Werd I/O

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 a new kind of freedom: no bosses, no corporate structure. Just mining for coin through good, hard work.

You can read the whole thing over on Medium.

Thoughts

1. 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 innovation will take place.
2. Last week I talked a lot about blockchain, but I think personal hardware is also fascinating. Why couldn’t a social network be built with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis or their equivalents? Why couldn’t the protocols and mechanisms be built with Bluetooth and peer to peer mesh networks instead of HTTP?
3. Over time, the frameworks that have overwhelmingly been used for web development become less and less applicable. Rails and its downstream descendants (Laravel and so on) were super-interesting for building websites a decade ago, but is that what the internet is today? Yes and no.
4. Which isn’t to say that the underlying principles don’t matter. The web’s openness, interconnectedness, and ease of execution are key values for any new platform. Maybe it’s better and more accurate to say that the web itself could extend to other types of devices and other protocols. It doesn’t need to be limited to HTML and HTTP, or links that you click in a browser. Nor does it mean that those links aren’t valuable. Of course they are! It’s just, there’s more.
5. What might it mean to build something completely new to connect people?

Actions

1. I need to find a really great, foundational Ruby on Rails course I can use as a refresher for existing coders. Ideally with a site license. I’m curious if anyone can recommend anything like that.
2. I also need to re-set up my development environments on my own laptops, unfortunately (post-theft). I’ve been dragging my feet but it’s becoming crucial at work, and for my personal stuff, including Known.
3. I’m flying to Boston on a red eye on Tuesday night. I’m heading back to Cape Cod and need to make sure I’ve got everything I need for the next few weeks.
4. As it turns out, what I thought was an ear infection is just stress. I need to find new ways to chill out! And possibly get a mouthguard to prevent any tooth-grinding at night.
5. One of the things that might be causing stress is my heavy social media use. I think I might take October off - or even the rest of the year. I have a few days to think about that one. I would continue to blog and use feeds. It’s safe to say that every time I’ve done a social media fast I’ve felt better as a result.

“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 heard a click on the line as he hung up.

I’m not the same person I was. They tell me I never will be again.

The other night, I lay awake in bed at three in the morning as my mind raced through an involuntary clips show of audio and emotions from the last year. When I closed my eyes - every time, not just once or twice - I heard the beep of an ECG monitor, so loudly and clearly that I had to open them again to make sure it wasn’t real.

Maybe this is normal after this kind of trauma. I don’t know what normal is in this situation. It sometimes feels like I’m barely holding on.

I can’t dream about her. A few nights before, I lay awake thinking about this. I had a dream where an old friend told me everything that was wrong about myself. I had a dream where I was the Doctor’s companion and we were evading some new iteration of the Cybermen. I had a dream where I was moving to London. But not once in the three and a half months since my mother’s death has she shown up. I miss her; why can’t I see her?

It dawned on me that I felt like she was angry with me. She didn’t want to die in a hospital; she had told me that a hundred times. When she was still semi-coherent in that final week, she said clearly, “this is not okay”. (She had also, months earlier, told me that if it wasn’t possible to move her from the hospital, that would also be okay.) But the amount of oxygen she needed meant we were unable to move her. Palliative care was the nightmare she had perhaps anticipated; it’s still not something I want to write directly about. Her death was hard and not what she had wanted. And she wasn’t showing up to say hello because I’d done her wrong.

When I realized that this is what I’d been thinking, a place I’d subconsciously been in for months, I spent the rest of the night unable to hold myself together. She’s not gone because she’s mad at me. She’s gone because she’s gone.

I haven’t really been okay.

“It’s not your fault your parents moved to California. I would have said, ‘sorry, Mum’,” a friend told me years earlier, in a pub in Edinburgh after the local TechMeetup. “Why should you have to move for them?” I suppose it’s hard to understand for some people, who are perhaps more tethered to geography and familiarity than family, but that’s exactly what I did.

My parents moved back to California to look after my Oma; my paternal grandmother. That’s enough of a reason, but Oma shepherded her children through a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia. Through her ingenuity and perseverance, my dad, who was a toddler at the time, survived. (She also helped save another, unrelated child, who I would love to find.) So when she needed help, my parents flew back and bought a house in the San Joaquin Valley so she could move in with them.

Turlock is a small town outside of Modesto. Lately it’s been the epicenter of some particularly regressive anti-mask groups; when my parents moved there, every radio station played country music and there wasn’t a single bookstore in town. When I first visited, the roads were littered with the remains of tiny American flags. But they didn’t have a lot of money and it was what they could afford. It was easy driving distance to the Bay Area, where they had met and where a lot of my extended family still lived. When my Oma passed away a few years later, they stayed; my mother had become a teacher nearby and it changed her life.

When UCSF diagnosed her with pulmonary fibrosis, the same condition that had taken her mother twenty-five years before, her life changed again. I remember the day my Grandma died like it was yesterday; my mother cried out in the living room and I, all of six years old, didn’t know what was happening. It seemed to me that one day Grandma was here, and the next she wasn’t.

One Christmas, as my then-girlfriend and I were preparing for our trip to head over there, I had a startling conversation with Ma. “I don’t want you to be alarmed,” she said, “but I’ve started to use oxygen.” Within a month I’d made plans to be in California. I remembered my Grandma, and I was scared of losing my mother. That’s why I moved; I couldn’t not. It wasn’t anything close to a choice.

Every moment became the potential last time I’d see her. Thanksgiving became maybe the last Thanksgiving. Christmas could be the last Christmas. Her oxygen tanks got bigger and bigger until she couldn’t work anymore. We ran two fridge-sized oxygen concentrators in parallel to make sure she had enough airflow; the long, plastic tubes trailed across the floor as a path to find her.

It was because I had moved to California that I was with my parents the night she was called in for her lung transplant. She sat bolt upright, her eyes blazing with some mixture of fear and excitement. My parents drove into the hospital in their car; I drove to pick up my sister in mine. I couldn’t get my girlfriend on the phone, and I remember the absolute silence as the moon lit the hills on the edge of the Altamont Pass. I felt completely alone. When Ma sat on the gurney on the outside of the double doors leading to surgery and told me to take care of my father, to be patient with him, I felt alone again.

We got another eight years with her. I feel grateful for that.

They weren’t easy years, though. She was in and out of hospital, and in 2019 she spent more than eleven straight weeks lying in a bed looking over Golden Gate Park. More than once, she nearly died, but she fought hard. “I’m not ready to say goodbye,” she would say. Even in her last week, she said, “I still have life-force in me.”

More than once, when I flew to New York for a work trip or Oregon for fun, I needed to take an emergency flight back. Behind every plan was the question: what if something bad happens to Ma?

For me, a silver lining of the pandemic was being able to easily spend time with her. By then, they’d moved to Santa Rosa for the cleaner air (it was years before the house would be threatened by raging fires that ultimately came to a stop within a block of it). I worked from a bedroom, which I rearranged so I could sit on Zoom calls with a bookshelf behind me, like I’d seen journalists do on the News Hour. I’d do a meeting, then go check on Ma, then do another meeting. Sometimes, if she was feeling up to it, I’d take her outside and we’d go for a walk. Every night, I’d help her up the stairs and tuck her into bed. Sometimes I’d help her brush her teeth from there, if she wasn’t feeling strong enough to stand in the bathroom. She stopped being able to eat hard food and I’d help set up her feeding bag and connect it to the tube the doctors inserted in her belly.

