and create a website experience that reflects who I am, which I’d like if it was someone else’s.

That’s what I think personal blogging should be like.

Jess and I went to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe back in November of 2019. It was such a bizarre and fun experience. I could have spent many more hours there than we did. I went in knowing nothing about what I was going to experience. I have mixed feelings about its continued expansion.

Part of what felt so interesting about Meow Wolf was it being this huge, expansive, comprehensive projected, grounded in this one space. For something so complex, it also felt completely haphazard. There was an element of anti-design that made it seem both more realistic/immersive and like it had just kept growing organically, purely by passion.

The idea of repeating something that felt tethered, unique, and layered like that– it removes a bit of the shine. It rubs off a sense of authenticity, even if that authenticity was equally manufactured the first go around.

I’m glad I experienced Meow Wolf how I did. We had an extra half day due to work travel schedules. I had no idea what it was– we were just told this is a fun thing to do in Santa Fe. We drove up to a very unassuming building in a very unassuming parking lot, with nothing of note around. We walked in and paid our ticket fee, and I still didn’t really know what it was. And suddenly, there’s just a house inside this building. It’s dark and there’s sound being piped in. And you walk into this strange house, and for the next two or so hours, everything you looked at, touched, peeled back, and wandered through was stranger and stranger. It began seeming like a completely random collage constructed by many hands with many styles and many visions, but slowly congeals into a cohesive and thought through idea. There is a narrative. There is a theme. Everything seems to fit, even when it really doesn’t.

I haven’t been to another Meow Wolf, and maybe I never will. But it’s a weird idea to replicate. I’m not sure it can be magical in the same way twice, and I’m not sure it can be magical transported and built anew. Maybe if you’ve never been, you can still have the experience I did, in whichever city you find yourself experiencing it. Part of me thinks not.

Software quality is a funny thing. Reflecting on the Six Colors report card, some folks have persistent, hard to solve bugs that sound horrific. Others, like myself, rarely, if ever have anything like these experiences. It’s hard to know whether these are differences in what we use, differences in our attitudes about software, or what exactly is going on.

State is the enemy of software, and it’s often far too complex to actually replicate or even understand.

“Works on my machine” is as dissatisfying and frustrating as it is real.

Every year, Jason Snell at Six Colors publishes his Apple Report Card. I always enjoy looking at what the commentariat have to say about where things are and seeing trends overtime.

I really like how Jarrod basically writes a version of the Clockwise Podcast each week as though he’s a guest. I’ve long thought, “I should do that sometimes, too,” but I never do.

So instead, I decided I’m going to participate in the Six Colors report card this year. I’m going to expand out a bit from Apple though and rank my experience in 2023 with all of tech by these categories. Of course, I’m primarily ¹ an Apple user, but I think that in many places that’s a bit incidental. I use those products because they best meet my needs, and my evaluation of where things are in 2023 has to do with what I want in each of these categories and whether any one is supplying that.

There are 12 categories rated from 1 to 5, with 5 being the best rating. They are:

• Mac (personal computers)
• iPhone (smart phones)
• iPad (tablets)
• Watch (stuff on your wrist)
• Apple TV (entertainment for communal and big screen viewing)
• Services (things you pay monthly for)
• HomeKit (smart home)
• Hardware reliability
• Software quality
• Dev relations (how well are big tech companies interacting with the folks who build things on their platforms)
• Environment/Social issues (how well are big tech companies responding to challenges that go beyond maximizing shareholder return under capitalism)
• Wearables (stuff on your body parts that are not your wrist)

I have added parenthetical comments to each category to explain the broader context in which I’m rating 2023. And also, since I haven’t done this before, 2023 is maybe too precise. I would say this is more of “how do I feel abut where things stand in 2023” versus “how do I rank what has happened in 2023”.

Mac (Personal Computers) 4.5/5

I can’t remember a time when personal computers were this good. Laptops are crazy powerful, have excellent battery life, and are reasonably sized. Their screens are incredible, such that there seems like there’s very little room to improve except black levels (OLED seems like the next step). The promise of USB-C is here, and I have just a tiny number of devices yet that require adapters or a USB-C to USB-something-else cable. I have been trying to live the laptop plus Mac mini lifestyle for some time– and with Apple Silicon, this has become a reality. I do not run into bottlenecks when it comes to power. I just wish Apple put better cameras into their products. The Studio Display camera and MacBook Pro cameras are just ok. My Opal looks much better, but it’s also completely unreliable.

Software is a place I’m less happy with– but not really system software. There are still some quirks, but 99 out of 100 days it’s not macOS I’m fighting, but bad, mostly third-party software. My complaints about Zoom are endless. My complaints about macOS mostly stop at System Settings, which I practically speaking is something I rarely think about or interact with. Oh, and Notifications Center– what a total piece of shit. I don’t love any text editor. Neovim is great, but I still find it hard to tweak and get setup and learn new capabilities of plug-ins. Nova is so damn close to being perfect, but its vim-mode is super lacking in the kinds of things my fingers just expect to be there, making navigation just a pain ². VS Code looks and feels bad to me. Applications like Dropbox have become absolutely shit-ware. Apple Music is there.

There are, however, rock solid stalwarts.

iPhone (smart phones) 4/5

Widgets and focus modes have combined to transform my relationship to my phone. What felt like chaos has calmed considerably. I have an automatic focus mode that turns on at 6 PM every night on weekdays and all weekend (Down Time), a Sleep mode, and a Travel mode. Each has their own Home Screen. Only my default mode has any apps outside of the dock (and even then, only 2 rows). Otherwise, I’m all Widgets. My phone shows me a limited set of data I know or need (Fantastical/Outlook Calendar, Carrot Weather, Apple Fitness/Lose It, Things, and Day One). Notifications are largely locked down to a few people.

Battery life is largely adequate, and having low power mode turn on when I hit the Travel focus is a big help. The Action Button is nice for taking pictures. The camera is not as good as I want, but it remains the best camera I own and takes the best pictures (and especially video) of anything I’ve ever owned.

Phone hardware is boring, but phone (OS) software has gotten meaningfully better over time.

Apps have stagnated. I’m not sure if this is just being in a mature market or what, but I don’t think there’s been a lot of major changes in what third-party apps I use or their capabilities in some time. It’s almost certainly market maturity. I have all my needs well met by apps I already have, many of which I’ve been using for years and years. Most of which have not seen a release that makes a big impact on my work flow in just as long. The big exceptions I can think of are the app Flighty, which I have been a subscriber of since day one and does continue to improve, and apps that have added Dynamic Island features and/or better widgets over time.

