Werd I/O

Startup culture as popularly described is a sham. You can read all the books you want on the subject, but the most successful companies build their culture from the ground up based on the same kind of learning cycle that they use on their customers. To succeed, you’re going to have to attract the best people - people who have a ton of options, many of which probably pay better than you do - and you’re going to have to find ways to keep them there.

Particularly in today’s market, if you’re not treating people well, they’re going to find something better. If you create a hustle-rich, competitive, aggressive environment that makes people feel like they’re under attack, they’re going to go find a place where they don’t. If you create a culture of long hours peppered with inflexible meetings, you’re going to lose the parents and carers who likely also happen to be your most experienced colleagues (as well as one where women, who largely still bear the brunt of parenting, are less likely to feel welcome). Your culture has to be one of deeply-held respect: not just of the expertise of every employee, but of what they bring as a three-dimensional human, and of their lives outside of work. If you think of people as a fungible resource, they’re going to feel it.

There’s no glory in working nights and weekends, and there’s nothing laudable about asking people to do so. Startups are a marathon, not a sprint. All your employees have lives beyond work. None of them are anywhere near as invested - in the literal, company-ownership sense, but also emotionally - as you are. As a founder, you might be burning the candle at both ends, but when the startup exits, you have the most to gain. Generous options help here, but if employees don’t feel like they have a strong say in the direction of the company, they’re little more than a lottery ticket from their perspective; a get-rich-quick scheme. If they lose trust in you, if they don’t have enough options to make a meaningful difference in their lives even in the event of an exit, or if the option price is so high that executing them is out of reach, or if there aren’t meaningful triggers, any kind of motivating factor that options could have brought is lost.

Even for founders, those long days come with diminishing returns: most knowledge workers can muster six hours of focused work at best. After that, anyone’s work is low-quality. In a small team, that means you’ve got to focus on building the smallest, simplest thing you can: a clearly-defined plan you know you can execute well with the time, team, and resources at your disposal. Because all of those things come at a premium, built-in ways to fail fast and learn quickly are incredibly important. A growth mindset and a nimble approach are more important than an “agile” one: paint-by-numbers scrum ceremonies aren’t going to save you, but short work sprints built around learning loops might.

That also means optimizing your workday for flow: removing meetings and interruptions so people can actually get work done. (Talking in meetings isn’t work; at best it’s a tactical huddle, and at worst it’s the performance of doing work.) As Steve Galevski put it in HBR a few years ago:

By cultivating a flow-friendly workplace and introducing a shorter workday, you’re setting the scene not only for higher productivity and better outcomes, but for more motivated and less-stressed employees, improved rates of employee acquisition and retention, and more time for all that fun stuff that goes on outside of office walls, otherwise known as life.

People have to think and reflect on their work to do it at a high quality. To be able to do that, they need time, emotional safety, and rest. If you create an environment of constant interruptions, long hours, and a lack of emotional safety, you’re shooting yourself in the foot and then some. Yet that’s exactly what a lot of startup porn advocates for, and where work has begun to go during the pandemic: a world where you can’t escape work, with numerous interruptions, long hours, and an underlying aggressive culture of hustle.

What modern startup employees are looking for is an inclusive place where they can do great work, live well, be treated with respect, and be compensated accordingly. It’s not hard, as long as you stop to really think and care about them. The catch is that many founders don’t.

Rewriting software from scratch is usually a terrible idea. But I’m thinking about it.

The Known open source codebase is now 9 years old; a PHP kludge that I wrote while my mother was recovering from a double lung transplant still powers my site and many others. It became the foundation of my second startup, and is still an open source project today. But there were a number of years when I didn’t pay attention to the codebase, and there’s a lot to unpick.

Meanwhile, the hosting landscape has completely changed. It used to be that you’d buy some space with a shared host and upload files via (S)FTP; these days virtual hosts are commonplace and getting easier to use. There are one-click installation buttons for Heroku and other hosts.

I’d like to clean PHP Known up, and I’m trying my best in between all the other things that are going on in my life. Probably that should mostly be about getting to another stable release: a lot of the architecture has been changed (by other developers) and a lot of users are having trouble installing it. So bringing that back to accessibility would be nice.

I also want to fix import / export, so that people can take their Known content and use it elsewhere. A lot of folks, rightly, would like to migrate to WordPress or Ghost in particular. They should be able to do that with ease.

