About a week ago, we had a retro. One of the things that was brought up was the sense that management felt that the team was not delivering as much as we could be. There are a number of reasons for this. For one, the higher ups work in Perth, a good 3,452 KM away from Melbourne. Another was that a lot of the work the team deals with is experimental in nature: more R&D vs. product development (a large portion of it involves dealing with a lot of barely supported, and completely undocumented APIs for MacOS).

Nevertheless, it was a bit of a downer that management felt this way. A solution proposed by a team member was to maintain a work log. Doing so would give the product owner, who works in Perth, the ammunition needed to push back on the notion that the team was just sitting on their hands. Prior to the pandemic, I started keeping a bullet journal, which helped me keep on top of things that I needed to do. But this would been different: it would essentially be keeping a log of what I did, and how I did it.

Last week I started to do this. I took a silly little web-app that I built for maintaining a “now” page (which I never used), and started to use it a bit more like a journal. I added it as a web panel in Vivaldi so that I could open it whenever I was in the browser. Every so often while I’m working on a task, I would quickly jot down a paragraph of what I just did. If I got stuck, I would write down what the problem is and my thoughts on how I can get out of it. I originally thought about setting up a reminder to do this like once every 30 minutes, but I found that simply journalling the thoughts as they come work quote well. At the end of the day I usually had at-least 3 bullet points on what I was working on (the record was 12) and at the beginning of the next day, I cut-and-pasted these bullet points into the Jira work log.

It’s too early to say whether this would help dispel the notion that the team is not delivering; we may get an update from the product owner when the next retro comes around. But I’ve found the process actually quite useful for myself. I’ve forgotten how beneficial it is to write my thoughts down as they come, and I’ve never used a process like this before: everything up to date has been simply todo items or scrawls of the next task to look at.

I learnt this morning that this is not a new concept. Dave Winer wrote a blog post about this in 2009, called Narrate Your Work which talks about how he adopted this practice at UserLand. I guess the same thing could be helpful here. After all, you could probably say the place I work at is distributed in nature, given that there exist a whole continent between the two offices.

It’s only been a week so the habit has not fully settled in but I hope to continue to do this.

Listening to episode #430 of ATP yesterday, it was kind of shocking to hear the loss of good will experienced by the hosts towards Apple and their developer relations. I can’t say that I blame them though. Although John’s point about lawyers making the case for Apple is a good one, I do get the same feeling that Marco does about Apples opinion about developers, which is not a positive one.

It feels a lot like Apple believes that developers building on their platform owe them everything to them, and that without Apple none of these businesses would exist at all. It does feel a lot like they are entitled to a cut of everything that is happening on their platform. It does feel a lot like they think a developer releasing their app for free on the App Store is an ungrateful free-loader, that is taking advantage of all their hard work building the platforms and developer toolkits. This is not just from what’s coming up during the Epic-Apple lawsuit discovery. Remember what happened to Basecamp last year, when tried to release a new version of their Hey iOS app.

None of these is accurate in the remotest sense. Although it is true that some of these business may not be around if iOS was ever invented, it’s not to say that these developers wouldn’t be doing something else. Also, these developers DO pay for the privilege to build on their platform. Let’s not forget the $99.00 USD ($149.00 AUD) that these developers pay yearly, not to mention all the hardware they buy to run XCode and these other tools. And it’s not like any of these tools wouldn’t exist at all if these devs were free to use another IAP provider. Apple, I assume, would like something like XCode to exist so that they can build their own apps.

I hope people in Apple are listening to this. Anti-trust regulation aside, they are doing themselves a massive disservice by treating their developers like this. These people are their biggest evangelists. I’m not sure it will come to the point where they will abandon the iOS platform, at least not at this stage. But I could foresee these developers being hesitant to adopt any new app platforms that Apple release, say a future AR platform that will feature hardware devices.

Yesterday, @Munish had the courage to share his podcast subscriptions¹. Sensing an opportunity to talk about with what I’m currently listening to, even though it may reveal more about myself that I’m usually comfortable with, I’m taking up his dare and sharing mine.

So, here is my podcast roll as of early May 2021:

The shows above can roughly be divided up into the following categories:

Technology: This is a topic that I’m very interested in so there are fair few of these. A lot of them are Apple centric, but this is more of an accident than by design. The second podcast that I started regularly listening to was The Talk Show since I was a casual reader of Daring Fireball at the time (and I still am). That opened me up to ATP, which led to a bunch of Relay.fm shows.

Business: These could probably be lumped into technology, but are focused more on the business side of things rather than product development. Ben Thompson shows up a lot here, with Exponent, Dithering, and the Stratechery daily update my regular gotos. The release of that last one helped set some new routines while I was working from home last year. There’s a decent collection of shows from indy developers here as well.