Sometimes - not enough, which I regret dearly - I would lie on the bed next to her and we’d talk. We’d discuss which books we’d both been reading (or, as her eyesight failed, listened to). We’d talk about what was going on in my life, and her worries about hers. We’d talk about trips we’d like to take and how she thought about life. She would give me advice and perspective, and I tried to do the same.

My sister was often there. At the end of the night, when all the talking was over, she would sit at the end of Ma’s bed with a guitar and sing lullabies. She read to her, sometimes over FaceTime while Ma was at dialysis.

Over the last few years, my sister started to suffer from chronic pain. I’m not remotely qualified to diagnose this or verify if it’s true, but I have to assume that it’s at least in part caused by the stress of it all; the sadness of watching our mother fade against her will.

My dad was a saint. He devoted his life to looking after her. He did everything he could to find cures and solutions to whatever the current problem was, and drove Ma everywhere she needed to go. He slept next to her at the hospital and sat with her at her appointments. His entire life was spent being a carer. Even when his own health began to falter, and his knees gave in, he was devoted to her.

She was the center of our lives, and she’s gone.

I’m lucky, in comparison, to still have my physical health. I’m a lot heavier than I was when we started this journey, but I can walk and run. Emotionally, though, I feel like I’m running an emulation layer: I look like I’m more or less okay, so I feel like people expect me to be more or less okay. I’m barely holding it together, somehow getting through each day, but it’s not something that people can see and hear and touch. It’s buried deep, my brokenness, but it’s there, waiting to erupt.

I want to be clear that I don’t resent it. On the contrary, I feel lucky: I had the ability to move to be closer to my parents and support them through this seismic event. I got to spend more time with, and be closer to, my family than most people ever get to. That’s been an incredible gift.

I also wish none of this had ever happened. I wish my mother had been healthy, and nobody else in my family had succumbed to this awful condition, and life remained uninterrupted. I couldn’t tell you what that would even look like, but I can say that it wouldn’t look anything like what the last decade has been.

And I want a hug. I want this pain, the hole that’s been ripped by the outrageous theft of my mother by this awful genetic condition, to be acknowledged. I want to be taken care of like I’m sick, because I feel sick, even if my body is to all intents and purposes intact. I want to lie under a blanket for a while and breathe. I want to tear apart the fabric of the universe and glue it back together in a shape that doesn’t feel quite so wrong. I want to sleep through the night. I want to let go of this guilt that won’t stop eating at me. I want to feel closeness and love and comfort.

I want to take this disease, which we now know is called dyskeratosis congenita, and I want to burn it to the ground. I want to avenge my grandmother Carol, and my mother Deborah, and my aunt Erica, and my cousin Michael, and anyone else it dares to take from me. From us. I want justice for our theft.

And I want, somehow, to be okay.

For the time being, my attention and focus are gone. I’m not the same person. Very little seems important, because very little is important. There isn’t much to do for now except let it all wash over and accept that it’s a forever part of me. Her loss has been a decade of love, and care, and trauma. It’s not going away; slowly, maybe, it’ll fade.

After that, when it finally does, who knows.

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 have been suspended, that's far from the point: we don't treat people who are seeking a new life in America like they're people at all.

This week I'm donating to organizations that provide help and advocate for their rights.

The Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition is "a group of local citizens and agencies that have united to develop an efficient way to transition refugees to their destinations upon release of federal custody through a unified and coordinated effort."

Because refugees often just arrive with little more than the clothes on their back, the coalition feeds them, provides clothing, medical care, and transportation. And recently, they've been doing it in huge numbers.

You can join me in donating here.

The South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project "empowers immigrants through high-quality legal education, representation, and connections to services. ProBAR serves immigrants in the Rio Grande Valley border region with a particular focus on the legal needs of adults and unaccompanied children in federal custody."

"Founded in 1989 in response to the overwhelming need for pro bono legal representation of Central American asylum-seekers detained in South Texas, ProBAR has a long history of providing critical legal services to people at risk of deportation."

You can join me in donating here.

RAICES Texas is "a nonprofit agency that promotes justice by providing free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees. With legal services, social programs, bond assistance, and an advocacy team focused on changing the narrative around immigration in this country, RAICES is operating on the national frontlines of the fight for immigration rights. [It defends] the rights of immigrants and refugees, empower individuals, families, and communities, and advocate for liberty and justice."

Most recently, it joined forces with the ACLU, Oxfam, and other justice organizations to challenge Title 42 expulsions in federal court. It won a preliminary injunction, but the Biden administration has committed to ongoing expulsions. These must be stopped.

You can join me in donating here.

#justice

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 Round, the still-in-beta fundraising tool, has launched a series of numbered drops that includes a grant program offering $50K for big tech workers to quit their jobs.

While that feels more like a commercial endeavor, Danielle Baskin’s projects - like opening a Spirit Halloween at an empty Google office and the Oracle Open World conference for divination experts, psychics, and wizards - have even more of a sense of fun with more of a guerrilla sensibility. I don't think she was inspired by MSCHF, but the cadence and sense of humor of some of her work could be seen to fit in the same category - while at the same time often being much more authentic and interesting. (I want to be like her when I grow up.)

This kind of episodic, satirical art is really appealing to me. Poking fun at an industry that has a tendency to take itself a little too seriously is obviously appealing to me. As a consumer of these things, I enjoy being surprised and amused. But I’m also really into the idea of making this kind of work: a new project every month or so. Each one could end there, or it could turn into a fully-fledged project like Dialup.

I’m enthralled by the possibilities of this technology-enabled art studio model, and I’m curious: who else is releasing work like this? What have you enjoyed?

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 businesses who employ most Americans have some major barriers to providing retirement plans to their employees. For one thing, they're expensive; for another, they require a lot of time-consuming manual administration. Finally, if that administration is done poorly, there's a risk that the business will be audited and fined. Even if the plan is in good order, many 401(k) plans look like they were built in 1998 in Microsoft FrontPage: they're daunting to use and don't provide much help, meaning some users never set up their savings.

ForUsAll fixes this problem in several ways. We automate the manual work and validate the plan information every payroll, taking away the cognitive load and the risk of being fined. (We literally take on that legal risk.) Because we automate the plans, we can bring the cost down. Collectively, we take away the major reasons small employers don't provide retirement savings.

On the employee side, we provide simple, easy-to-use, modern interfaces. We also reduce the cognitive load by sending simple nudges. For example, if we think you can afford to save a little more, we'll send a nudge that says, "we think you can increase your savings rate by 1%. If you click this button, you can take it for a test drive." Users find these nudges easier, and the result is that when retirement plans use ForUsAll, more people save.

So: we help more companies provide retirement savings, and then help more employees to save with them.

Finally, we're providing more options to divest from fossil fuels in your retirement savings. We're also providing access to different kinds of investment assets, tools, and advice that are ordinarily the preserve of the wealthy. The first of these is the ability to invest a small portion of your savings into individual cryptocurrencies.

The stack is built in Ruby on Rails with an increasing amount of Node, with React on the front-end. It's a remote-first team. If this sounds like a mission you're up for, click here to apply. The first step is a phone call with me, and I'm excited to meet you.

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 ethical. (For example, you'll never see an Amazon link in my posts.) Book links in particular will continue to be via Bookshop, but will all (including this link) include an affiliate tag, giving me a small percentage of any sales that result.

