Over the past few months, I’ve been tweeting out some coupon codes. I’ve created a Storify below to collect some of my favorites. Continue reading →

On the most recent episode of Connected, the hosts talked about this week’s Apple rumor: a new, hyper-skinny, 12” MacBook Air. While a lot of talk about this unicorn of a machine has been focused around its supposed “only one port” design, Stephen and Federico had a short side-conversation about whether Apple would ever get around to hosting Time Machine backups in iCloud. While Stephen was pretty adamantly against the idea and pointed out the differences between OS X backups and iOS backups, Federico seemed a little more willing to entertain the possibility. Both got tantalizingly close to a solution, so I wanted to flesh it out a little more here. Continue reading →

Well, I did it. After spending my entire adult life working in massive corporations, I took the plunge and joined a startup exactly 248 days ago. It’s been a terrifying, exhilarating, exhausting, incredible ride so far, so I wanted to take a minute to write down a few things I’ve learned.

• Amazing people make all the difference. There have been a few moments in the last eight months where I have no idea how I would have made it without the rest of the Flywheel team. When you never have to worry about coworkers carrying their weight, it’s a totally freeing experience.

• Young companies are exhausting. I’ve never worked harder in my life, even when I was helping launch iPhones for Apple. You’re being pulled in a million different directions, and everyone has to wear every hat at various points during the day. I’ve never been more mentally exhausted than after a couple recent projects. I never used to understand how people could get “burnt out” working a job they love, but I get it now. Which is why:

• Culture is critical. When everyone is staying late to work on support tickets, or landing back home at midnight after a whirlwind trip across the country, being just “coworkers” doesn’t cut it. Even little things, like eating lunch together or watching a stupid video helps. Inside jokes, musical tastes, and pronunciation of “GIF” can be just as important as someone’s skill at debugging PHP.

Coming from a couple Fortune 500 companies before this, I was more than a little nervous to work for a young company. It’s a massive change to be given freedom to shape your job and the company you work for, and I can’t imagine not having this freedom ever again.

Bottom line, I’ve never been happier. Here’s to 2015.

The delivery room is clean, a nearly suffocating whiteness enveloping the occupants. The expectant mother, screaming through the agony of labor, begs the engineers for something to dull the pain.
Their silence is deafening.
She screams again; one last push and the first genetically modified human has entered this world.
The engineers look down – the look of disappointment written in their eyes.
“What is it? What’s wrong?!?”
“THIS UPDATE INCLUDES MINOR IMPROVEMENTS.”

The prairie is dry, the ground cracked from a millennia of over-farming. A famished child, stomach distended and covered in filth, crawls through the dirt. She bumps into something soft; a pair of denim pants ending in Adidas sandals.
“We’re so hungry. Have you brought something for us?”
The man’s head almost imperceptibly moves. A nod, only visible from the slight rustling of his hoodie.
He reaches into his pockets, dropping something into the girl’s outstretched hands. It’s small, and impossibly warm.
She considers it, unsure.
“What is it, sir?”, she asks.
“BUG FIXES AND PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS.”

A cattle prod jabs out, a painful reminder of their status as the last humans on Earth.
“Have mercy!”, they plead to the robotic sentries.
No response. Their algorithms are programmed only for improving engagement with the brand, not for sympathy.
“When will the suffering end?!?”, the refugees scream.
The bots pause. They seem to consider the situation. Dusty speakers crackle to life, breaking their hundred-year silence.
“TO MAKE OUR APP BETTER FOR YOU, WE RELEASE UPDATES EVERY TWO WEEKS.” Continue reading →

• Bëspoke – An artisanal bakery made entirely of reclaimed Herman Miller office furniture.
• Dank – A speakeasy in the basement of Bëspoke. You’ve probably never heard of it.
• SaaS – Sandwich As A Service. Soggy, day-old sub sandwiches, delivered right to your door. They might even get there on the day you requested.
• TurnkeyDesignTalks.io – Speaking at a design conference? Don’t know what to say? Feel an uncontrollable rage any time you see bad kerning? TDT.io has your back.
• Kevin.webcam – All intern, all the time.
• The Basic Podcast – A weekly panel discussion around the Starbucks drink of the week, and how it relates to Taylor Swift’s next album. The hosts literally can’t even.
• MyChemicalPoetry.tumblr.com – A weblog for short-form prose, written exclusively by teenagers whose parents “just don’t understand”.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks looking at new vehicles (mine is about to bite the dust), and one thing is a constant: nearly every single one has a terrible in-dash system for entertainment and navigation. After chewing it over for a couple days, here’s a short list of things that suck about cars: Continue reading →

I, like thousands of others, saw The Dark Knight Rises at midnight on release day. While I thought the film was great, one scene really bothered me: at the climax of the movie, Batman straps a nuclear bomb to his helicopter and flies it out to sea in an attempt to save Gotham City. I decided to do some math on whether or not the climax of the movie was actually plausible. Continue reading →