I’m not sure what I expect from the app world. I suspect without interesting hardware that enables something new, we’ve just reached the point where we understand what functions computers this size will play in our lives and have mature apps to meet each of those needs.

I don’t really see much that I’m jealous of on the Android side of the world. Folding phones don’t appeal to me– I think folding tablets are far more interesting– and while some camera system are clearly neck and neck or better than the iPhones (for stills), it’s not a difference that would drive me to something new.

Phones– I think we should consider them a solved problem, for now.

iPad (tablets) 3.5/5

I use my tablet every day. The 10.9" iPad Pro (I don’t even remember which one) with the keyboard case is a great size for me. Bigger enough to use on the couch or on planes as a laptop replacement when iOS is all I need, small enough to use in bed. Because I have bad eyesight, having a bigger-than-my-phone device for things like reading RSS feeds is great. The iPad is not a power tool for me, and never has been. I can get a particular kind of work done– reading, writing, and communication can live there pretty well.

We’ve gone a year without new iPads, but I’ve gone several years not really needing my iPad to do more. There’s plenty of room for improvement here.

I liked the iPad to be thinner and lighter– the iPad with the keyboard that has a track pad should weigh as much as the iPad Pro alone does today. I’d like it to have better battery life when doing things other than watching video. I cannot believe the keyboard doesn’t come in more, better colors at this stage. The front camera needs to be better and along the top when in landscape mode.

My Kindle is great and disappointing in equal measure. It’s the expensive one, which I can’t bother to look up. It hasn’t changed in a long time and it was way too much money. But I like that it’s water proof/resistant/whatever. I really like that it has physical buttons. I like the flush screen and the DPI is pretty good. The software is absolute trash, but most of the time that doesn’t matter when I’m just in a book reading. An e-ink device is great for me. I have terrible eyes– pretty bad keratoconus and corneal scarring that requires scleral lenses to correct. That means my vision after I take my contacts out at night is pretty rough. Having a display that does not cause eye strain and the ability to set text to an enormous size is great. I just wish the hardware I wanted existed. It really would just be an upgrade/update to the existing Kindle I have. It needs faster software. A browser that kind of works for the few times you need it in a pinch. Support for more modern wifi standards.

Tablets overall aren’t that interesting right now to me either. I don’t think I want a touch screen Mac (nor would I be ideologically opposed to one). That says to me I’m not seeking a tablet to be great at the things my Mac is or vice versa. If my eyesight was better, I might not need a device that’s bigger than my phone and works for mostly of the same thing (though I do like a good keyboard). I use my tablet instead of my Mac also because of eyesight. Maybe my satisfaction stems from my specific use and needs.

Watch (stuff on your wrist) 2/5

I am happy with the fitness features. Apple Pay is great. The HomeKey stuff is amazing (though I wish there were more locks that support it).

But I don’t really like my watch. It hasn’t changed form factor in a while. Battery life is just ok. I wear it every day for the fitness tracking and sleep tracking, but if I’m honest, I wish I could swap it for some other fitness band. The problem is, those all suck right now. The Apple Watch apparently cleared out the wrist. Elsa has an Oura ring– I think it’s too big to be something I’d want. The Watch has conveniences, but its hold on me is definitely the most tenuous. At this stage, nothing exists that I actually want, but this is the area where I am most “winnable” by some other product– or maybe no product at all.

AppleTV (entertainment for communal and big screen viewing) 3.5/5

I hate the Roku interface. I hate my smart TV’s interface. The Apple TV interface is not bad. The remote is not so bad. But the number of issues I have with HDCP stuff (go to play a video, get audio but all black screen, or all the colors are wrong etc) is insane. I have replaced all the cables, my equipment is modern, and this is a thing that has gotten much worse over time. Is it the Apps? Is it streaming services themselves? Is it the hardware? I don’t know, but it makes my experience bad regularly. It drives the other people in my household nuts, regularly.

AppleTV+ the service is really solid. It has a shockingly high hit rate for me. I hear a lot of people say there’s not enough content– but I find it refreshing to actually know when new shows come out, especially since I end up liking so many of them. Netflix has tons of shows, and I can’t ever figure out what’s worth watching. Most of what I try… isn’t.

Services (things you pay monthly for) 3.5/5

Apple One is a pretty ok deal. The price increase kind of sucks, but all services are getting to be too much money. I am much more annoyed at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc than Apple One– that tells me that I think I’m getting my money’s worth. I have been paying for iCloud so my family can backup their devices. It works great for that. Apple Photos works great. I like News+ – I have other subscriptions like Dwell, The Atlantic, etc that I can read in there. I like the crosswords. Apple Music needs way more algorithmic playlists – Spotify is just plain better at discovery– but it’s totally usable. Fitness+ is pretty great, even if I don’t use it.

Mostly, I think that things work well and are pretty high quality. Spotify is a better service (if terrible App), but not so much that it’s worth paying for on top of Apple Music, in my opinion.

My dissatisfaction is entirely with the rest of the world of services. They’re all getting too expensive for too little value. I’m tapped out on monthly fees, like a lot of folks. I’m just starting to feel like the juice is not worth the squeeze.

HomeKit (smart home) 2/5

HomeKit mostly works for the few things I ask it to do, but it’s terrible overall. HomeKey is great. Lutron Caseta lights work. HomeKit Secure Video should be great, but my Logitech Circle View devices cannot stay connected to Wifi for shit. I don’t really trust smart home stuff to do a lot or do a lot with complexity. My Ecobee seems totally fine, and I can’t think of a reason to upgrade it. My “smart shades” in the bedroom are great, but I entirely use them via a timer and the fact that they work with HomeKit doesn’t really matter.

Maybe I’m unimaginative, but also all of this stuff seems like a set of solutions without a problem. I’m amazed I can’t do something to hook into the alarm system wiring that exists already in my house to have something without a monthly fee. I’m mad at Chamberlain’s MyQ BS. Overall, the home is smarter than it used to be, but also, all of this stuff feels like a CES demonstration.

Hardware reliability 5/5

All of the physical things I buy works better than any hardware I’ve bought in the past, but if it goes bad it does have to be replaced. Appliances in particular seem to have dropped off in quality, but everything else in my life that’s a physical product seems to work pretty great. Consumer electronics are much more likely to fail because the company that made them attached them to a shit service that they stop supporting or the company goes out of business than something goes physically wrong with a product. Apple’s stuff is built as well as I can ever remember, but so is most of the rest of stuff I buy. Maybe it’s because I spend too much.