But I also like the idea of going back to basics with Idno, the underlying platform, and thinking about it again. The original core idea was that you could create a stream of arbitrary content, set fine-grained permissions on it, and both post to it and consume from it in a bunch of different ways. If you wanted to post via the web, great; via a webhook, API endpoint or common standard like Micropub, also great. Likewise, reading via the web, JSON, RSS, MRSS, ActivityStreams, and so on would all be easily possible. Permissions would limit both reading and writing to a customizable set of people, from everyone on the internet down to one person.

That’s not really where Known ended up going, but I still find that potentially interesting as a project. Instead of PHP, I’d be more inclined to write it as a Node service these days (or use it to learn something I’m less familiar with, like Go).

I wish I had more time to work on these sorts of projects. But it’s something I’d love to figure out how to fit in: I want to clean Known up, and return to Idno as a way to write scalable streams of arbitrary content. In the meantime, it’s fun to think about.

I just (almost) got phished! It’s a little embarrassing, but I’m hopeful that sharing this will help others.

I got a pretty call on our landline (yes, we still have one) telling us we were about to have our power disconnected for non-payment. They had our address, PG&E account number, and account name.

To deal with the issue quickly, they had me call a separate 877 billing number. It sounded like PG&E: they had the call system set up and a convincing-sounding address check.

We genuinely had a late payment, because the account was in my mother’s name, and I didn’t get the notification. So I asked to make an emergency payment to prevent the disconnection. Everything up to this point sounded legitimate, except that they hadn’t seen my previous payment in their account system - and I just brushed it off as being a legacy business not having its shit together. Because PG&E is legendarily awful, I was prepared for the information they gave me to not quite add up. Were it a professional, modern organization, it would have been harder to convince me.

It was only when they tried to get me to Zelle a payment to an individual that I became suspicious, asked some verification questions, and disconnected the call. Even then, I didn’t consider it beyond the bounds of possibility that PG&E had a super-janky payment system for emergency payments, so I was worried. But yes, to date, the power has not been disconnected.

I didn’t give them any payment or personal information. But they clearly had some of mine already, so I’m going to be checking my accounts and resetting some details.

I’ve been involved in a few projects that involve sensitive information and vulnerable communities (and a few others that involve potentially large sums of money). My own security stance directly affects the people I’m involved with. These attackers just wanted some money, but there are others who could easily want to harm others by getting through me. This was a wake-up call that wherever I think I’m at with my security mindset and practices, I need to do more.

Obviously, I feel like an idiot. It also made me realize how much PG&E’s shoddiness added to my vulnerability. If I felt that it was a company I could trust to do the right thing, I would have cottoned on far earlier in the process. But when a company already feels like a scam when it’s operating its day-to-day business, it’s really hard to distinguish an imposter. It’s another reason for every company to operate at a very high quality, and to only pick very high quality suppliers (and to not allow undemocratic monopolies in California’s energy markets).

Happy birthday, Ma. I miss you.

This time last year I booked an AirBnb in Pacific Grove, right on the bay, because you had talked about wanting to visit Monterey and be by the water. It was a hard trip for you, but I’m so glad we did it.

I’m so glad we did a lot of things.

During the pandemic, I was with you most of the time. We had a ritual at the end of the night where I would help you walk up the six steps to your bedroom, help you into bed, and then help you brush your teeth if you weren’t feeling strong enough to do it in the bathroom. Sometimes, I would lie on the bed and we’d talk, although I know it eventually got too hard to hold up a conversation. I treasured those times. Most of all, I think about the hug we’d have at the top of the stairs; the feeling of your skin as I kissed your head.

I’m glad for the walks we would take in the small park near the house. I’d drive you down and pack your rolling walker with the built-in seat, and we’d stroll together, at your pace. Sometimes we’d just walk to the end of the road and back. But we’d talk and be together, just us. You’d ask me to time how long it took to get to the corner, and it was always shorter than you expected. You were so strong.

And even when you were tired and struggling, you were my mother. You worried that I worked too hard, and spent too long at work. At the time, I was frustrated with you; I’d fought hard to build a career from nothing. But what you were saying came from a place of love, and you were right. I’d fallen into a trap that a lot of people fall into, and you could see it. You worried about my health, my well-being, and my future, even when you had so much else to worry about.

