A vague idea, that turned into a Slack channel, that maybe is ready to be more than that.

The idea is to have a group of people that easily form projects together without too much haggling. It’s called Upside, because that’s the thing that makes it work — everything we do together has to have upside for all participants.

My idea for this is pretty extreme — what if the entire company was formed and built through shared upside of individual components?

This idea is nascent, but not theoretical. It’s how Better Programming, Better Marketing, the Better Programming Job Board, Moneyball and Habit Coach Certification were built, launched and are currently run. …

This epic Javascript book showed up on my Twitter feed, published in three places: Medium, Leanpub & Amazon.

It seems obvious to me that there is a pretty big world of books that are going to get published to Medium in serialized form, either to increase reach or earnings or both.

I’m helping get some books republished onto Medium and so I wanted to run a quick little experiment myself.

Here’s Frankenstein converted to feel Medium native. Does it work?

Right after the 2016 election, Sarah and I went to a meeting of Stand Up for Racial Justice. It’s a good group that, as I understand it, is about amplifying the work of other groups. That makes sense to me as a goal.

But what I really took away from that meeting was a phrase from one of the speakers, “Pick a lane and fill it.”

If you start to pay attention to politics in your country you’ll quickly realize that there is a lot that’s in need of fixing. …

I spent the morning writing and then deleting Facebook posts about the implications of the election.

One reason I didn’t post is out of respect. My life was going to be good either way this election turned out. I’m in the chosen crowd and there was, as of recently, no backlash against white guys like me. So I wanted to try to pause and listen and hear the people who might actually face severe repercussions from the outcome of a US election or who might know personally the type of Cuban American in Florida who voted Republican, etc. …

I’m a bit more excited to meet a celebrity than your average person, like maybe a 6.5 on a scale of 10.

Unless that celebrity is in tech, because then I’m not excited even a little bit.

My friends in NYC like to introduce me as Jack Dorsey’s last boss. (That’s the name of a tech celebrity if you don’t know). And that’s true-ish, but it’s a ridiculous non-accomplishment in my book. The truth of it is that I used to be a middle manager and Jack used to be an individual contributor. So what?

But my dad is maybe one of the least excitable people I’ve ever run across when it comes to celebrity. …

And yes, I get it was Uncle Ben who said this.

With great power comes great responsibility.

Most people know this phrase but as a culture we don’t exactly push it as a norm. But it always seems relevant to me as the guiding principle to sift through cancel culture in particular.

(I’m pro the actual culture that cancel culture is a pejorative for. It’s just standards and consequences, and it’s very rare that the consequence is actual cancelation. But back to my point about Spiderman.)

Somewhere in the Hackernews community there was some reaction to a move to ‘cancel’ Richard Stallman. He’s an MIT guy and tech luminary and I can’t, honestly even remember what he said that got people riled up. …

Siobhan O'Connor kicked this off here and of people I know, I see Michael Sippey posting here and Harris Sockel here.

Of course I am down with this because Sarah Milstein and I have played our own similar game called “Two Good Things” every night since 2006-ish. (With the exception of one epic adventure at a Bachelor party in Las Vegas where I was “feeling ill” and couldn’t call home)

What’s Nice?

1. Eloise. Every transition at home, say putting a book down, standing up to get the TV remote, going to get a glass of water, even heading to the restroom, in every one of these moments, a 110lb St. Bernard/Pyrenees mix will magically appear, her head at perfect petting height. She is very good natured, pads around the house quietly, and will sneak up on you and place her giant head right into your hand. …