Software quality 3.5/5

It’s all over the place. The web is kind of shitty. Webkit and Electron-based stuff is everywhere and also kind of shitty. A lot of things crash without good logging or lack controls to help me to understand what’s happening and how to trigger what I want. There’s no manual sync button. There are no informative progress bars. There are some weird persistent bugs (how many times in my life will I only be able to dismiss a notification by typing sudo killall NotificationCenter?!). The HDCP errors I get trying to play back video drive me insane. There are still websites that don’t work well in Safari on macOS. Shortcuts is weird as hell. Better than Automator? Sort of.

But overall, I feel like my experience of using computers is one where the computer mostly gets out of my way and I have powerful tools to do my work. So for all the paper cuts, things are really not so bad.

Dev relations (how well are big tech companies interacting with the folks who build things on their platforms) 1/5

They’re terrible. All of the big tech companies are bad at this. Yes, Apple has really been intransigent about the App Store stuff (look, I actually really don’t want other App Stores, don’t really care for side loading, and think the 30%/15% thing is really not that crazy), but Apple has absolutely screwed up App Store review for a decade. They’ve neither been good enough at curation and removing scams nor permissive of reasonable, “good” apps on their platforms. The balance on tight v. loose is in an uncomfortable place where we seem to have the worst of both worlds.

This one is mostly a mark on Apple, because I don’t care enough about other companies that do devrel. I mean, I guess Amazon with AWS? They suck too, but not on devrel– it’s the UX and product strategy that’s a mess. Meh.

Environment/Social issues (how well are big tech companies responding to challenges that go beyond maximizing shareholder return under capitalism) 2.5/5

The AI rollout is a mess too. The expansive view companies took on training data sets and their “rights” rightfully leaves a lot of folks feeling sour. And by publishing something that is shockingly good, but with glaring challenges that are not obviously, definitely solvable, the AI tools coming out right now are balancing on the knife’s edge of harm versus benefit.

I think Apple is about as good as you can get selling physical goods and trying to do right by the environment, but I think we’re all falling on issues like authoritarian government controls, misinformation, moderation and safety, and the environment itself. Some of the major social issues tech companies are up against feel kind of unsolvable to me, but they’re making their case remarkably poorly, both in the court of public opinion and in the court of politics (not really the court of law, which is still mostly uninvolved).

The largest tech companies are not doing much to actively make the world a better place. I fault Apple somewhat the least, because I think they’re basically a hardware company that is outside of the information space. It’s in the information space where companies like Google and Meta are blowing it. I mean, crap almighty look at what has happened to Twitter. Is Netflix doing anything with its entertainment power? Nope. Amazon, the physical goods store, seems awful. The technology services provider is pretty great. Nvidia (wild to include them) was all too happy to make money off of the Bitcoin miners, and I’m dubious about the power behind the AI stuff. I don’t really see them using their power for much yet either, but they’re newly huge. Microsoft has hitched onto OpenAI, which also feels weird, and continues to mostly copy other stuff. They seem moderately less evil these days than I used to feel about them, but I still feel like their business practices with including things like Teams and PowerBI into existing subscriptions feel bad/weird.

Overall, I think tech is doing a lot that is of dubious value these days. I’m not surprised that we have stock buy backs and malaise instead of tech optimism. I’m just not sure the software world is where the next improvements will come from. I’m pretty sure that the software world has not made things much better this last decade. The big companies feel like they’re kind of blowing it to me. But maybe that’s just being big mature companies.

Wearables (stuff on your body parts that are not your wrist) 2/5

Sucks. The AirPods Pro are amazing. But very little else is appealing in this space. I thought for sure we’d have more variety of smart bracelets, rings, clothing, shoes, or something by now. Innovation here is mirroring the home– lots of stuff that only kind of works that feels just barely above a CES demonstration. I think there’s so much promise in small, networked computers, and we seem to have landed on the watch and headphones. Maybe Apple Vision Pro will change things here– by all accounts the technology is incredible and I’m already getting a bit of FOMO. This weekend I went away with my partner and dogs to a cabin. Both of our dogs are older now, and I decided to take some spatial video. I have no idea if it’ll come out nice, but I felt like this was something I might want to have someday. That tells you something. But the VR world (and AR world) seems a bit away from its final, most useful form. I’m excited about it as an early adopter, but not as something that’s really making a mark.

Meanwhile, I still wear this clunky Apple Watch because it’s the best thing on the market. That bums me out. I know hardware is hard, but Fitbit going to Google to die and everyone else shrugging this category away is a bummer.

Conclusion

I want to think about technology way less. Right now there are places that’s true– mostly in my personal computing life. There are many pieces of hardware and software at this point that are very close to being great. So much so that I suspect a lot of my complaints will fade away in the coming 2-3 years. I hope so, at least. But there are other areas where I think technology will continue to disappoint– in the home, wearables, and environmental/social issues feel lost already. In those categories, at least, I think we’re far down a path into a local maxima that we cannot escape and we’ll need a new generation of leaders, new ideas, and new inventions to back track and start down a different, better path.

And good lord, work on the bugs.

My take reading some posts going around about self-censorship in the circle of blogs I read.

For most of human history, an individuals’ thoughts and opinions rarely left a small circle of people who were essentially kin. Not sharing all of your opinions in public isn’t self-censorship— it’s wise.

In my opinion, there are three types of opinions people share that result in having a pretty bad time.

1. Someone holds an opinion that has been pretty poorly thought out that falls along familiar, fallacious ground. Folks who have thought deeply about that issue/area have confronted the naive view so many times that they are unkind. This is the classic Internet forum issue of the n00b. It’s terrible, but folks who are experts are often exhausted by novice opinion. Because the internet freely mixes novices and experts and screens are easy to depersonalize, we get unpleasantness.

2. Someone holds a deplorable opinion they’re sharing under the mistaken belief they’re among other people who share their horrific belief. Think most racists or misogynists on the internet.

3. Someone is a member of a marginalized group exposed to the people in (2). Of course, the people in group (2) immediately claim they’re in group (3) when called out on their shit— it’s their only play.

I sympathize a lot with folks in group (1). Most of us have been there before, and most of us could do better to practice empathy in that situation. And sometimes, it makes sense to read and listen more than write and talk. No one wants to be told to read the fucking manual, but it’s also hard to answer a question for the 100th time with the same patience as the first time. If I felt the need to debunk idiotic climate denialism every time I read it, I’d go nuts. Maybe that’s group 1.5– those of us not answering because we’re exhausted.