Science, History, and Philosophy: These are where the real heavy podcast listening comes in, the shows that are 2 to 4 hours long and go deep into a particular topic or event. I have to be in the right kind of mood for these one. Key drivers here are Making Sense, Mindscape and Hardcore History.

Politics and Society: I am somewhat interested in US politics, which could explain the shows that appear in this category. Deep State Radio is one that I still listen to occasionally. Also of note is the NPR Planet Money podcast, which was the first podcast that I’ve ever subscribed to. A recent addition is the ABC Coronacast which provides a decent briefing of the coronavirus pandemic in Australia.

Popular Culture: This is probably where all the Incomparable shows come in, when I’m in the mood for something lighthearted and funny. My usual goto’s there are the Incomparable Game Show, Robot or Not and Pants in the Boot. One or two Relay.fm shows fall in here as well, including Reconcilable Differences, which is a favourite of mine.

Micro.blog: The final category is more-or-less podcasts that I’ve subscribed to while spending time on Micro.blog. This includes shows like the Micro Monday podcast, but also shows from those on Micro.blog like Core Intuition and Hemispheric Views.

So that’s it. There are a fair few subscriptions listed above, not all of them I regularly listen to. I guess I should probably unsubscribe from those that I haven’t listen to for a while. I probably keep them around for the same reason why I keep RSS feeds around: just in case something worth listening to pops up in there.

I’ve been thinking about the incident at Basecamp for most of the week. I wanted to write something about it earlier, after hearing about the policy changes on Tuesday, but I’d figure that it would probably be best to wait a bit and learn more about the issue first. The last thing I wanted to do is add one more knee-jerk reaction to the mix during the heat of the moment.

But it is something that I want to comment on. I’ve only recently started following the writing of DHH and Jason Fried but I am aware of their reputation in both their approach to business and their dealings in the open-source community. To hear of a scandal form a business founded by these two took me aback. That’s probably why I’m writing this post at all. Hearing news like this from companies as large as Facebook or Google, with tens of thousands of employees, doesn’t surprise me as much as something arising from a company of about sixty people.

The thing about being on the outside looking in is that you have an imperfect picture of the whole incident. And even after reading the open letter, the report from Casey Newton, and the response from DHH, it’s still not the full picture, as you cannot be inside the head of those involved. You can only work with what you read, and how it shapes your view of the principal actors that lives inside your head. This, along with the current environment that this event occurred in, makes it difficult for me to comment on the matter.

But I do see a few things that are regrettable. It’s regrettable that such a thing like the Best Customer Names list exists. Far be it from me to be above making light of those that I deal with on a day-to-day basis, that such a list exited seemed like a step too far, particularly when it deals with those that you are being paid to serve. I can understand if this was a small startup with a handful of employees working hard to get it off the ground, and there was a need to vent. But for a company of sixty, especially one that thinks highly about how they operate they write blog posts about, it strikes me as unprofessional, and it does them no credit.

It’s also regrettable that this matter could not be have been dealt with internally.
One thing that struck me was how long the build up to this policy change was. It did not happen overnight; clearly something was brewing in Basecamp for a little while. And although I recognise that there were attempts to settle the matter internally, with the list removed and an apology from the founders, I also recognise that we are dealing with people with very strong personalities that are not afraid to air their opinions. So I wonder whether or not it could have remained an internal matter at all. Nevertheless, it’s in the public now, with the associated backlash and loss of credibility.

Which brings me to the third regrettable thing, which is the ban on political discussion. In the abstract, this is not something that I personally support; a company does not operate in a vacuum after all. Maybe for a company like Basecamp it could act as bit of a circuit breaker if deployed for a little while; I get the sense that the founders thought similar. But it is a shame that it got to that level, and I do hope that they reverse it once things settle down. I think it’s good of Basecamp to offer severance packages to those employees that disagree with this measure, and wish to find work elsewhere. That indicates that they are willing to back their employees decision to leave, rather than leave their employees with a bit of a Sophies’s choice situation.

So, what will I be doing going forward? I’ll probably continue to read posts from Jayson and DHH, and continue to use their open-source frameworks.
I’m not a paying customer of Basecamp, although I do use their free offering, and I’m planning to continue doing so. Of course, I can understand if others choose a different course of action. Although I’m not a fan of making decisions in the heat of the moment, I can understand and respect the decisions made now, given that more on the incident has surface. I will be interested in seeing how Basecamp operates going forward. An event like this could have a lasting impact on a company, it’s founders, and it’s employees, and it would be interesting in seeing how to move on from it.