My favorite description of chat comes from @jasonfried's excellent Is group chat making you sweat? post: “Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.” It's simply too easy for group chat to disrupt your flow, making it difficult to get the most important work done. The Slack Diet Over the last...

“If you stand for nothing Burr, what will you fall for? – Aaron Burr, Sir, Hamilton Musical.” This lyric from Hamilton The Musical jumped to mind when I heard of Governor Kathy Hochul’s historic and cowardly backtracking on Congestion Pricing, her actions are those of someone who stands for nothing: “New York was just a few weeks away ...

Meta’s Workplace is shutting down but the team communication problems it attempted to solve persist. Workplace helped teams prioritize asynchronous communication in a world where real-time chat can trigger excessive context switching. This post clarifies the key problem Workplace attempted to solve and offers tips on what to consider w...

“Shipping solves everything” is a product development motto I deeply believe in. I’d rather ship the wrong thing and learn than to not ship. It becomes increasingly difficult to ship well as a company grows––process and communication taxes tend to slow shipping down. Here is the content I recommend to help teams ship well no matter wha...

On the weekend that everyone is reacting to the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, I decided to test out a different product, Once Campfire, a chat service from 37Signals with a twist. Instead of paying a monthly subscription you pay $299 once and host the service yourself (how it used to be). Just as the Vision Pro will lead us to rethin...

Peopleware, the seminal book about Productive Projects and Teams, is based on the premise: “The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.” OpenAI's recent challenges have proven the authors, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, correct again. OpenAI is a company creating groundbreaking technology th...

Team alignment leads to autonomy, which leads to individual and collective fulfillment. Zoom fatigue and the cost of unnecessary meetings are well documented scourges to knowledge worker fulfillment but there is an antidote, greater writing discipline. Teams struggle to achieve sufficient alignment by overly relying on real-time commun...

Having AirTags in luggage is a game changing experience. Last week I had the unfortunate experience of having a flight canceled and had to extend my trip by a night. This meant passing through Canadian customs to reclaim my checked bag. Since my bags weren’t arriving from a flight, there was no signage telling me where my bag would be....

If you are unfamiliar with APIs, "What is an API" might be helpful pre-reading. My recent open sourcing of api-sports, a ruby gem that simplifies usage of the API-SPORTS.io sports data API, clarified for me that the well documented and repetitive nature of API library creation makes it a perfect use case for AI automation. It can be he...

TL;DR: I was unfamiliar with American "Moneyline" odds formatting and open sourced oddx to simplify switching between formats (e.g. +300 » 3/1). Until recently I was unfamiliar with American "Moneyline" sporting odds (e.g. +300). Having grown up in Ireland I'm much more familiar with "fractional" presentation of odds (e.g. 3/1 aka "3 t...

Halloween was a real life nightmare for me last year. I had to say goodbye to Jameson, my thirteen year old Yellow Labrador and best friend. The sense of loss is intense and I’ve been reflecting on what Jameson thought me about dog ownership. Rule 1. Train early and often. Compound Interest has been described as the eighth wonder of th...

“What product impressed you the most last week?” is a question I’ve asked myself for some time. In January 2022 the answer was obvious, “Wordle – A Daily Word Game". At the time I answered: “Wordle has taken the world by storm and is incredibly elegant. It's so successful that when you Google “Wordle” you see a doodle emulating Wordle’...