If you've got any worries about this, reach out and I'll be happy to discuss or cover my reasoning in a future post.

I’m going to start kicking off my week with a list of thoughts and actions. Join me!

Thoughts

1. 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 like a collection of small experiments. Now it’s like reading a list of private equity updates. That’s what happens when an industry grows up, I guess, but I miss the sense of discovery and wonder. Remember the first social network, or marveling at what Flickr was able to do with a web interface? Or being excited by what one person in their bedroom could put together?
2. The closest we have to this kind of new platform is smart contract blockchains (Ethereum, Algorand, and so on). Aspects of them are pretty cool, but the fact that money is involved creates a de facto barrier to entry. I could get into the web because it was free and because it had relatively low computing requirements. We didn’t have a lot of money. Which kids are getting into Ethereum when just the gas on a transaction is often tickling $100? $1 would have been too high a barrier for me.
3. I’m therefore really interested in the decentralization without the monetization. What does a totally free blockchain look like? Is it even possible, given the incentives in the network? Are other, non-monetary incentives possible? Does decentralization really have to bake in capitalism? Why?
4. What else is it baking in? Software carries with it all kinds of implicit cultural biases based on the predilections of the developers who build it. What would a barter-based decentralized protocol look like? Or one designed around paying forward? Or one designed to penalize wealth hoarding?
5. I’m not an economist, but lately I’ve been lucky to spend a lot of time hanging out with a former expert in east-west trade with an Oxford PhD in the subject, in addition to advanced law degrees with a specialization in contracts. He’s my dad, I should declare, but our conversations on the topic have been fascinating. I’ve tried and failed to get him to blog, but maybe one day I’ll write up one of our conversations here.

Actions

1. Last week my car was smashed into and all my devices were stolen. Replacing them was pretty quick, but replacing my backpack (a Peak Design Everyday) and getting the glass repaired on my car has been less easy. This week, both those things need to happen.
2. I spent some time today laying out some architectural diagrams for my job. I need to get some internal feedback and then put them into practice.
3. Last week, I joined the Zebras Unite co-op as an individual member. I’ve been following the zebras since literally day one, and I’m excited to help them more deeply. I need to learn how I can be most useful to the community and put myself out there. Helping people who are genuinely out to distribute equity and make the world a more equal place is a life-affirming thing to do.
4. I get to catch up with some friends (outside) this week, and hopefully see some live music. I’m looking forward to it.
5. I think I’ve got an ear infection, and not for the first time this year. I actually first noticed it months ago, but it was the day my mother died, and I’ve had other priorities since then. No more putting it off: I’ve made an appointment with an ENT doctor and hopefully we can figure it out.

Have a good week!

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 around the world and therefore lots of different timezones, so the synchronous part isn’t required.

Everyone is working on either one long-form fiction work, or a series of short stories. There’s no non-fiction.

Everyone must submit at least 1000 more words of their work every week for everyone else to read. People can leave comments but don’t need to crit.

If you don’t submit work, you’re out of the group. (Maybe there’s a three strikes rule.)

It works seasonally - so you commit to a season, but if you fall out you can start again for the next season.

I haven’t seen anything like this. Have you?

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 dedicated to “the unification and liberation of Afrikans across the diaspora”.

Its programs include People’s Breakfast, a free breakfast program for Oakland’s houseless community, a health clinic, bail and legal support, a grocery program, and more. Modern inequality and generational injustices mean that organizations like People’s Programs are crucial lifelines for many people.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to join me here. I also donated a tent from their tent drive wishlist.

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 in your car in a public place. Particularly not valuables you use for work.

But beyond that, I have a few observations about the cloud. Because less than 24 hours later, I'm completely back up and running again on new devices that have all the data, configurations, and feel of my old ones.

First of all, here's what Find My says about the ones that were stolen:

The headphones and the iPad pinged first, and then my laptop pinged about a minute later. You can see the thief progress north. Find My is pretty good at pinging through any available connection - that's why AirTags work - but the trail runs cold from there. Out of an abundance of caution, I marked the iPad and laptop as locked and left a message in case anyone tries to turn them on. (Unfortunately you can't lock the AirPods.)

This morning I set up a new laptop, and within an hour I had all my apps and files back. It's the same model as the old one, so it's in effect identical, except without all the cool stickers. I'm hopeful that my property insurance will help me pay for the replacement.

I've been backing up on iCloud for a while, and although I have some real worries about some of the direction that Apple's going in (the shelved plan to scan devices is, despite the obviously good intentions, deeply problematic), I'm relatively comfortable with the safety - and certainly the convenience.

For a moment I worried that I'd lost the video of my mother's memorial, which would have deepened this event from an inconvenience into a tragedy. But no, iCloud had managed to back up the video, and I was able to check it this morning.

For all their power, the value of our computers is in the information we store: and by information, I really mean stories, memories, creative work, and the things we make. When I upgrade my laptop or my phone, I get the ability to take photos in a higher fidelity, or create new kinds of things. But that underlying human footprint - the trail of how I got to here, and most importantly, the people I knew and loved - transcends. I'm grateful that I don't need to worry about losing it. It's all just magically there, waiting for me.

Clearing the broken glass out of my car, on the other hand, was a real pain in the ass.

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 a car in the US, and I was worried about my environmental impact.

I was wowed: it’s a performant, beautiful car that feels safe. Features like auto-steer and an in-car personal assistant feel like driving in the future. It even connects to my phone and unlocks as I approach and locks as I walk away. It’s seamless: what an amazing thing.

And then I drove across the country in a 2021 Toyota Sienna.

The Toyota Sienna is not famously a beautiful car. It’s kind of got this soccer mom reputation, which shouldn’t malign it (what’s wrong with parents who take their kids to sports practice?), but at the same time it doesn’t give it a reputation for performance or elegance. It’s got a lot of room for suitcases and has a hybrid drive train that allows it to go 500-600 miles on a tank of gas, which made it a perfect vehicle for a long road trip. And it’s pretty comfortable in the back.

It turns out to be a performant, beautiful car that feels safe. It has auto-steer and (through Apple CarPlay) in-car Siri. It even connects to my phone and unlocks as I approach and locks as I walk away. It’s seamless: what an amazing thing.

Furthermore, CarPlay is an order of magnitude better as an operating system than Tesla’s software. The Tesla assistant sucks in comparison - and it’s not like Siri is known for its perfection. There are fewer apps available. And then on the phone side, both the Toyota and Tesla mobile apps leave a lot to be desired, but they also fundamentally do the same stuff.

The big advantage of the Tesla is that it doesn’t need any gas at all and doesn’t make exhaust fumes. I’m very happy with it and I’m not going to trade it in. But it turns out that some of the stuff that wowed me about it is just part of buying a modern car. They’re safer and smarter than they ever were, and the gap between a Tesla and a Toyota is much smaller than I thought.

One caveat: I didn’t spend the extra money to get full self-driving. In part, that’s because full self-driving seems to not quite be ready for primetime, although I’m tempted to try it for a few months for the automatic parallel parking. Automatic parallel parking, by the way, is something a Prius can also do.

That leads me to some interesting questions about what happens when fully-electric vehicles reach real ubiquity. My Tesla has a much higher range than electric vehicles produced by traditional auto makers, but I have to assume that won’t always be the case. What’s Tesla’s edge then? How do they stay in front? It’s not obvious to me.

