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This rage comic by an 86 year old is wonderful. http://gagism.com/86-year-beautiful-rage-comic/

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This is the longest I've ever been in one country in my entire life. Feeling antsy.

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I've boycotted Nestlé for decades now. Did they get money for Android KitKat? That would be sad.

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@toddbarnard Not at all! These pictures represent a huge relief. New chapter.

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Beyond saying that I want it to be a safe community, & an anti-harassment policy, how could I encourage diversity in contributors to idno?

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Any advice for getting MongoDB running on an ARM chip? cc @explain_analyze @johannes_ernst

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More diverse gene pools are stronger. That goes for ideas, for talent, and, well, for genes.

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@downes @heathr In response to this feedback, I've changed my citation ways. I'll keep thinking about it.

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Posted without comment: business school students pick the weakest passwords. http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/its-official-computer-scientists-pick-stronger-passwords/

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What the heck are the references at the end of my posts? #indieweb

If you're following me on sites like Twitter or Facebook, you may start seeing references at the end of my posts. They look something like:

(werd.io s/3Nb4L)

Or they'll just be a link to the post, with the URI scheme (the "http://" bit) removed.

I'm adding those to make it clearer that I'm not actually posting on those sites; if you're following me on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere, those are echoes of my content, using a mechanism called POSSE (Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere). I began exclusively using POSSE to post to other sites on June 1st.

If you search for the citations on the web, you should find the original post. Or, you can add a slash between the two clauses, and they work as a link on their own. (I don't just post a link to my site if there isn't more content to read, and I don't bother posting a citation if there's already a link to my site in the post.)

This is all part of the indieweb movement, which is about owning your own site on the web to represent yourself and communicate rather than primarily saving it in a third party silo that you don't control. I use my own software, idno, to host all this, but many other projects are available. (Nonetheless, if you'd like to get started with idno, I'm very happy to help you out.)

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One major change I've made since the wifi broke on my MBP that I no longer depend on online-only web apps. Offline mode or no thank you.

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Excited by wins for progressive values in the elections. A change is coming.

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Genuine question: is Twitter's near-ubiquity on TV (eg on financial shows) likely to affect its ongoing stock price once it's public?

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Some speculation about the barges, by @hondanhon.

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A tech startup model that doesn't *ever* work

Split your early-stage startup into three teams:

Strategy

Development

Administration

The strategy team sets out the vision and owns the product. The idea is theirs. Then, they hand off to the development team, which is functionally subservient, and is simply responsible for building out the strategy team's vision. It's possible they're outsourced to a development firm. Meanwhile, the administration team takes care of the bills and payroll.

It doesn't work. Why not?

At first glance you'd be semi-forgiven for thinking that it should, because it more closely mirrors the structure found in larger organizations. But there are a couple of reasons why this kind of setup is almost always going to fail.

The product is the most important part of a startup.

By which I mean, the whole product: design, implementation, use and feedback, in its full context. Unless you're the mythical version of Steve Jobs, which nobody is or ever has been, and unless the sole customer of the product is you and just you, you're not going to come up with a fully-formed, perfect product idea with your own brain alone. If you're smart, you're going to know what you don't know, and seek feedback from your users and potential users.

How does that feedback loop work? It's part of the product itself. Which means that the people building the product need to be in on it. And conversely, you need to be part of the team building the product, in a very deep, real way. Maybe, as a business-orientated founder, you don't know how to code, but you'd better be prepared to get very technical, very quickly. Not having technical chops is a disadvantage, and it's not something you can outsource. If you can't script, you can probably help with wireframing and workflows, and if you can't do that ... you might want to consider a job working for a management services firm. Accenture is waiting.

The technical members of the team need to be equal stakeholders in the strategy, and the "strategy" members of your team need to be stakeholders in product development. (After all, you hired the smartest, most creative people you could find, right?) No, this isn't going to work when you've got 5,000 employees, but when there are five of you, it's the only efficient way to build a product.

So what about those administrative employees?

A startup is a scrappier kind of business, but it is a business. Everyone needs to be tied to the numbers, and just as everyone needs to be prepared to get involved in product, they need to be able to understand exactly how much money is left, where it's going to, and how their actions and technical decisions affect the bottom line. Of course, that buck ultimately stops with you - but if it's your startup, every buck ultimately stops with you. There's nothing to be gained from hiding details, or trying to protect your employees. And extra administrative staff will simply add to the burn rate. You should be doing the payroll yourself, until you get big enough to justify something else.

In other words: keep it small, keep it simple, and make your organization as flat as you possibly can. You'll need to add more structure later on, but for now, your only goals are to survive and grow. Abstraction will not help you do that.

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Everpix: a really brave, honest account of the last days of a failing startup. Definitely worth your time. http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-death-inside-the-worlds-best-photo-startu...