I hear your advice every day. I try and live up to it and carry it with me. The last year has been untethered: after ten years of that journey with you, everything feels wrong. It’s like one of those movies where the protagonist wakes up and the world has changed around them in unsettling ways, but here there’s no key; there’s no way to get back. The mirror dimension is the world now. I’ve made weird knee-jerk decisions just to fill the void. I haven’t been exercising. I sleep poorly. I’m trying to practice what you wanted for me - it was all about being healthy, living a good life, standing up for myself and setting good boundaries - but right now I feel like I’m not there. I’m trying.

When we were lying on your bed, we talked a lot about how you wanted your death to go. We were all very clear about what you wanted, and I’m so sorry that it didn’t happen that way. You didn’t want to be in the hospital, surrounded by tubes and machines. You wanted to be in your home, surrounded by us. The hospital worked with us to bend the covid restrictions so we could all be with you, but we couldn’t take you home. You needed too much oxygen; I don’t remember if we explained that to you, but I hope we did. “It’s all happening so fast,” you told us. That last week was a waking nightmare and I wish I’d been smarter in it.

What happened next, in palliative care, will be with me for the rest of my life. I didn’t know how it would be. I don’t know if I (we) could have steered those last days to be different, but it was exactly what you didn’t want, and I’m going to be sorry forever. You were there for me in so many ways for so many years and then, when it really counted, I couldn’t give you what you needed. You didn’t have agency in the way you left. It’s unforgivable. I don’t know if I will ever get to a point where I can forgive myself, or if I should.

I hoped I would dream about you; that I’d get to talk to you in some form, even if I knew it was more me than you. I have dreamt about you, but every time, even now, you’ve been in pain. I just want to tell you I love you one more time. I want to tell you I’m sorry.

I have all these videos of you. We recorded your life story over a few different sessions, which I’m afraid to say I still haven’t stitched into one video and shared with everyone. Maybe I’ll do that today; it seems like a fitting celebration of your life. I have videos of you at your singing recitals - it’s still incredible to me that you joined a singing class post lung transplant. I even have two videos, one before your lung transplant and one more recently, of you telling me you love me. I’m glad to have them, and to hear your voice and remember. But playing them also feels like listening to an echo: another ripple from a giant hole that has been torn out of the universe.

You were so game. You made the decision to move to Europe when you were pregnant, because that would be a better place to raise a baby. You gave birth in a foreign country where you didn’t really speak the language, thousands of miles away from your family. And it worked; it all worked out. You moved to England and made Oxford your home, only moving back to California so you could help care for my Oma. I felt so privileged to do the same to help care for you; you had shown me the way. Life is an adventure: it’s exciting. We’re capable of doing, and dealing with, so much. A good life means building and enjoying and thriving on your own terms, not consuming some template that other people have set out for you. There’s no comfort in sameness.

You were amazing. So many people have families that value conformity, or wealth, or tradition. Mine valued humanity, ethics, and building a meaningful life from first principles. You modeled that for me incredibly from the moment I was born. My horizons were broad and my world was big. No idea was off-limits to discuss; nothing was off-limits to explore; you never told me to follow a set path or do something because that was just how it was done. You were never parochial; never petty or small-minded. You fought for equality before I was born, literally on the streets and in courtrooms, and fought for it in everything you did as I grew up. You were smart and fierce and kind and silly and patient and loving.

Thank you. I miss you. I love you. I’m sorry.

One of the things a realtor will often do for you when you’re selling a house is to set up a website for it. It’s often built by the people who take the photos, and is created to a set template. It turns out there are a handful of services that exist to do just that: host a single-page site that showcases your home.

We’re selling our family home in Santa Rosa - the one my parents lived in for a decade - and I’m a web developer. Don’t get me wrong, these are nice sites, and we’ll probably set one up. But I’m also going to set up my own. Because of course I am. It sounds like fun, and I want to have fun with it, but wouldn’t it be great if it brought in the buyer?

I’m giving myself a few restrictions:

It’ll be a hand-rolled static site. No frameworks for the HTML, JS, or CSS, and no pre-set templates: just me, a text editor, and some design tools. It’s a home with shared ownership - everyone gets a say on the content and design - but I’m going to build it.

It needs to get an A for SEO, site performance, and security.

And it needs to be up over the next two weeks. There’s a lot going on, so this is a bit of a challenge.

Wish me luck. And hey, if you’re in the market for a three bedroom, two and a half bathroom single-family home in the heart of wine country …