Links and Notes - April 29th 2021

The first skipped day

Since March 19th I haven't skipped a single day of daily Links and Notes. Until yesterday. The truth is, that with all the basecamp stuff going down, I just didn't have it in me to do a Links and Notes post. That said, I don't feel bad at all about it.

Instead of letting those thoughts roil inside of me unproductively though, I took it, munged it together, and created my first single topic post since I wrote Merkle trees and voting in March. It felt good, if a little rushed. I still stuck to my single post per day goal and got it out yesterday. Thanks to the experience, I have a few reflections.

Firstly, I think it's fine to follow the principle of a single post per day, no matter which type it is. On a day where I want to post a larger single topic write up, it's fine to skip a Links and Notes. If I ever get to the point where I'm writing more single topic posts than Links and Notes type ones, I think I'll be pretty happy with myself. It's fine though to post both types on the same day. As long as I try my best to hold on to the ideal of 1 day, 1 post minimum.

Second, I think in the future, I'd like to have longer form posts written in the background with at least 2 to 4 days of editing time. I write the post, step away from it for 1 to 2 days, and come back to edit it with fresh eyes. I can afford the kinds of errors that slip into the Links and Notes because the material is light weight. I'm not fussed that for one day I failed to link to my citations. But in a larger post? I'd want it to be intentionally thought through. This seems obvious, but yesterday's somewhat rushed post was a good reminder to myself of the value of taking time to write, and then edit before publishing.

Basecamp follow up

After yesterday's post on Basecamp, I felt like I was finally able to let go of my feelings of being unsettled with all these developments. I'm not happy of course. But I am, as pretentious as this might sound, at peace with it. As I mention in my little essay, I can respect and uphold all the good things I learnt from David and Jason a long time ago. And I can do that while acknowledging how poorly led the company seems to be. Moving on, I'm basicaly accepting that David and Jason are no longer role models in terms of wisdom in operating a business. And here's what moving on looks like

For me personally, this does mean that I'll continue to promote the ideas of shape up while acknowledging that they've been created by deeply flawed people. So even for my personal projects, I'm going to keep going ahead with my plans of using Shape Up style cycles and Shape Up terminology to discuss it.

I'm also going out looking for people from a minority background who are leading their own companies. I want to learn from them and how they manage these kinds of cultures at the work place.

And finally, I'm consdering moving away from hey mail. It feels like a decent idea to vote for ideas with dollars. The challenge is not the feature set though. It's that I'm still looking for other email providers with policies that I support. Policies like privacy. I wouldn't migrate from hey to gmail for example. That would be a step backwards. So far, what I've come to realise is just how opaque most companies are. Makes this kind of comparison doubly difficult.

Platformer discord

Today had a fun event for me. I'm a subscriber of Casey Newton's newsletter called Platformer. A week or so ago, he created a discord for subscribers to come and join. After much forgetting of the email, I finally rememberd it this morning and joined in, and there's so much happening! It's amazing.

From places to discuss the daily newspaper, to paid member only channels, to spaces that allow you to freely share things you've been working on. Reminds me of the IRC days in some way. That spirit really is alive and kicking. The only downside? The amount of categorization in there is too much to handle.

This afternoon I wanted to discuss David who is continuing to be immovable with regards to the recent decisions at Basecamp. But after going through each channel, I realised I didn't know which one to post it in at all. There seem to be multiple candidates. I really hope Casey looks into this sooner rather than later.

This blog doesn't have a comment box. But I'd love to hear any thoughts y'all might have. Send them to [email protected]

Previous links and notes (April 27th)

Next links and notes (April 30th)

Posted on April 29 2021 by Adnan Issadeen