The people in group (2) should have a bad time of it. I don’t feel bad calling them out, and I actually do believe enough people saying something helps to change views over time. I don’t think people who say they are “self-censoring” because they’re being called out are actually engaging in any kind of censorship. Facing the consequences of holding deplorable positions (being shamed) is not censorship.

The folks in group (3) are the real people who are censored. Marginalized folks are actually being bullied into silence because of who they are. It sucks. But also, these folks have (in my opinion) been heard more and are more empowered to speak than ever before. The fact that some folks are facing consequences in group (2) is both a marvel and relatively new.

Sometimes people claim they’re being censored when lots of people disagree with them. I think this almost always come from someone who is unwilling to reconsider their views. Rather than feel shame, I wonder what would happen if they took a deep breath and asked, “if lots of people I normally like, trust, and agree with feel very differently than I do in this case, maybe I’ve missed something?”

Do you think we should try to bring the forums back? When I say we I don’t mean me and you but we people who care about a certain type of web. Do you think there’s still a place for those? Or do you think we’re so used to social media that people will prefer to move to Mastodon or some other decentralized social network?

I hear you about “online only” relationships thought. I have quite a few of those and they’re honestly great. And the best part is when you finally do end up meeting someone in person and it doesn’t feel strange at all. I believe that digital relationships can be as powerful as IRL ones. Both types have pros and cons but they’re both powerful in their own way.

Your urban hiking thing is neat. Picking two points for lunch and dinner is such a cool idea. I might have to try it at some point. Quite hard for me at the moment because I live in the middle of nowhere but maybe in the future. I’m a big fan of moving slowly through spaces. We’re all so busy these days that we often forget to enjoy our surroundings.

Since this is going to be the last letter I’m going to ask you a couple of questions.

The first one is related to your work news: how does it feel? I’ve always been self-employed as I mentioned in a previous email so I’m curious how it feels to know your entire workplace will change as a result of an acquisition. Is it disorienting? Is it exciting? Is it scary? Does it make you want to change job entirely? I’m curious to know what’s going through your head at this moment.

The second question is probably silly but it popped into my head when you wrote “the start up I’ve worked at for almost a decade”: at what point a start-up stops being a startup and it’s just a company?

Lastly, do you think the letters experiment was something worth doing? Did you learn anything new about yourself over these months?

Thank you for having me as a guest on your blog, I really enjoyed these exchanges.

Ciao, Manu

Hi Manu,

I think that forums continue to have their place, but they’re dead as social places on the web. What made them great communities was the magic of being a place that drew in people of similar interests who then just… stuck around for lack of somewhere else to go on the web. The number of easy “social” options where “everyone is” makes the magic of off-topic posts and relationships built on forums somewhat irrelevant. I think it’s hard to invest in the kind of community glue that used to exist on forums among regulars and translate that into a broader social interaction than it used to be and that’s probably here to stay.

That said, I think there are lessons to be learned from the world of forums. It’s right in that paragraph– there’s a magic to bringing people into a space with common interests and letting that be the basis of a community. That’s how “academic Twitter” or “black Twitter” (two bad examples because they represent, in a way, identity groups more than common interests, but they come to mind as known, named things) or activist hashtags functioned– they were like interest-driven spaces that became communities. Common interests serve as the foundation, but the load-bearing beams and walls of a community are the personal relationships that build between regular participants.

On to work and how I feel… I feel, well, everything. I ended a post on LinkedIn about the transition that I felt both hope and determination for what’s to come, and that still feels like the best summary of how I feel. I think there’s a huge opportunity here to take the work I’ve done for the last decade to a much larger scale and to have the support to go from “a start up that feels like it could end at any moment” to “a permanent fixture in US K-12 education and maybe more”. I think all the problems we set out to solve are still present and we’re in the best position we’ve ever been (and of anyone else out there) to really address it. That may sound like the hope,but instead that’s the determination. I am determined to do everything I can to take advantage of this opportunity.

The hope is not knowing if it’ll work. I’ve never known if any of this would work in anyway, and I continue to hope that I’m the right person to be a part of it. I hope that we’ll make good choices, that my coworkers that have been a part of building this thing will keep at it with me, and that we’ll add new people to contribute over time that level us up. But I know there’s every chance that I will fail, separate and in addition to whether “we” collectively will fail. Right now, I feel like we hit an important milestone, but I still feel far from done.

I was smiling reading your question about “the startup I worked at for over a decade”. This is actually something we used to discuss internally to help people understand the language we use about the business. For us, start up does not indicate “a new business”. Instead, when we say start up, what we mean is a business model. We considered ourselves a start up not because of size or age, but because we took outside investment in exchange for ownership in the company and designed the company to prioritize revenue growth over profitability. Our measure of success was top line revenue growth while ensuring our model could achieve profitability, but we would invest every dollar that came in (and then some) toward growth– both investing in sales and R&D. This is in contrast to a “new” business or a “small business” that is largely owned by proprietors and is geared toward achieving profitability every year. The only way Allovue would have ever ceased being a startup is if we changed our business model. Companies can be startups for a long time, provided its investors support that model. Startup, in that sense, does not really refer to the age of the business. Instead, it’s more “this is a business that needed ‘startup’ capital”– we had a business that took a lot of upfront investment before what we built could be sold.

Letters has been a fun project. As you can tell from my late response here, life often made it hard to be truly “weekly”. Many months on my site did not get a post per week. Sometimes that was my fault, sometimes it was the person who signed up for that month. I decided early on that I was not going to get crazy about it or generate any pressure for myself or others– an obligation that felt bad seemed counter to what I was trying to achieve. Despite that irregularity in a project that was meant to be regular, I’m confident that this year I wrote more long posts and more personal posts than ever before. Letters has made my blog feel less like social media reaction takes and more like a place I share a bit of myself. I have gotten to know some people I didn’t before, or know some people I knew but in a new way.

Maybe my favorite thing about Letters is that others were inspired to do a similar form of writing on their own blogs. I love reading letters/pen pals/whatever folks choose to call it on other blogs. It makes me feel like this last year I contributed a small bit to building the kind of community I’d want to be in online. I’m not trying to be well known. My blog is not designed for that, my temperament is not designed for that, my goals are not that. So it’s nice, in spite of that, to have made a bit of a ripple.

This has been a great way to sunset (in its current form) my main creative project for the last year. Thanks for being a part of it. And for anyone else who made it to the end of this post who has been reading Letters or participated in it, thanks for being an important part of my 2023 / 4.