I’m really happy to be driving an electric car, and I can’t wait until all cars are electric. But in terms of features, I’m not sure there will be a clear winner.

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 to give employees stock compensation; they should have been given some ownership of the company.

To be fair, it offered profit-sharing instead: based on company performance, up to 19% of an employee’s salary was placed in their 401k at the end of every year. That’s not a bad deal as such, although it doesn’t lead to any extra cash in hand in the shorter term. But it was a better deal when it looked like the company was going to stay independent forever: its success is undoubtedly down to its employees, who should really see some upside. There’s a gross inequality here.

But gross inequality is par for the course. This compounds when you remember the allegations of sexism and racism at the startup. As The Verge reported back in February:

Employees say the company’s position as one of the premier startups in Atlanta allows it to view workers as disposable, as there are fewer tech jobs to choose from than if the company were located in San Francisco or New York City. They also say that because the organization is private and has never taken on outside investment, executives can operate without the specter of more public accountability.

It’ll be interesting to see how this changes once MailChimp joins Intuit. Granted, the new parent company recently faced a giant class action settlement from low-income workers who were duped into paying for its tax preparation software, so it’s not like MailChimp is being absorbed into the epitome of sweetness and equality. Nonetheless, as part of a publicly-traded company, it will face greater scrutiny than a privately bootstrapped tech startup.

Regardless, none of this will help its current employees during the acquisition. They’re doing fine - they’re relatively highly-paid tech workers, after all - but they may still be miffed that they missed out on capitalizing on a valuation that was based on their hard work.

I'm convinced that writing well is a core engineering skill. Here's why:

1. 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 in mind. (It’s worth saying: the audience for code is other programmers, not the computer.) There's a lot you can learn from writing that is directly applicable to coding.

2. Good code needs to sit alongside good writing. Code doesn’t self-document. Yes, you need to name your methods and variables carefully, and pay careful attention to your layout and style. But you also need to write actual inline documentation, written in human language, that describes what your methods do and why. You’ll help any future engineers who come across your code - and that probably includes you, a few months down the line.

3. Writing forces reflection and rigor. Before you write a single line of code, you should fully understand the problem you’re solving - and how. Some of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with write out their ideas first in specification documents. These documents allow them to receive feedback from their peers, but also help them figure out if they’ve figured out the right details. But it only really works if they’re written using clear language and a strong structure: fuzzy writing is an indication of fuzzy thinking.

4. Great engineers communicate cross-functionally. The myth of an engineer who puts on a pair of headphones, enters the Zone, and never communicates with anyone is just that: a myth. In order to be able to scope the problem you’ve taken on, and to ensure that you’ve solved it well, you’ll almost certainly need to communicate well with other teams. That means empathizing for them as an audience, writing clearly, minimizing jargon, and only including the details you need to in order to convey your message (but no fewer).

5. Writing well conveys competence. The previous items describe writing well as a duty of care for your colleagues. The truth is, it can directly affect your career: spelling and punctuation errors lead to worse outcomes for jobseekers, promotions, fundraising, and more. An overwhelming majority of business leaders - i.e., the people who employ you - agree that poor writing wastes their time. It’s not just about showing care for the people you work with; it’s about making a better impression on them, too.

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. If you want to receive posts more often, you can subscribe via the RSS feed (or the all items feed if you also want my link posts, photos, etc).

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 we’d be back in action early this year, and that vaccinations would stop the spread more quickly than they have (partially because I didn’t expect there to be hordes of people who refused to take them).

I haven’t arranged to be at any events this year, but I now see that the ones I tentatively booked tickets for in winter 2022 aren’t going to happen - or at least, I’m probably not going to be there. That’s a bummer for me, because I was really looking forward to them, but the more important thing is to stay safe and stop the spread.

So here’s the policy: unless something major changes, I’ll refuse any in-person business meetings or events this year and in winter 2022. (Socially, I’ll hang out with other fully-vaccinated people outside.) I’ll re-evaluate in the winter to see if it’s safe. If we have to take a third jab - or more - I’ll be first in line if they let me.

If you haven’t been vaccinated yet: please consider doing it today. It’s safe and makes you much more likely to survive an encounter with the virus. The disinformation out there surrounding vaccinations is not reality-based. You’ve probably already been vaccinated for a bunch of things (at least, I hope you have) - this is just one more.

I’m really looking forward to the day when we can talk about this period of time with a historical lens rather than being in the midst of a global, deadly pandemic.

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 business?), and feasibility risk (can we build this in a scalable way with the time, team, and resources potentially at our disposal?). And then we’d ask them to go out and figure out how to de-risk those assumptions in the real world, usually by talking to experts and asking smart questions.

The answers didn’t matter as much as how the founders reacted to those answers.

Some founders felt that confidence was the key. “We didn’t find any blockers,” they’d say. “We validated our plan.” Often they believed in their own expertise so much that they didn’t even fully test their assumption.

Other founders were transparent, discussed the issues they’d discovered with clarity and lack of hubris, and figured out what their next steps should be based on what they discovered.

Every time we invested in a founder from the first group, it was a deadly mistake. Founders who weren’t precious about their ideas and were willing to take a test-driven approach were exponentially more likely to succeed. It’s easier said than done - particularly when you’re emotionally invested in an aspect of your idea - but sometimes you have to let go to succeed.

I’ve found that outside of the investing world too: colleagues who were willing to say, “I don’t know, let’s ask” were significantly more effective than ones who tried to bluster through an answer or try and figure out a problem based on their own smarts alone. Time and time again, ego proves itself to be a kind of myopia.

A fixed mindset is never as good as a growth mindset. Everyone can learn something new, and it’s never a weakness to have to reach out and ask. Any time you find yourself saying, “I’m just going to assert that ...” in answer to an unknown, you need to stop, take a step back, and find someone who really knows.

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 mistake, American criminal justice needs deep reform. Violence is pervasive and abuse is rampant, particularly against communities of color.

APTP describes its mission as follows:

The Anti Police-Terror Project is a Black-led, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color. We support families surviving police terror in their fight for justice, documenting police abuses and connecting impacted families and community members with resources, legal referrals, and opportunities for healing. APTP began as a project of the ONYX Organizing Committee.

Recent campaigns have included support for Black communities after Covid, in the light of historic, systemic inequalities, mental health focused responder reform, and effective police oversight in Oakland. This is vital work.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to join me here.

#justice

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 to block the state abortion ban to be extremely troubling. The law itself is horrific, allowing anyone to sue anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion, with no requirement to have any connection at all to the person being sued. There are no exceptions for rape and incest.

It’s abhorrent. Women have domain over their bodies, as men do. Abortion bans rob them of this.

In addition to the organizations below, I’ve donated to the ActBlue Texas abortion fund, which splits donations to abortion funds across Texas. If you need an abortion in Texas, or know someone who does, Need Abortion contains resources to find providers and financial assistance.

The Texas Equal Access Fund helps low-income people get access to abortions in north, east, and west Texas. Abortion bans disproportionately hurt people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The organization describes its mission as follows:

Texas Equal Access Fund believes that when it comes to abortion, there is no choice if there is no access. Restrictions on abortion access and funding are discriminatory because they especially burden people with low incomes, young people, people in rural areas, and people of color. We oppose all efforts to restrict abortion rights and are committed to fighting for access to abortion for all. We believe that abortion is a fundamental feature of health care, and that it is the responsibility of government to cover abortion as part of social safety net programs. However, in the absence of government funding, we believe it is our duty to act now to support those who want abortions and cannot afford them.

