Ben Werdmuller

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.