Jason

Today, I woke up and Elsa had a whole day planned for us. We went to a new coffee shop together, where I did some writing and caught up on some reading. We then walked to Cross Street Market for lunch followed by Protean, a used books and record store (among other things) I’ve heard a lot about it but never went to.

We then came home for a bit before I went out to play volleyball. I learned once again how much my whole mood can be lifted by playing sports with friends. I keep writing about it here because I keep finding myself struggling and forgetting how physically transformative sports are.

We play sports. Play is fun.

It melts away my anxiety.

When I got home, Elsa had ordered Thai and.now we’re watching some TV. In an hour or so, I’ll take a shower, read for a couple of hours, and head to bed.

Mundane? Maybe. But it’s the kind of day I really needed. I needed time away from work, away from stress, away from responsibility. I just needed some low key fun.

Tomorrow I’ll put away laundry. I’ll go food shopping and probably do a little food prep. I’ll worry more, and play (too little) ¹ volleyball again. But today was pretty good.

it’s really hard to find good, new stuff.

It really is and it’s frankly amazing that we’re still facing this issue. It’s not rare for me to mindlessly browse the web not knowing which sites I should actually visit.

I don’t do social media and outside of those platforms there really aren’t many places useful to discover new content. I think that’s one of the unfortunate consequences of people moving on social platforms: old-school forums died, for the most part.

And forums were neat! If you had an interest in something specific chances are there was a forum for you out there. And since forums weren’t stupidly huge over time you could become friends with a bunch of regulars and it was such a cool experience.

That’s something I personally miss and I don’t think social media can really recreate that. And it’s one of the best aspects of small communities. I love small online communities, especially weird and niche ones.

I wrote about the topic a few times before and I suspect I’ll touch that topic again in the future because the way is changing and I think people will slowly move back to more distributed spaces. We’re seeing a resurgence of personal blogs and maybe forums are gonna be the next type of sites to come back online.

A completely unrelated question but is there a place in your life for exploration? I’m not talking about intellectual exploration but rather physical one: going to new places, walking random paths. I’m asking you because I was doing my morning walk with the dog earlier today and decided to go up on a path I often see while driving, and after a short hike on a snowy path I stumbled on this tiny cavern, and on the other side of it there was this gorgeous view of the mountains and everything was lit by the morning sunrise.

Not sure if you do pictures on your blog but I’m going to attach one I took from that spot.

And it got me thinking about how many things we’re missing simply because we don’t explore more often. I lived here for almost a decade not knowing about that wonderful place and who knows how many others are out there.

This is something that also happens when I click links at random, now really knowing where I’m going to end up. That’s one of the reasons why the indie web is fun. You start clicking and you don’t really know where you’ll land.

Hi Manu,

Forums were neat. I can’t believe how much community they could build. I still speak nearly daily to someone I first “met” on forums when I was about 15. He lives half or more a world away right now. We’ve never met in person. In various ways, our careers and interests have continued to follow similar paths. In some ways, he’s my original “letters” pen pal. It’s strange to have known someone that well for nearly half my life and having never met. But I think that friendship is a testament to the fact that forums do create community and connections that are meaningful.

I agree that today’s social media doesn’t really recreate that magic. The closest thing was early Twitter. I first joined Twitter at a conference in 2010. It was using a hashtag at this multi-track conference and being able to follow the conversation in other rooms (and have a conversation with folks at the same talk) that felt electric. In a way, those hashtags for real world events were like pop-up forums. I don’t know that I regret being on Twitter for so long, but it’s pretty wild how it took using Twitter as an augmentation to a real world event to make me “get it” and what Twitter usage became by the end.

I’ve also written about community at least a few times. It’s really why I participate in the web at all.

I personally love exploring. What I like to do whenever I travel is just move through a city on foot. We do “urban hiking” where we purposely choose two points pretty far from each other on the map for lunch and dinner and spend our day in the spaces in between, learning what it feels like to inhabit a place. I honestly wish we did more exploring and more “nature” hiking, which is something we’ve picked up and down depending on the year and our overall energy level. I think it was Annie, who I wrote letters with earlier in the project, who used to post a photo of her hike every weekend referring to it as “church”. That’s how I feel when I get to go outside for long periods and really shut things off. Lately, this is has been really hard to find time for. I’ve been pretty busy preparing for some big changes in my work life which has subsumed all the energy I have.

A little more exploration would be a nice thing for 2024. I’m going to think about how I can make that happen.

Sorry for the late letter— as I mentioned earlier this week, on Monday we announced that Allovue— the start up I’ve worked at for almost a decade— was acquired by a large public K-12 software company, PowerSchool. In some ways, this is going to change a lot. In other ways, nothing at all will change. But this week, especially, was a hectic one with a lot of emotions to process and people to support as my team and I transition.

Hoping we can still slip one more of these in.

Jason

It’s all connected— partisan gerrymandering and non-proportional representation leads to a sclerotic legislature, ending Chevron guts the capacity of the regulatory state to do anything, essentially forcing a level of detail into legislation that cannot be achieved— it’s the planned destruction of the state by the state.

I work in tech. I manage developers. There’s no world where AI would let me get by with fewer developers. Even if I thought it made them meaningfully more effective, we have no end of productive work for them to do.

I can sort of imagine things like content moderation needing fewer employees. But even there, do we really think companies have found all the Nazis? It seems to me like the current state of content moderation is not one where we think, “this is good enough”, it’s more “this is the most we can justify doing” — against the cries of users, especially those who are harassed.

I don’t think AI has anything to do with layoffs. This is a very boring story about interest rates. Money isn’t cheap any more— it takes much higher returns to beat zero risk investments, so there’s less money to be spent on risks. Investment is risk. Tech companies aren’t willing to invest in new and growing revenue streams. Investors are less likely to back your risky startup or reinvest before you’ve figured things out.

Lots of experiments with potentially long return horizons or with potentially lower rates of return are no longer worth investing in. Lots of investments that had growth rates that are worth it at 0% are no longer worth it at 5%.

What’s happening in tech is a lot of CEOs and companies are admitting that some of the things they’ve spent money on aren’t likely to going to make very much money and they don’t yet have better alternative ideas.

Many products and services these companies have tried all seem pretty stupid from the outside. But here’s the thing, if you’re incredibly profitable and there’s very little risk-free return out there, it’s worth trying a bunch of things that are silly, some of which may turn out to be a huge deal. Tech companies get sky high valuations because they’re really good at trying things that seem silly and have very low costs to scale. The unit economics are great, if they work. Most traditional companies don’t get the same multipliers because they tend not to compete in winner-take-all markets, with zero marginal cost products, and a track record of success finding or creating new markets.