TEA notes that “almost half of our clients are already parenting at least one child and 70% of the people we fund are people of color.”

If you have the means, I encourage you to donate here.

The Afiya Center provides refuge, education, and other resources to Black women. In addition to helping provide access to abortions, TAC provides a range of important services, including HIV/AIDS support, reproductive justice, and work on maternal mortality (Black women are the most likely to die in childbirth in Texas).

It describes its mission as follows:

The Afiya Center (TAC) was established in response to the increasing disparities between HIV incidences worldwide and the extraordinary prevalence of HIV among Black womxn and girls in Texas. TAC is unique in that it is the only Reproductive Justice (RJ) organization in North Texas founded and directed by Black womxn.

At TAC we are transforming the lives, health, and overall wellbeing of Black womxn and girls by providing refuge, education, and resources; we act to ignite the communal voices of Black womxn resulting in our full achievement of reproductive freedom.

If you have the means, I encourage you to donate here.

#justice

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 for reflection rather than consumption.

Books

100 Boyfriends, by Brontez Purnell . Raw in a way that transcends honesty, these confessional short stories are full of uncomfortable life. The writing is incredible. I’m not sure what I took away, exactly, but I think it’s time for a shower.

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks. Although it’s written for teachers, there are lessons here that transcend that field to be insightful for anyone in a hypothetical position of authority. Today, the topics and even its writing style are still cutting edge. When it was written a quarter century ago, it must have been incredibly radical. I wish every teacher and manager in my life had read it.

Notable Articles

Business

One Medical Employees Accuse Concierge Care Provider Of Less Focus On Patients. “Dozens of One Medical employees are trying to unionize as a response to what they say has been mismanagement of the organization’s COVID-19 response, poor working conditions for staff and, they allege, a declining focus on patients.” I’m a long-term One Medical customer and have definitely (but anecdotally) noticed this in the quality of care I’ve received over time.

Inclusive icebreakers. “To ‘break the ice’ is a metaphor for dissipating tension in a group of people who don’t know each other very well. Word Histories gives a bit of background behind the phrase, which seems to be hundreds of years old. However, there are still some common activities being used that have the opposite effect for some people – making them feel even more disconnected from the rest from the group.” An important point with some great suggestions.

VCs are financing a servant economy. “But this is more than just the most recent unicorn-bubble fad. It’s bringing us one step closer to living in a servant economy. The world’s most powerful VC investors are funding an economy where technology allows a ‘ruling class’ to command an ‘underclass’ of servants with the swipe of an app.”

Court rules California gig worker initiative is unconstitutional, a setback to Uber and Lyft. “A California judge on Friday ruled that a 2020 ballot measure exempting rideshare and food delivery drivers from a state labor law is unconstitutional because it infringes on the Legislature’s power to set workplace standards.” Great news!

The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms. “We found that lenders gave fewer loans to Black applicants than White applicants even when their incomes were high—$100,000 a year or more—and had the same debt ratios. In fact, high-earning Black applicants with less debt were rejected more often than high-earning White applicants who have more debt.” Alternative credit scores are vital - Classic FICO disproportionately harms people of color.

What If People Don’t Want A Career? “In May I ended up on Burnout TikTok, where every 5th video offered withering commentary on the futility and frustration of toiling away for long hours at a job they didn’t particularly like. I can’t find the video anymore but the one that sticks in my head was a TikToker venting about how the idealized career is — when you think about it — a raw deal. It went something like this: You devote the bulk of every day for 30-40 years in the prime of your life to various companies to make them and their shareholders money and then you get ten years near the end of your life to do what you please. Sounds like a bad arrangement.”

Crypto

Remarks Before the Aspen Security Forum by SEC Chair Gary Gensler. “Right now, large parts of the field of crypto are sitting astride of — not operating within — regulatory frameworks that protect investors and consumers, guard against illicit activity, ensure for financial stability, and yes, protect national security.”

Chelsea Manning Is Back, And Hacking Again, Only This Time For A Bitcoin-Based Privacy Startup. “Halpin asked Manning to look for security weaknesses in his new privacy project, which eventually became Nym, a Neuchâtel, Switzerland-based crypto startup. Halprin founded Nym in 2018 to send data anonymously around the Internet using the same blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin. To date, Nym has raised some $8.5 million from a group of crypto investors including Binance, Polychain Capital and NGC Ventures. The firm now employs 10 people and is using its latest round of capital to double its team size.” I’ve known Harry for a long time, and was privileged to meet Chelsea when she was an advisor to his previous startup (which we invested in at Matter). I’m excited to see this collaboration.

Culture

What Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings looked like as two Weinstein movies. “My script review became the second part of a carefully coordinated one-two punch. At that point, Ain’t It Cool was a useful platform for filmmakers who were trying to convince studio heads that there was an audience out there for serious-minded genre fare produced with all of the resources required, and it was not always an easy sell. I was happy to make the case: The scripts were great enough that Jackson deserved the chance to see them through.”

‘Bloody’ overtaken as the UK’s most popular swear word, study suggests. I’ve been self-censoring since I got to the US - people swear much less often here - but I’m being less diligent over time.

My dead dad’s journal: How I finally met a man I knew for my entire life. “It was a window into the mind of a loving father. It was a look into the fraught thought process of a deeply analytical man. A religious man who knew he was sinning. An addict who was self-aware, and still couldn’t pull himself out from the abyss. It was Jekyll talking to Hyde. Bruce Banner talking to the Hulk. And, in honor of my dad I feel I must also include: It’s Data talking to Lore.”

Feels Good Man! Pepe, copyright, and NFTs. “And then NFT craze hits, and Pepe becomes a star in the non-fungible token markets. I’ve spent countless hours in NFT platforms in the last months, every time I open a new page, there’s usually an animated Pepe waiting for me. Many NFT artists are part of the meme generation that grew up on Pepe and other memes, so these tend to feature heavily on their output (probably only beaten by Doge). Instead of fighting the trend, Furie joined the NFT revolution, and started making lots of money off Pepe “originals”, and allowing most other NFTs of Pepes to continue.”

Politics

Afghanistan Meant Nothing. A Veteran Reflects on 20 Wasted Years. “And so I sit here, reading these sad fucking articles and these horrified social media posts about the suffering in Afghanistan and the horror of the encroaching Taliban and how awful it is that this is happening but I can’t stop feeling this grim happiness, like, finally, you fuckers, finally you have to face the thing Afghanistan has always been. You can’t keep lying to yourself about what you sent us into.”

Science

Atlantic Ocean currents weaken, signalling big weather changes. “The Atlantic Ocean’s current system, an engine of the Northern Hemsiphere’s climate, could be weakening to such an extent that it could soon bring big changes to the world’s weather.”

A Major Report Warns Climate Change Is Accelerating And Humans Must Cut Emissions Now. “Global climate change is accelerating and human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are the overwhelming cause, according to a landmark report released Monday by the United Nations. There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming this century, but only if countries around the world stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible, the authors warn.”

Rain falls at Greenland ice summit for first time on record. “That meltwater is streaming into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise. Already, melting from Greenland’s ice sheet --the world’s second-largest after Antarctica’s -- has caused around 25% of global sea level rise seen over the last few decades, scientists estimate. That share is expected to grow, as global temperatures increase.” We’re increasingly screwed.

