Great creative work is usually the product of a single person
Make It Work vs. Make It Good
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
Works in Progress: The Long Journey to Doing Good Better
The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know. — Albert Einstein
Quality Wednesdays: How we trained our team to see what doesn’t work - Linear
In early 2023 at an offsite in Tenerife, our European engineering team did a series of exercises that ended up changing the way we work.
How to win a best paper award (or, an opinionated take on how to do important research)
An opinionated perspective on how to do important research that makes a difference (and sometimes win awards).
Project Wonderful
Project Wonderful was an advertising service created by programmer and webcomic author Ryan North in late 2006.[1] Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, the service supported thousands of webcomics and blogs with auctioned online advertisements, until it was shut down in 2018.
Please stop multitasking. I’m begging you. Please.
The greatest trick we ever pulled on ourselves as knowledge workers was convincing ourselves we could juggle multiple projects with no consequences.
I automated my job (and it made me a better leader)
Explore how my day as a senior leader looks now that I use 40 automations to help, and learn more about some of my favorites.
Make one customer happy
Find one customer that is funny and motivating to work with, and learn about all their problems, select one and solve it. Simple.
How to Make Remote Work: Part Two, Zulip
How I've learned to be productive working from home. I'll write a second guide about how I think about remote work as a manager and the processes Monadical have put into place to make things work for us.
Bob Moesta - Jobs-to-be-Done Find Out the Why!
Making Slides
I was asked to give a short talk in my Departmental Proseminar yesterday on the topic of giving presentations, and specifically about making slides effective. There is more than one way to give a good talk, and there is more than one way to make “good slides” or—better—make good use of slides and other material you might want to show people. So the things I’ll talk about and especially the specific techniques I’ll discuss are selected from many good ways to present yourself and your work. Presenting is a two-sided process, where you should be comfortable with what you are saying (and how you’re saying it), on one side, and where your audience should be able to follow along and understand your message, on the other.
Developing creative identity
I was a theoretical physicist from 1992 to 2007. It was a romantic activity, exploring the fundamental nature of the cosmos! I became a university professor, wrote papers and books, and got to explore some of the most beautiful ideas ever discovered. In parallel, I also developed a fascination with the social systems humanity uses to make knowledge. Systems like the university or peer review are immensely deep inventions: our discovery system is itself one of the great inventions of humanity! But I believed a radically better discovery system must be possible. I became obsessed with this idea, eventually giving up tenure to work on it1. My first big project was to write a book helping develop and spread the fundamental ideas underlying the modern open science movement.