The math has changed. These companies (big tech) still (mostly) print money, but they’re no longer (as) good places to spend it.

As inflation eventually cools, if the world doesn’t set itself on fire, and interest rates begin to creep downwards, we’ll see further adjustments. Capital will get deployed into more, riskier businesses. New company formation will go up. Existing companies will do more M&A and take more risks seeking new revenue streams. Hopefully, this time, they’ll be a little more cautious on the way up. A lot of ideas the last time didn’t really pan out.

From Manu

I guess Mondays are going to be the days for this “publicly private” conversation we’re having on your site and inside your inbox.

I was thinking about your leak at the house and it’s ironic how this kind of problem seems to always crop up at the most inconvenient times. I was also dealing with some annoying issues at home, not a leak but a clogged sink in the kitchen and we spent way too much time on January 2nd trying to sort that out. Like you said, we tend to look at the beginning of the year as this moment of starting from scratch but life manages to find ways to remind you that this isn’t a new beginning after all.

And in my case, that way was scraping away junk stuck in a pipe for who knows how long.

You wrote that you find slowness to be nice in the context of these conversations and I’d have to agree. In my weird internet-powered interactions I managed to find a few people willing to move these strange conversations on a medium that’s even slower and that’s old-school paper letters and I have to say, it’s incredibly refreshing.

Having to wait for weeks to get something back is a very enjoyable change of pace. Also the thrill of not knowing what is happening to your mail once it leaves your hands. Will it be delivered? Who knows! But it’s fun, something I want to do more of.

Learning about your blog journey was interesting and reading about this kind of journey through tools and services always makes me wonder if I just got lucky.

I decided to start a blog on January 1st, 2017 because, you know, clean slate and all that. I never had a proper site, one with pages and menus and content. I always had super minimal one-pagers that were more like digital business cards than actual websites.

But for some reason, I decided I wanted to start blogging. And so on January 1st I woke up super early in the morning, made myself coffee, and coded a very simple blog. The plan was to post weekly updates on my life, a way to keep me accountable. Those posts are still up on my blog and you can clearly see that I didn’t know what I was doing with the site. But it was clear that it was meant to be a way to have conversations. I kept that weekly pace for a month or so, and then I stopped. At some point, I removed the blog because I thought it was stupid to have a site with just a bunch of posts left there.

I coded myself a different static site that was mainly a collection of links. I then wanted to post something I wrote though and I didn’t have a way to do it anymore. So that simple list of links became a list of links with an extra page with this lonely blog post. At that point, I realized that I did want to blog after all and I re-coded myself a blog, powered by the Kirby CMS and I’ve been running on that ever since.

The site has not changed much over these years. I tweaked the typography a bit here and there but it’s been in its current form at least since 2018 I believe and I still like it.

I do want to change a few things in 2024 primarily because I know have a few extra side projects I want people to know about but I love the overall simplicity of my blog. And others seem to like it too so I don’t see why I should change it.

As they say “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Schedule, rhythm, pace, this is something I find myself thinking about a lot these days. Both in the context of my online life and also my life in general. I’m 34, never had a proper job, always been self-employed so it’s been ages since I had to follow a schedule and I think it’s time to change that. Endless freedom has its pros but also some cons. Constraints are sometimes helpful.

Speaking of technology and pingbacks, I still think the best way to notify people is to simply email them. Because that opens up the door for more interactions. An automated notification doesn’t really help interactions with other humans because I think we’re now trained to ignore notifications of any sort.

At least that’s what I like to do. If I stumble on something I think it’s worth replying to I usually post something on my blog with links to the relevant content and then I try to email the author to let them know that I appreciated what they made and I wrote something in response. That’s how the web is supposed to work in my opinion.

You asked about my blog and I don’t really know what to say about it. It’s a chronological list of thoughts and things I find interesting. It’s part portfolio, part blog, part photo album, part side project. I don’t have a topic and I don’t care about having one. I’m the topic of my personal blog. If you read it you’ll learn things about me and about the things I like to think about. It’s a simple plan but has worked fine so far.

I also don’t try to be any different on my site than I am in person. My posts are not edited and are not drafted. I don’t spend days reworking my content. When an idea forms in my head I write it down and I publish and I move on. My English is far from perfect, there will be typos, and that’s ok. At the end of the day what I care about is not producing great written content but generating interactions with other humans which is why I liked your letters project.

Do you think blogging and online interactions in general will change in the near future with all the AI nonsense that’s coming up?

Hi Manu,

It’s funny you should mention emailing someone. Today, for the first time, I got one of those emails. It was so eerie I had to double check I hadn’t yet posted a response to this letter. It’s not a bad idea.

While I’m just a bit older at 36, and I have never been self-employed, I’ve had a pretty flexible schedule the most of the time. I still end up with quite a bit of routine. Some of that is imposed– I have, a metric ton of meetings. But a lot of that is just having found what works for me.

My ideal day looks something like this:

• 8 - 9 AM Lift weights at the gym
• 9 - 9:45 AM Shower, make or get a coffee, have a small breakfast
• 9:45 - 12:30 PM Desk work and meetings
• 12:30 - 1 PM Lunch
• 1-2:30 PM Desk work and meetings
• 2:30 - 3 PM Take a walk outside, sometimes with my older dog who likes to walk.
• 3 - 4 PM Desk work
• 4 - 6:30 PM Dog walking, dinner, and some time with my partner
• 6:30 - 9 PM Volleyball
• 9 - 11 PM Quiet desk work
• 11 - 11:30 PM Prepare for bed
• 11:30 - 12 AM Read

There are lots of disruptions to this. I only go to the gym 3 days a week and volleyball is 2-3 days a week. They’re not always on the same day. I also frequently have meetings with West Coast team mates from 4-6 PM or emergent issues that require sticking to my desk until 6 PM. Those days, I rarely make it back for the Quiet Desk work slot because my energy is just shot. Heck, in general, this kind of ideal day dramatically undercounts my typical hours. But I do think it shows off why flexibility is great.

I do some of my best work after 8 PM if I can at my desk doing focused, quiet work, that I find terrible difficult to do during the day. In fact, looking at it written out, there are very few long stretches of uninterrupted work. I think that fits my own brain and role– I very rarely can actually get something done for four hours straight. I don’t have the kind of work that is “Start here, and keep working until you solve the problem” very often. When I do, I kind of like to do that work on weekends. I do find myself often picking things up on a weekend afternoon and suddenly realizing I put in a half day of work because I finally had a concrete problem to just work through. It’s a real manager’s dilemma.