Evolution is now accepted by a majority of Americans. “The level of public acceptance of evolution in the United States is now solidly above the halfway mark, according to a new study based on a series of national public opinion surveys conducted over the last 35 years.” That number is 54%, which is absolutely pathetic.

Society

Nearly half of American workers don’t earn enough to afford a one-bedroom rental. “Rents in the US continued to increase through the pandemic, and a worker now needs to earn about $20.40 an hour to afford a modest one-bedroom rental. The median wage in the US is about $21 an hour.” Some absolutely dire statistics here.

2020 Census data: The United States is more diverse and more multiracial than ever. “While the under-18 population decreased during the last decade, it is rapidly diversifying. Non-White US residents younger than 18 now make up 53% of the population among minors, up from 47% in 2010.” (NB: I don’t like the “non-white” framing; white is not the default.)

Disability Advocates Fight Ruling Allowing Electric Shock Treatment Back In Mass. Residential School. “students wear backpacks equipped with electrical stimulation devices around the clock. Workers at the residential school employ the shocks using a remote control device when the students display a range of unwanted behaviors.” WTF?

‘It’s not hard work for me’: At 101 years old, this Maine lobsterwoman still works the water. “Virginia Oliver is the oldest licensed lobsterer in Maine and possibly on the planet. But in her eyes, it’s simply what she does. Her world has changed in once-unimaginable ways since 1920, but in other ways it’s hardly changed at all.” Come for the story, stay for the amazing photo.

Afghanistan's all-girls robotics team frantically trying to flee Taliban. “Members of the team, who range in age from 12 to 18, have overcome war and other hardships to pursue their love of engineering and robotics and strike a blow for national pride. They’ve made global headlines as a symbol of a more progressive Afghanistan.”

Op-Ed: As a doctor in a COVID unit, I’m running out of compassion for the unvaccinated. Get the shot. “I can pretty much guarantee we would have never met had you gotten vaccinated because you would have never been hospitalized. All of our COVID units are full and every single patient in them is unvaccinated. Numbers don’t lie. The vaccines work.”

Feds Deliberately Targeted Black Lives Matter Protesters, A Report Says. “Movement leaders and experts said the prosecution of protesters over the past year continues a century-long practice by the federal government, rooted in structural racism, to suppress Black social movements via the use of surveillance tactics and other mechanisms.”

What I Learned While Eavesdropping on the Taliban. “When people ask me what I did in Afghanistan, I tell them that I hung out in planes and listened to the Taliban. My job was to provide “threat warning” to allied forces, and so I spent most of my time trying to discern the Taliban’s plans. Before I started, I was cautioned that I would hear terrible things, and I most certainly did. But when you listen to people for hundreds of hours — even people who are trying to kill your friends — you hear ordinary things as well.”

Parents Are Not Okay. “School is only just starting and already kids are being quarantined in mind-boggling numbers: 20,000 across the state of Mississippi, 10,000 in a single district in Tampa, Florida. They’re getting sick too, with hospitalizations of kids under 17 across the country up at least 22 percent in the past month, by the CDC’s count, and each new week sets pediatric hospitalization records for the entire pandemic.”

Technology

Electric cars have much lower life cycle emissions, new study confirms. “But Bieker’s analysis says that there is no future for internal combustion engine vehicles if we are to actually decarbonize. HEVs only reduce lifecycle emissions by about 20 percent, and PHEVs are little better in Europe (25–27 percent lower than gasoline), a little worse in China (6–12 percent lower than gasoline), and adequate in the US (42–46 percent lower than gasoline). But compared to BEVs, a PHEV will have much greater lifetime emissions in all three areas. (India has almost no PHEVs, apparently.) And the advantage of BEVs over HEVs and PHEVs only grows as the grid decarbonizes more.”

Why Silicon Valley’s Asian Americans Still Feel Like a Minority. “On her way out she asked her likely successor, a White man, if he needed help navigating the company. She says he told her, “I don’t really need to prepare that hard—the manager has my back.” [Bo] Ren was floored. She’d spent more than 100 hours preparing for the same interviews so she could prove she deserved the spot. Being White, she says, is “like having a skip pass at Disney World. I realized there is a bamboo ceiling, and I’d have to work 100 times harder.””

The voices of women in tech are still being erased. “When we look at the impact of women’s voices in tech today, we can see both that they have led calls for accountability and also that they have been literally and figuratively undervalued. From doing voiceover work that becomes the basis for voice tools that millions use, without being paid or acknowledged accordingly, or doing work on the foundational concepts of AI, women are often present in tech without being listened to.”

Global organizations urge Apple to drop child safety features. “More than 90 civil liberties organizations around the world sent a letter to Apple’s Tim Cook Thursday, urging the CEO to walk back its plans to use machine learning to automatically detect child sexual abuse material on users’ devices.” Although everybody wants to protect children, the implications are unfortunately enormous.

On TikTok, misogyny and white supremacy slip through ‘enforcement gap’. “News investigations have nevertheless revealed that TikTok is used by Islamic State militants and to promote neo-Nazism. While the platform has started releasing transparency reports with details about the content it has removed for violating its guidelines, it is not yet part of a consortium of tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube involved in an industry anti-terrorism effort to collaboratively track and review content from white supremacists and far-right militia groups.”

Why are hyperlinks blue? “As a user experience designer who has created websites since 2001, I’ve always made my links blue. I have advocated for the specific shade of blue, and for the consistent application of blue, yes, but I’ve never stopped and wondered, why are links blue? It was just a fact of life. Grass is green and hyperlinks are blue. Culturally, we associate links with the color blue so much that in 2016, when Google changed its links to black, it created quite a disruption. But now, I find myself all consumed by the question, WHY are links blue? WHO decided to make them blue? WHEN was this decision made, and HOW has this decision made such a lasting impact?”

The future needs files. “I want all OSs, including mobile ones, to properly support real files as they are amazing, inspiring, and possibly the future of how we build our digital future.”

I wrote this piece to read at my mother's memorial on Saturday, August 28. I don't want to lose it, so I'm posting it here, to my personal space.

This is terrifying to me, which is why I’ve decided to write something down. I can’t possibly hope to represent Ma well. Even finding a story to tell is incredibly hard because there are so many of them: a lifetime of happy stories from a childhood that always felt like a kind of wheatgerm-fueled adventure where we lived on our own terms in spite of what the world might have wanted from us.

I started calling her Ma as a term of endearment when I was an adult. “Mum” is too British; “Mom” doesn’t sound right coming out of my mouth. “Mom”. So I confess, I absolutely stole Ma from [our cousins] the Neales, who have similar accent difficulties, and who I admire in lots of ways.

But when we were growing up, I called her Debbie. We were a very respectful but non-hierarchical household: we called our parents by their first names, we were encouraged to take things apart and ask how things worked, and we were consulted on all kinds of things that children are not necessarily best-equipped to weigh in on - but we were trusted, and that was wonderful, and a reflection of how both my parents think and thought. It’s a mindset rooted in equality, growth, and learning.

So. What do I want you to know about Ma?

Everything. Or at least, quite a few things. But let’s start here:

I want you to know that she was really freaking smart.

In my line of work, which is working in product and engineering in the tech industry, people often say things like, “explain this like you were explaining it to your mother.” It’s obviously a completely sexist line of thinking, which is kind of a reflection of the tech industry to be honest, and I take great satisfaction in telling them that my mother taught me to program. Not only that, but she learned assembler, which is one of the most intricate ways to program.