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@bmndr I *was* getting an auth error and what looked like a 404, but I just tried it again and it works. Thanks!

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@aaronpk It doesn't authenticate me. I get an auth failure and what looks like a 404 when I click the button.

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Reading list for a new kind of manager: https://medium.com/about-work/935a550ddd02

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Being male (following up on @quinnnorton's excellent piece)

Quinn Norton posted an insightful first part of her series on women on the Internet today. For me, the money quote is this:

Men have to open their mouths and talk about constructing an idea of manhood that makes sense in the 21st century. The whole world needs a manhood that doesn’t rely on attacking or demeaning women.

There were two notable reactions from the audience of men at large: demands that her comments about men were qualified with the word "some", and complaints that men alone don't define what a man is.

Who cares? Neither one of these responses is constructive. There is an undeniable gender equality problem that pervades society. Quinn points out unsettling domestic violence figures; there are also less overtly violent, but still unsettling, gender career inequality figures to consider, not to mention the countless stories about sexual assault right here in the tech industry. Qualifying these problems with "some"s and "it's not just us" doesn't help solve them.

Instead, men, let's own it.

I think Quinn has put her finger on the issue. There is still a traditional, prevailing view of manhood that is at odds with the rest of the 21st century. Here on the web, we're all about disrupting gatekeepers and restructuring systems to be more transparent. Why can't we turn that lens on gender inequality? I agree with Quinn that technology can't solve this. We need to have an ongoing conversation about what manhood is - something that projects like the Good Men Project have already begun.

Although this problem goes far beyond tech, and is far older than our industry, there are a few things I, perhaps naïvely, think startups should think about to help correct the problem:

  • Equalize maternity and paternity leave. Where this happens, women's pay is also equalizing. I've unfortunately been in conversations, in prior companies, where colleagues were wary of hiring women because they might get pregnant. This mitigates that, but also more generally sends a very strong message about the role of a father in a family. I would strongly support legislation to make this happen more widely.
  • Enact a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment. Publish your policy publicly, and ensure that any kind of harassment is dealt with swiftly and fairly when it occurs.
  • Publish salaries on job vacancy advertisements. Don't adapt the salary based on the employee and how willing they are to negotiate; simply decide what you're willing to pay for the right person, and stick it right on the vacancy ad. Then, as much as possible, clear out names, gender pronouns and company names from resumes as you consider them.

Those are all simple, administrative changes that could make a difference. More than that, though, public participation in this conversation will make a change in itself: understanding that traditional social values are oppressive, and that we can all engineer something better together.

This requires a certain amount of "yes and" thinking: defensive retorts about how not all men are participating in the oppression aren't helpful. We are all participating, whether we like it or not, not least every time we sidetrack the conversation. Being male comes with inherent privilege. Whether we use that to oppress, or use it to help society evolve, is our choice.

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Still feeling under the weather. May counteract by binge-watching Spaced tonight. That's almost like vitamins, right?

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If your answer is another programming language, you've asked the wrong question.

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How I'm writing #nanowrimo this year (using @GitHub)

I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month again, mostly because last year was so much fun.

Last year I wrote a simple database-backed CMS to help me write. My brain was so addled by blogging for a decade that I found I could only be creative in a big text box in the middle of a web browser. It was kind of sobering, but I powered through, and I'm proud of the end result.

This year, I'm writing in public again - you can follow my story, such as it is, as I write it. But I've abandoned my database-driven CMS approach and am going another way.

Each of my chapters is a simple text file, named in chronological order: 01.txt, 02.txt and so on. I've been using TextWrangler, my favorite Mac text editor, but of course it doesn't matter at all.

My changes are synced to a a GitHub repository, where anyone can download the original source text files. (I've decided to license the whole thing under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Creative Commons license.

I also plan on using Poetica to work with editors to refine my text as I go on (it's by far the best online service that does this). Right now, though, I'm in shitty first draft mode.

My web server also regularly syncs with the GitHub repository, so I know that if I commit a text change, it'll be reflected publicly online. For the public version, I decided it would be nice to include an HTML snippet at the top of each chapter. Mostly, for now, this includes embeddable music from around the web, but I also plan to include animated GIFs, Javascript-enhanced illustrations and a bunch of other stuff. I built a very simple reader script that takes the text files, formats them appropriately, and then injects the equivalent chapter-number.html file at the top. Keeping the HTML and the text separate will make it easier for me to keep track of word count as the project grows.

It's working well - at the time of writing, I'm ahead! You can follow along at benwerd.com/openbrace.

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Vintage camera table decorations

Vintage camera table decorations

Woody literally made table decorations - and then put vintage cameras on them.

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Werd I/O © Ben Werdmuller. The text (without images) of this site is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.