My blog is also just about me. In some ways, it represents the conversation I’d be having if I were with a friend. I’m just often… not. When I go quiet on my blog, it’s almost always because there’s a lot of stuff going on I don’t want to talk about publicly or I’m spending a lot of time with people. The quieter my physical space is, the louder my digital one gets. I once told a friend that my blog basically existed so that I didn’t drive my friends crazy with constant text messages.

That’s really what the theme of my blog is– the group chat no one signed up for but is happening anyway.

I recently added an About page. It started as something I wrote to test out a new design I’m playing with, but I ended up liking it too much and realizing the redesign project was going to take a long time. It’s funny– I put a whole section that was about my blog, but it doesn’t say what the blog is about.

AI and its impact on the web. Well that’s a bit of a can of worms.

I’m not sure how big the impact of the current AI models will be in the first place. It was actually Matt Birchler linking to a post in which I compared OpenAI to Uber that had me thinking about pingbacks. I never would have known he replied if I didn’t happen to follow his blog. I’m quite sure he doesn’t follow mine, so I my later elaboration and reply to his post probably never made it to him. I never really thought to email him about them. I don’t think he owes me or even should write a response to them. But, I guess I do think the internet would work better for conversation if he knew they existed.

That’s a tangent though. Large language models are pretty good at cleaning up writing. I’ve had times where I’ve asked it to simplify a sentence or make a paragraph more direct and I’ve been happy with at least some of its edits. Their chat interfaces are also genuinely great– remember the chat bot craze of 6 years ago? LLMs could make chat bots less like a bad support phone tree and more like a real interface. ¹ I also think that the image generation tools are pretty damn powerful. Combined, I think they will create a bimodal distribution. There will be a new internet-of-shit, this time digital, filled with AI generated content. This will be a massive volume of web addresses that no one actually visits or wants. Then there will be the rest of us, whose websites and content may get a little better with the help of AI tools. As a result, I think more and more people will want a place away from the algorithms and clearly personal and human made to point to. I think we’ll see user generated content continue to grow as a counter to the AI slop. But I also think that it’ll continue to get harder and harder to find good stuff on the internet as it gets buried below the new content farms.

One of the biggest challenges of blogging will continue in the age of AI-content – it’s really hard to find good, new stuff.

Jason

This month I’m talking with Manu Moreale

Hello Jason

As is often the case, life takes over my plans and things get delayed. It’s something I just learned to accept because fighting against it is a lost cause.

I must confess that writing a public email feels kinda odd. Like you, I have a blog where I publish content that is meant to be public but I also write a lot of emails that are meant to be private.

Writing an email to someone knowing it’s going to be public feels strange as if something is not how it’s supposed to be.

Anyway, I’m curious about this experiment you’re running. I remember stumbling on your initial post talking about it months ago and thinking “That’s a neat idea, I should participate”.

I got in touch and my month was so far into the future that I completely forgot about it in the meantime. So when your email landed in my inbox it was a nice surprise.

***

I was poking around your site and noticed that your blog—like many others—has an interesting history. You went through phases only to finally settle to a good publishing cadence. Do you think that journey is inevitable for all the people with blogs? Do you think we all have to go through the various stages before we find our preferred rhythm?

And speaking of rhythm, are you going to keep this letter project going for another year?

I hope you had a lovely end of the year and I also hope you can have an even better 2024.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Ciao, Manu

Hi Manu,

2023 ended with a lot of drama– a major house leak that has taken the better part of a month to plug up. The house is still in disarray, but there’s some light at the end of the tunnel. There’s also been some personal turmoil that I think mostly “will pass”, but still kind of in the thick of it. But that’s life– every year we think we get to reset the decks and wipe the slate clean, but there’s always new stuff to handle and plenty of unexpected challenges to disrupt our best plans.

This experiment is interesting. I have had some solid conversations with strangers and friends alike. No one I’ve done Letters with has been someone I regularly spend time with. I enjoy that I can wait until I feel like I have a clear head to read and write back. There’s something nice about the slowness and having a reason to write something a bit longer. The schedule and scheduling, however, has been kind of a pain. I double booked some months by mistake, and I wasn’t always on top of reaching out to folks well ahead of time. My life is a little chaotic– or at least has very little routine compared to the past. In that sense, the project has been hard.

It’s related to the life my blog has lived. The earliest posts on this blog came from a Pelican-based blog I started toward the start of my working career. I had previously written extensively on LiveJournal, Blogspot, and tried Wordpress at least a few times. Most of writing was on old topic-based forums, however. I never really got into a rhythm of blogging regularly. I wanted to write about my interests, but I put too high a standard on posts and never really met them. My blog mostly became a place to play with code on the side. By 2011 I was well into my Twitter phase. I probably had collectively around 100,000 tweets that I wrote from 2010 until 2023. So when something was much too long for Twitter, I’d occasionally blog instead of write long threads. At some point, I grew frustrated with Pelican and switched over to Hugo. It was a way to play with things like nginx settings and keeping a server running on Digital Ocean. It was fine, but I wasn’t inspired to write that much. The work flow of Markdown file, running Hugo, checking things, making a commit, pushing, SSHing into a server, pulling, and building was a lot. Then I had to link it places because otherwise no one would read it.

When micro.blog, my current host, cropped up, I was quite attracted to a couple of things. First, I was already uncomfortable with putting everything into Twitter. I had played with POSSE-like systems elsewhere, using things like tags on Pinboard to post links to Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook via IFTTT. I liked the idea of writing once and letting that go out to all the social networks. But I viewed Micro.blog as a stalwart against a Twitter I increasingly didn’t want to be on and a way to get posts into Facebook (which I briefly had an account on) and other places easily. A couple of years into using Micro.blog, it switched from being Jekyll-based to Hugo-based and opened up custom templates. Suddenly, I could take the blog I already have and host on Micro.blog.

So the real way I found my cadence here (on this blog) was a combination of disillusionment with Twitter and finding the right tool in Micro.blog. The key was that I could have almost all the same control I had with Hugo (at least enough control) and I could post from my phone easily. It’s not just that I can write micro-posts– it’s that I can use MarsEdit and the Micro.blog app and iAWriter to publish to my blog without the whole build step. It’s so much easier to share a photo or two or write a quick paragraph than it used to be. But I still understand how the whole system works and I can make things look how I want, mostly. That was key to building a blogging habit.