She would sit patiently with me for hours on end, and together we’d plug source code into our 8-bit Atari. She taught me BASIC, and then later on, we moved on to more complicated languages together.

When we didn’t have the money to get the latest and greatest PC, she organized a computer club at a local business in Oxford so that I’d have access. Every Thursday night, a bunch of kids from across the city would play games, make art, learn to code, and become computer literate together under her gentle guidance.

She studied the telecommunications industry, and knew that both the internet and the mobile revolution were coming. She understood the implications, and spoke to many of the people who were making things happen. She wrote detailed analyses of the forces that would reshape much of society over the coming decades.

She took me with her to industry shows in Cannes, and as a family we went to technology conferences across Europe, where we’d go sightseeing (and I might sneak into an event or two) and she’d be running panels and conducting interviews.

She was unassuming about it; she wasn’t self-important, but if she’d been someone else, she could have become a billionaire.

Instead, she withdrew from the industry, retrained, became a middle school science teacher in one of the most impoverished towns in California, and never looked back. I don’t remember her as happy at work as when she was teaching those kids. Even when she started to get sick, she went into work every day with an oxygen tank on her back, looking like a Ghostbuster. Even when she couldn’t work anymore, she helped her school get grants and organized an educational program with NASA. She was dedicated and she loved it.

She would engage in debate about anything. It was common to see her and my dad watching a documentary or lecture on any number of obscure topics and discussing it late into the night and sometimes days later. She became fascinated by science and space. She could speak a bunch of languages and would read and analyze academic reports in languages she didn’t even know yet. She was well-read, and read voraciously - often with multiple books on the go at once, which even this year she’d alternate between during dialysis and while she was getting her tube feeds in bed - and was hungry for knowledge.

So, sure, I’ll explain it like I’m explaining it to my mother. I’ll include all the detail, know that she’ll understand the implications better than I will, and be ready for a series of informed, insightful questions - and to be, more than anything else, challenged on the ethics of it.

What do I want you to know about Ma?

I want you to know that she cared. She wasn’t just kind and forgiving, willing to see the best in absolutely everyone and go out of her way to help - although she was definitely all of those things. But more than that, she really cared deeply: about people and the intricacies of their lives, about the world, and particularly about fairness.

Before I was born, both my parents were involved in struggles to support affirmative action and tenants’ rights. She described herself as having been radicalized early on, but it’s not particularly that she was radical: she could just see past the social templates that everyone is expected to adhere to, and which perpetuate systemic injustices, and could see how everything should operate to be fairer.

That was true on every level. She wanted she and Steve and Erica to all be treated equally, and would make it known if she thought the others were getting a raw deal. She tried her best to treat Hannah and I equally. If someone made a sexist or a homophobic remark around her, she would call it out. If someone was xenophobic, or unthinkingly imperialist, she would bring it up. She was outspoken - always with good humor, but always adamant about what really mattered.

Later in life, when she had a little bit more money, she gave to causes she believed in: representation for women, reproductive rights, racial justice, voting rights, and the environment. She was glued to the Presidential debates, appalled by the previous guy, and was completely on top of what was going on in the world.

She was a feminist, as we all should be. She defined her own identity, dressed as she wanted to dress, acted as she wanted to act, spoke how she wanted to speak. It wasn’t that she was irreverent towards more traditional expectations; they were utterly irrelevant. As they should be.

What do I want you to know about Ma?

I want you to know that she was herself - and that self was full of life and energy and humor and movement. And I’m not just talking about her amazing trousers.

The last time I was here at the Cape, which was three years ago, we were all hanging out in the pond behind Little Lane. For some reason, there was an inflatable bull out there with us. None of us could climb on top of it: Hannah, me, Anna, I think Rachel was there, Wiley, Elise.

Ma was weak, and the lung transplant drugs were taking their toll, and she was having trouble eating food. And when she started to climb onto that bull, I’ve got to admit, I was kind of worried.

But by god, climb she did, and she was the only one of us who made it to the top of that bull. And once she’d scrambled to the top of it, she lifted her arms up in victory.

That was Ma.

We realized later that she absolutely was not supposed to be in a closed body of water as an immunosuppressed person, but whatever. There were no ill effects. She climbed the bull.

She spent the last decade scrambling to the top of the biggest metaphorical inflatable bull you’ve ever heard of. And she spent most of that decade balancing precariously on top of it with her arms held high in victory.

When Pammy gifted us the Sunfish - the same boat that they had both sailed when they were younger - it was like a key to unlocking the bay. We spent days and days tacking around the bay, finding exactly the right breeze, and making our way back to Grandmother’s Beach at high speed in a single tack. She would yell: whooooooosh! And then we’d think about tacking back to Sagelots and doing it all again.

Life was always full of those small moments of joy. Taking Tessie, our little Jack Russell Terrier, out on Port Meadow and watching her bound through the tall grass. Going out to the wildlife sanctuary outside of Turlock and seeing the birds fly through the reeds. Sneaking out and stealing a dinghy late at night from Grandmother’s Beach and oohing at the phosphorescence shimmering around our oars. Getting out the sofabed and all sitting together under the covers to watch Doctor Who or a movie on a Friday night. Sitting around the table with people she loved, picking crabs.

When she got sick, life was still full of those moments of joy. Even just a five minute walk through the park had the same energy. Just a few months ago, she got out and walked the boardwalk at Monterey. “I still have life-force in me,” she told the doctors. She loved to live.

What do I want you to know about Ma?

One last thing for now. I actually have a message to impart. Not so long ago, while she was lying in a bed on the tenth floor at UCSF, surrounded by all the tubes and hospital paraphernalia, she gave me a simple instruction:

“Tell everyone I love them.”

And she did. She loved you so much. She loved all of us so much, in a way that was open, and forgiving, and kind, and all in her own way.

I’m really glad you’re all here. She would be glad too. She was hoping to be with you all one more time.

Thank you.

I failed to publish a Fairness Friday post today. In my defense, I've been preparing for my mother's memorial, which is tomorrow.

I'll likely post on Sunday. For now, I hope that you have a lovely weekend, full of good things, and urge you to tell your loved ones how you feel about them.

1. Proof-of-work is a disaster. There’s no way to couch it; arguments about it providing economic incentives for renewable energy are cognitive dissonance at best. Proof-of-work blockchains have the environmental footprint of a small country. Bitcoin could raise global temperatures by two degrees over the next decade all on its own. There is no valid argument for that being acceptable - or necessary.
   
   
2. Not all blockchains are terrible. Algorand could be considered to be carbon-negative if you accept that carbon offsets are effective (I don’t). Still, it’s got a very low footprint. Proof-of-stake chains have a much lower impact; Ethereum is a high profile example of one that’s making the change. But, of course, it should have happened faster.
   
   
3. The financialization of everything sucks. The instinct to put everything on-chain is a horrible idea that undermines social contracts in favor of free markets. In its worst embodiments, it’s a hardcore conservative libertarian’s wet dream. To have value, something doesn’t need to have financial value. Social contracts, representative democracy, social programs, and welfare all have immeasurable social value that should not be replaced with a Decentralized Autonomous Organization or anything else. Not to mention creating art for the sake of art, or community spaces for the sake of community. We don’t have to - and shouldn’t - make everything into a market.
   
