“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” – Gertrude Stein My first job as a product manager was in games. I worked at Playdom, Zynga’s primary competitor du
Canadian assistant referee Joe Fletcher has seen it all — World Cups, Champions Leagues, fixtures in every confederation … the biggest matches the world will ever know. A FIFA-listed official for more than a decade, Fletcher announced his retirement late last year, leaving the touch-line with an…
The massive disruption that ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft have visited on the taxi industry stirs up so many conflicting feelings for me. I use these services all the time but the larger impact of my patronage has been weighing on my conscience more and more lately. Not least because, from a…
(And what you can do about it) The Book of Life (1898) There’s a term we use in software design called the happy path . It describes a best-case scenario, in which customers use a product exactly as i
Mark Geiger is the only living American to referee a World Cup match. He'll do it again this summer in Russia. PATRIK STOLLARZ/AFP/Getty Images This story is from the winter/spring 2018 issue of Howle
At the beginning of 2017, my company started experimenting with an 8-week work cycle. The cycle looks like this: (You can read all about the what and why in this detailed article here if you want.) We
“As design has become commodified and weaponised, the response from designers has largely been to arrange chairs on the Titanic.”
‘On Weaponised Design' – an essay I wrote for @Info_Activism’s 'Seen Through Machines' – is out today:
https://t.co/5GrUwYlb3r
Meg Robichaud Follow Jul 24, 2017 · 13 min read **Before I go any further, let me tell you who the “we” is in this story. Our incredible team of illustrators at Shopify include myself ; Ryan Coleman , Holly Schofield & Erin Moncrieff ; with occasional help from Blake Stevenson & Alek…
Randomly think of a thing. Let it bump around your head a bit. If the bumping gets too loud, start writing the words with the nearest writing device. See how far you get. The more words usually mean a higher degree of personal interest. Stop when it suits you. Wait for time to pass and see if the…
The 4 line in the Bronx. Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times Feature It built the city. Now, no matter the cost — at least $100 billion — the city must rebuild it to survive. The 4 line in the Bronx. Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times L ong before it became an archaic, filthy,…
I n the winter of 1906, the year San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake and SOS became the international distress signal, Britain's Punch magazine published a dark joke about the future of technology. Under the headline, "Forecasts for 1907," a black and white cartoon showed a well-dressed…
If you want to be amongst the best paid people in software, you have to move to San Francisco. Or do you? The roots of Basecamp are in Chicago. It’s where the business started, it’s where our only office is located, it’s where we do all our meet-ups. But more than just a geographical connection,…
"I shouldn’t have cared but I do not have the maturity to be graceful when someone is so wildly wrong on the internet." - @rgay on truth for #WordsThatMatter2017 https://t.co/QbQfLPg4dU
Why are we still doing this to each other? It’s thankfully been a really long time since I’ve been invited to a recurring meeting. But I heard a couple mentions of them last week, and it brought back terrible pre-Basecamp memories. It reminded me that not everyone is so lucky — many people still…
Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently UPDATE: We’ve written an entire book on this topic! Read it online: Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters . Agile started off as a set of values . Values are subtle and abstract, so as agile spread, what spread wasn’t the…
Today, there are nearly 30,000 U.S federal websites with almost no consistency between them. Between the hundreds of thousands of government employees working in technology, there’s nothing in common with how these websites are built or maintained. As a result, the government is spending…
One of the most common questions I’m asked is: “How do I find my purpose?” The askers seem bored with their current jobs. They feel lost. They want to work on something that has more importance to the world. On November 18, 2007, Dennis Quaid’s infant twins were given two injections of Heparin —…
Sometimes our smart phones are our friends, sometimes they seem like our lovers, and sometimes they’re our dope dealers. And no one, in the past 12 months at least, has done more than Tristan Harris to explain the complexity of this relationship. Harris is a former product manager at Google who has…
Thigh-High Politics is an op-ed column by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca that breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense. More than ever, our cultural conversation is taking place on Twitter and Facebook — and yet, women who are…
Whenever I speak at a conference, I try to catch a few of the other presentations. I tend to stand in the back and listen, observe, and get a general sense of the room. Lately, I’ve been hearing something that disturbs me. A lot of entrepreneurs onstage have been bragging about not sleeping, telling…
A few of us at Basecamp were recently discussing how decisions get made to “green light” new projects, and I came to the conclusion that it boils down a simple rule: If you can make a decision and you don’t think it’s going to get you fired, just do it. Basecamp operates without much in the way of…
W hen you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days. Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times,…
When tens of millions of Americans tune into Fox on July 15, 2018, they will likely hear an American call the World Cup final for the first time since 2006. The man on the call is likely to be John Strong, a 31-year-old Oregonian who has undergone a meteoric rise through the broadcasting world in…
.@ShaunKing: GOP can never say they care about family values again for embracing Trump and shunning the Obamas https://t.co/mLg3jxOqlV https://t.co/O56OmbJPBP
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