I think another key was nabbing this domain on day one of the .blog TLD being available. Naming this blog based on my own name took away the idea that this was meant to be anything other than a personal website.

Letters has been a great way to keep a consistent writing schedule, but I think this will actually be its last scheduled installment. Doing these weekly and having to keep track of folks ahead of time is too much work. I haven’t said this publicly so… this is the announcement of that.

However, I really like having long form correspondence on the web. Not enough blogs are blogging about other blogs. I think that’s really important to having discovery again on the web.

I haven’t come up with the exact idea for where Letters is going, but I think it’ll be something more like Tumblr’s “Ask me a question” feature. I’m going to try and encourage ways for folks to write me, a long letter or even a simple question, and I will do my best to respond to what comes in. At least that’s the current working theory. I’d love some feedback on this idea– how do I keep getting the chance to write a bit with strangers and parasocial relationships on the web? And how do I keep writing blog posts that are, in essence, responses to other people’s posts in a way that encourage conversations between the two?

I think our technology outside of the Wordpress pingback is pretty crumby here. I know that when I post links, I am not using Indie Web standards with u-in-reply-to classes. I’m sure very few people do. I don’t know when someone writes about a blog post I wrote! Unless they @ mention me on some form of social media, it’s just happenstance if I see that stuff. I think that kind of stinks, and I think the tech to fix that also kind of stinks right now. It’s too complicated.

Tell me a bit about your blog and what you write about and why. How are you hoping to keep being a person on the internet?

Jason

Hi Jason,

I already feared for the worst when I read your message on Micro.blog this week. I’m glad it was “only” from water from a leak instead of a burst pipe. But still, no matter how small or big, it comes at the worst possible time. I’m glad it can be fixed quickly and that you will return your office and living room as soon as possible.

I don’t mind the cold so much. I like it more than the sweltering summer temperatures. But then also it does not get as cold here as in other places. And I can be inside for 100% of the day if I want to.

The thing about moving is something I think about sometimes. I’ve moved around quite a bit. But all my moves were within 20km of each other. So, I always stayed in the area where I was born and grew up. I wonder how it would feel to move to a completely different place where you know nobody and don’t know the geography. I would feel totally lost and uprooted (“uprooted” is a strange word; “unrooted” would sound better – but that is a tangent ;-)). My wife took those steps as she moved into my region.

I love your idea of being “burned-out” of a location – it is not something I ever felt myself so far. But I can certainly imagine it could happen, especially when the surroundings change significantly due to external circumstances. I never felt much wanderlust (another lovely word ;-)) – actually, I’m starting to feel it now – but more for holidays than for moving my whole life to a different place. Not traveling much when I was younger is something I’ve come to regret in recent years. Now that I have a child, it is so much harder to do.

I need to remember the concept of “finding your pace.” I like it very much. And you can apply it to so much in life, not only sports. And it is undoubtedly a good thing to remember when you set goals. Focus on something other than the end result, but focus on how you can get there. By using a pace, you can keep up for a long time.

These letters helped me escape my bubble and the snail mail penpal habit I also started. It is just something different. And I can now write these emails without being nervous all the time. You should have seen me earlier that year when I wrote the first email to Jarrod!

I wish you (and your family a happy Christmas). I hope you can still enjoy the time, no matter the situation with the roof. And I now need to move some furniture around myself to set up our Christmas tree. Until the next email,

Cheers Chris

Hi Chris,

I’ve been avoiding responding, mostly because I feel pretty flustered and down. We continue to have water issues, and I’m having a lot of difficulty getting any help. Because of the holidays and bad weather we’ve had, it seems impossible to find someone to fix the source of the leak. In the meantime, our house is very loud, with blowers and dehumidifiers on every floor, very hot, and very messy. I like to start the New Year having spent some time decluttering and cleaning my slate for the year. I feel more cramped, cluttered, and uncomfortable at home than I have in a long time. It’s impacting my mood, and I was hoping to be a better one by the time I wrote our final letter.

I am thinking a lot about goals right now. It’s the end of the year, and I am seeking a theme. Last year it basically never came. I’ve been a bit knocked off my axis again at the end of this year, so I’m having trouble being introspective. I am having my own wanderlust, not for a place as well, but for a state of mind where I can feel a bit clearer and think about what I really want.

I hope you had a great holiday with family. I’m impressed you waited so long to setup your Christmas tree– around here it’s almost unheard of to go deep into December without fully embracing the season. We had a lot of folks visit prior to the holidays and get out of town around December 23rd. This meant we still got to have some restful time to ourselves, including taking a trip up to Philadelphia for a couple of days which was a welcome change of scenery.

Letters is nearly at an end. I have, I think, just one more set of these planned to go. I considered opening up all of 2024, but instead, I think I’m going to let this project live its 13 months and move on. Last year I started this project to do something fun and as part of creating a community, in a small way, on the internet. I missed blogs that responded to other blogs back and forth. And I read about the Republic of Letters and felt… well… jealous. I wanted to be a part of a network of people who shared interesting ideas with one another. Lofty for my short engagements with folks I mostly didn’t know.

So maybe what I should think about is not my theme for next year, but my next project. I want to continue to find ways to put the inter into the internet. I want to build a social web, but from the comfort of my own home there. I’m going to think a bit about how I can keep the spirit of this project going. Its format was rigid, but helpful to get at what I really want– to share ideas online in deeper conversation than the current model of social tools encourages.

I’m glad you’re no longer nervous writing these emails! I think that’s a sign that all of this is working. The best part of the weird web was always when we found each other.

Thanks for finding me.

Jason

I agree with everything in Why I’m skeptical of low-code. Nick Scialli’s four reasons are:

They wanted truly custom functionality that the low-code solution could not handle. They implemented a bunch of custom functionality in a product-specific or even proprietary language and now their pool of potential developer talent is tiny. Upgrades to the low-code platform would break their custom implementation. The underlying database structure was an absolute mess, especially after a bunch of incremental modifications.

I’ll add one more reason to be skeptical of low-code.

Low-code encourages executives to believe truly custom functionality is reasonable. When the first 80% works great and comes at nearly no cost, it’s easy to imagine that closing the gap that remains with custom functionality is worth it. In truth, low-code encourages customization. And customization is almost always bad ROI. If the process you’re using software to address is not your businesses core competency, anything but bog standard commercial-off-the-shelf software should be looked at with great skepticism.

Organizations should use the “good enough” solution built somewhere else for anything other than their core business differentiators.