I’m writing from around 33,000 feet above Wyoming on a flight from San Francisco to Boston.
I feel guilty flying: it’s not something I’m particularly pleased to do, and not only because I don’t enjoy the experience. We’re destroying our planet, and by taking the easy way out and boarding an ...
September 29, 2021
A short flash fiction piece about blockchain:
There was someone like this every few months, it seemed. They couldn’t just get on with it. They had to break the pattern somehow; fight the algorithm, as if we weren’t all working for ourselves now. They didn’t seem to get it. This was ...
September 29, 2021
Thoughts
The web is no longer the platform. If anything, it’s become a sort of connective middleware: a place to be shared through. The actual work is happening in apps, devices, and other levels of the stack, and I think, to some extent at least, that’s where a lot of the ...
September 26, 2021
“I’m sorry to bother you,” the person on the end of the landline call - obviously a scammer - said to me in a clipped Indian accent. “I’m calling from Medicare health insurance. I’m hoping to speak with Deborah?”
“I’m afraid she’s passed away,” I told him.
“For real?” he said. I ...
September 26, 2021
I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.
Like many people, I was appalled by the pictures of horse-bound border patrol agents corralling Haitian immigrants in Del Rio, Texas. Although the horse patrols ...
September 24, 2021
I’m kind of into MSCHF’s drops: a new project every fourth Monday. I’ve bought a few - my favorite is Spotting Plutes, a field guide for spotting plutocrats.
More than anything, it’s just a lot of fun. I’ve noticed that a few other groups have been inspired by MSCHF’s example: Party ...
September 23, 2021
I'm looking for a senior Ruby on Rails engineer to join me at ForUsAll.
ForUsAll was established to help more Americans reach financial safety in retirement. If you're employed by a Fortune 500 company or a well-funded startup, you probably have lots of retirement options; ForUsAll is for everybody else.
The small ...
September 21, 2021
Going forward, I may include affiliate links in my posts when I'm linking out to products I recommend, including in my end-of-month link roundups.
You can be assured of several things: I won't link to products I wouldn't have recommended anyway, and I'll never link to a store I believe isn't ...
September 20, 2021
I’m going to start kicking off my week with a list of thoughts and actions. Join me!
Thoughts
There was a time when the web was really fun: a new medium that people approached with a sense of play. Even TechCrunch, back when it was a blog run by Mike Arrington, seemed ...
September 20, 2021
I’m looking for a writer’s group that meets some or all of the following characteristics:
It’s completely private. Everyone agrees that nothing leaves the group.
It’s almost all asynchronous. No Zoom write-ins, etc. Every month there’s a check-in where you can read aloud if you want to, but contributors are from all ...
September 19, 2021
I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.
This week I’m donating to People’s Programs. Based in Oakland, People's Programs is a grassroots community organization that serves the people of Oakland and is ...
September 17, 2021
Not too long after I wrote my blog post about cars, my car was broken into. Unfortunately, I'd made the unwise decision to leave my backpack in the boot, with all of my devices save my phone. They were swiped unceremoniously.
I feel pretty stupid about it: never leave your valuables ...
September 17, 2021
I took delivery of a Tesla Model 3 a few months ago. My original intention was to take my mother to dialysis in it (she really wanted an electric car), but when that didn’t work out, I decided to keep it. For one thing, I’ve always resented having to own ...
September 14, 2021
MailChimp is selling to Intuit for $12 billion. Importantly, seemingly because it’s a privately-held, bootstrapped company, it never gave stock options to its employees - so not a single one will see a penny from the deal.
If I was a MailChimp employee, I’d be pretty upset. Venture capital isn’t required ...
September 13, 2021
I'm convinced that writing well is a core engineering skill. Here's why:
Good code is like good writing. Expressing your intentions succinctly, in a way that is accessible to its intended audience, isn’t just about good syntax. You need to structure your work clearly and explain yourself well, with an audience ...
September 13, 2021
I realized that the existence of my mailing list was encouraging me to post less often and to not publish short posts at all, for fear of swamping peoples' inboxes with short messages.
The simple solution to that is: the newsletter is back to sending digest posts on an every-other-day cadence. ...
September 12, 2021
At this point, I’m assuming that nothing’s happening in person until spring or summer 2022.People thought I was being super-negative when, last year, I suggested that it would probably be a long wait before we were on top of covid. Looking back now, I was probably too optimistic: I thought ...
September 12, 2021
At Matter Ventures, Corey Ford developed a method for figuring out a founder’s mindset early on. It went as follows.
We’d get the startup founders to figure out the biggest assumptions they were making across user risk (do people want this?), business risk (can this be the center of a viable ...
September 10, 2021
I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.
This week, I'm donating to the Anti Police-Terror Project. Based in Oakland, APTP is leading the way in pushing for criminal justice reform. And make no ...
September 10, 2021
I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.
This week, I’m highlighting two organizations involved in providing access to abortions and reproductive health for women in Texas. I find the Supreme Court’s failure ...
September 3, 2021
This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for August, 2021. Once again, this is a lighter list: I spent a lot of my month with family, helping to organize my mother’s memorial. Apart from that, it's been a time ...
September 1, 2021