   
4. But putting some resources on-chain isn’t bad. A rough rule of thumb for me: if the current gatekeeper for a resource is a wealth silo (giant corporation, wealthy individual) then it’s a prime candidate for replacement by a decentralized mechanism. Once again for the conservative libertarians: our democratically-elected government represents us and our interests, so government-run programs are not candidates for this.
   
   
5. Too many projects use an “if we built it they will come” mentality. I once saw a crypto investor tell an audience that he likes crypto projects to find an audience for their work in year two or three. That’s bonkers. As with every other software project - or every project - you need to validate the need and the users on day one. Otherwise you’re playing a very risky game, probably with other people’s money. It’s fun to pretend that you’re smarter than everyone else and can make something amazing without outside input, but it’s also highly unlikely.
   
   
6. And most of them are near-impossible to use. Using web3 projects is a horrible, archaic user experience. Centralized exchanges like Coinbase are far easier to use than decentralized exchanges for almost everyone, and unless someone comes up with the equivalent of Netscape Navigator (the first truly usable web browser), centralized services will always be the gateway to blockchain tech for most people.
   
   
7. Crypto may threaten to replace reserve currencies. The dollar has been used as a reserve currency for decades, but the ease of cross-border trade with cryptocurrencies may unseat it. Countries like China and El Salvador seem to be betting on this. It’s not obvious to me that a truly-decentralized currency replacing the dollar is a bad thing; but of course, not every cryptocurrency is truly decentralized. Even the likes of Bitcoin aren’t if a single entity controls enough of the miners.
   
   
8. Crypto is transforming global trade on a local level (which is great). I’m personally aware of freelancers in countries like Colombia being paid in crypto rather than USD or local currency. Vietnam, India, and Pakistan lead global adoption. I think this is a really positive change that could have a major impact on traditional global power hierarchies.
   
   
9. Some incumbents won’t go down without a fight. Both the empowerment of individuals in the global south and the upending of reserve currency structures will be major issues over the next decade or so. It’s the kind of change that has the potential to start wars. And at the very least, there are plenty of interests locked up in the traditional financial system that will do what they can to preserve their wealth.
   
   
10. Free markets tend not to protect the vulnerable - and we can’t afford to not. We need mechanisms to mitigate climate change, to empower people who live in poverty, to support social goods like education and public health, and to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to lead a prosperous, good life in health and safety. Those things need to be dealt with intentionally.
    
    
11. We need to be wary of crypto-libertarians. We need to beware of people who want to replace representative democracy with a financialized system, and who want to replace social safety nets with markets. Markets and society can happily live hand in hand; one does not need to replace the other. There are lots of opportunities that come with decentralization; conservative libertarians see opportunities to remove these social protections. We should continue to build for progress, and not tear down important protections that were hard-won over generations.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

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 California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance. CIYJA is an organization run and developed by undocumented youth organizers. It describes its work as follows:

CIYJA is a statewide immigrant youth-led alliance that focuses on placing immigrant youth in advocacy and policy delegations in order to ensure pro-immigrant policies go beyond legalization, and shed light on how the criminalization of immigrants varies based on identity.

Its work includes pressure to divest from private prisons and to prevent deportations and family separations.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Peg Hunter.

I’m hiring for a few engineers right now: five Ruby on Rails positions (most of them senior), two JS positions, and a quality engineer. More than a few people I’ve spoken to for these roles have apologized to me for coming from different backgrounds and not having been the product of a conventional CS track.

There’s no need to apologize for this. At all. In fact, I really like working with people who come from non-traditional backgrounds and/or small startups. Conversely, I’m not at all swayed by whether people went to top CS schools (or did CS at all) or are an an alumnus of a Fortune 500 tech company. Perhaps it’s worth exploring why; it seems obvious to me, but maybe isn’t to everyone.

The short answer is: it’s about priorities and values. Big companies and well-established CS tracks tend to (but don’t always!) lead to a certain kind of templated thinking that doesn’t necessarily translate to a smaller startup environment. People from more creative backgrounds or who have worked on smaller startups tend to be focused on making an outsized impact on a real, human problem using a broader set of skills, rather than developing a niche skill and working their way up the corporate ladder.

The skills required to climb the corporate ladder are intrinsically different to the ones required to solve problems quickly. One of the reasons I’ve avoided big tech companies for most of my career is that I’m allergic to office politics and the confrontation that inevitably arises: if a major concern for someone is building and maintaining power within an organization, becoming a gatekeeper to information, or not being willing to help build a supportive team culture, they’re going to be an obstacle to the team’s success.

If, on the other hand, a person’s focus is on solving the problems in front of the team and building the best product possible (including the best culture that leads to building the product), everyone is going to have a better time working together, and the product is exponentially more likely to be fit for purpose. All teams are communities of people pulling together to achieve a common goal. For any community to work well, the focus must be on the whole community’s success, while also ensuring that every member of the community is treated well and benefits from the group’s work.

In a smaller startup or organization, this is crucial. In these contexts, the focus needs to be on building. You have to go broad, because there just aren’t enough people to go around; you have to have a “no job too big / no job too small” mindset. Everyone needs to be a doer, not a manager. The CEO is doing everything from setting business strategy to unplugging the toilets. Engineers will sometimes need to make product decisions, think about design, or gather insights from customers. They need to find scrappy ways to get answers to questions themselves, sometimes by any means necessary. It’s not about hustling - hustle culture is not productive - but it is about pulling together to build the right product in the right way, using the full weight of your skills and insights.

I’ve been really impressed by engineers who have made their way to the discipline through meandering paths. Some of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with don’t have degrees; some studied music or art or literature. Perhaps this group has self-selected to be particularly passionate about solving the right sorts of problems; perhaps the wider breadth of disciplines helps to build stronger problem-solving skills; perhaps it’s something else entirely.

It’s not that you can’t have these skills if you’ve come from a traditional CS path. I studied computer science (with AI) in Edinburgh, and have met plenty of really strong team players with this background too. But they tend to be people who have been drawn to smaller, scrappier startups in the past. They’ve often built their own thing (although not everybody has the resources and freedom to do so, so perhaps they’ve been drawn to other people’s startups). They have a bias towards working on interesting projects rather than simply building up their own wealth and career.

It’s unfortunately also true that people from more “traditional” paths tend to be from a narrower demographic: CS degrees and Fortune 500 tech companies infamously have an inclusion problem. If you’re serious about solving problems for a breadth of people, you’d better have a team who represents those people. And, honestly, as well as being the right thing to do, it’s just more fun to work on a more diverse team.

Everyone on a team should be compensated well, should enjoy good work-life integration, and should be able to work in an emotionally supportive (not just emotionally safe) environment. Ideally, everyone should bring a different perspective, their unique creativity, and a set of skills and personality traits that allows them to contribute uniquely to the community as a whole. They should have a bias towards action and be able to Sherlock Holmes their way through problems in collaboration with their colleagues. That requires a sort of scrappiness that isn’t taught in CS degrees, and isn’t required in resource-rich Fortune 500 companies.

There’s no need to apologize for being different. I’m grateful for it, and I’m excited to build a community of unique, talented, creative people who build software that matters together.

This is a personal post, but I'm hiring Ruby on Rails, Front End JS, and Lead Quality engineers. If this is you, I'd love to meet you!

Photo by Lagos Techie on Unsplash