Warning: self-indulgent and strange (a two-for-one) I’ve been spending a lot of time at my keyboard this summer. OK, that’s nothing new: as a scientist, I write papers and grant proposals and reports and more; and I write this blog; and I write books. Books are the theme, this summer. I’m working, bizarrely, on three […]| Scientist Sees Squirrel
A couple weeks ago we had close to 9 hours of downtime. Some kind of meltdown in the datacenter in Newark where our servers live. A lot of websites/apps were affected, which I guess lessens the shame of it, though it’s embarrassing we’re not more robust to this kind of thing. Anyway, check out status.beeminder.com...| blog.beeminder.com
We keep raising the price of Beemium (currently $64/month as I write this). When we do, we grandfather existing users for a year. Most businesses warn everyone when they raise prices. It’s a classic Act Now inducement: lock in the old price before it’s too late. We don’t do that for the Beemium price...| blog.beeminder.com
[ This is a lightly edited internal post we've made public.] Last week we had booths at DevConf Joburg, and DevConf Cape Town. They’re two ZA events run by the same crew with the same speakers, two days and 1400kms apart. The organisers set a bar in ZA for putting on polished and well-run events. Where the…| Thinkst Thoughts
Most security products are terrible. For years our industry has managed to get by because our products were mandated by someone or some regulation, and users were trained to accept that security and usability were necessary trade-offs. This was just the prevailing truth. One of the reasons we always promote hacker-led companies is because hackers delight in challenging accepted truths. We think this applies as much to product design as it does to smashing the stack. In a few months, Thinkst w...| Thinkst Thoughts
The golden mean of Beeminder: If you never derail, dial up your bright red lines — if you’re derailing all the time, dial them down. Thanks to felixm and others in the forum for inspiring this post. The previous blog post in our series on how derailing is good-actually (see the sidebar for a review)...| blog.beeminder.com
Remember Fractional Beeminding? We’ve been putting it to great use for such goals as Our meta goal to keep churning out autodata integrations Project Euler, and Workerbee-Visible Improvements. A key clarification before reviewing how it works: fractional beeminding doesn’t mean beeminding something with...| Beeminder Blog
Welcome, readers, to what may be the final week of Wings Over Scotland. We’ve been covering the Scottish Government’s horrific, draconian Hate Crime Act for almost four years now. But u…| Wings Over Scotland