Rolandt

	sillygwailo shared this story from OmniFocus – tyler.io:
	I don't use OmniFocus for recurring checklists, but this got me considering it.

I’m a firm believer in the whole mind like water spiel that David Allen preaches through GTD. I jumped on the Gettings Things Done bandwagon around 2004 I think – the first of my two senior years in college. And here we are in 2020, which means I’ve been practicing this methodology (with varying levels of success) for over fifteen years. And now, looking back, I can see that it was probably 2010 – six years in! – before I became truly comfortable with letting go; before that whole mind like water state of flow finally became second nature.

For me, and I guess most people doing the GTD thing, getting to that point meant fully trusting your system. And that’s exactly what I mean when I say “letting go” above. You have to train yourself to be diligent enough that putting everything into your system becomes habit. And you have to trust your system (paper, digital, whatever) enough so that all those open loops in your head fall away and you can just let go and go about your life confidently.

Years ago, I worked on a piece of medical software that was designed to ensure surgeons operated on the correct side and limb of the patient’s body. It’s the 21st century; you’d think the medical industry would have fixed that problem by now, right? But even after verbally confirming with the patient before surgery, and then even after marking the incision site with a Sharpie, doctors still occasionally operate on the wrong part of the body. The software I helped build aimed to solve this problem by being a glorified, cloud-synced checklist that hospitals could buy for tens of thousands of dollars per license. (Enterprise software sales is ridiculous.) And I’ll be damned, but the research showed that medical facilities using our software reported a statistical decrease in operating room screwups.

That point of that story is to say that checklists – particularly ones that recur and involve multiple, detailed steps – can be an amazing tool to have at your disposal. And learning to use them was a huge part in my own journey towards letting go of all the crap in my head.

And so, for a long time now, I’ve been using checklists for all of the recurring, multi-step projects in my life. Here are some examples:

• Releasing an update to one of my Mac apps is a twelve step process. Some of it can be automated – but not all. And if I forget or mess up any one of those steps, it could botch the whole release.
• At the start of every month, I sort, organize, and backup all of the photos and videos my family took during the previous month. Because of the sheer quantity of data we generate every 30 days – and also the fact that I’m slightly crazy and don’t trust any single cloud provider with my memories – that backup process involves syncing tens of gigabytes of data and a bunch of shell commands. Once again, it’s not something I trust myself to get right every time on my own.
• Every three months I have to renew and ship an updated SSL certificate inside one of my apps. If I forget, or if I mess up, my customers won’t be able to get their work done. This is also another fairly involved process that I can’t easily automate, so I have to do it by hand.

Originally, and for nearly a decade, all of those checklists lived inside OmniFocus as recurring projects. And by and large that worked really, really well. But in early 2019, when I found myself with a bunch of free time on my hands, I took a week to reevaluate all of the systems, inboxes, apps, and habits I use to get life done. One of the best changes that came out of that week was a new approach to handling those repeating projects. And it makes use of two of my very-most-favorite apps: TaskPaper and Keyboard Maestro.

They key insight I had was that while my checklists in OmniFocus were definitely helping make sure I do the things I’m supposed to do, they were limiting in two ways:

1. Tasks in OmniFocus aren’t very good at holding detailed information about the task – information you might need to actually do the task. There are a few standard approaches to solving this limitation. OmniFocus does have a “Notes” field associated with each task, but it’s basically just a small textview – not really anything you would want to type in or view a sizable amount of text with. Or, you could use the “Notes” field as a pointer to link to some other actual document in your reference system. Many apps now let you copy a unique URL that will link back to the source document. That’s super handy, but in practice I’ve always found it a bit clunky, clumsy, and fragile.
2. The other drawback to having everything in OmniFocus was that I was not capturing any of the metadata around those tasks as I completed them. When you mark a task complete in OmniFocus, the only thing that’s actually recorded is the completion date. If something unusual happens or goes wrong with one of my tasks, I don’t really have a way for my future self to reference or learn from the mistake. Or say everything went totally fine and normal, but I just need to store some piece of information particular to a task. Where does that go? Again, OmniFocus has that “Notes” field, but I just don’t find it very usable in practice – especially since the app isn’t really optimized for going back in time to reference past actions. (Nor should it be, really.)

To fix those two shortcomings, what I ended up doing was converting all of those recurring projects into TaskPaper documents. Each document contains all of the actions for the project, which of course can be nested and organized just like they were structured in OmniFocus. Then, back in OmniFocus, I deleted the project and replaced it with a single recurring task that reminds me when it’s time to start the project again.

When that time arrives, I make a duplicate of the template TaskPaper document just for that specific recurrence of the project and work my way through the checklist like normal. Having everything stored inside the TaskPaper document solves the two problems above.

1. It’s a plain text file that can be opened with TaskPaper or any other text editor. So, I’m free to add in as much supporting material for each task as I want. I can literally drop in paragraphs and paragraphs of prose between each task if I need to. Or, some of those projects might require technical details. I can just inline those in the document itself. The same goes for actual URLs linking to other supporting materials or websites.
2. If I need to take notes, remember anything about a particular task as it happens, or record the outcome or any results of the work, I store that in the document, too. That way, everything is self-contained and in the correct context if I ever need to reference what happened. And, again, since it’s all plain text – everything is easily searchable from Spotlight all the way down to grep.

After the project is complete, I file away the TaskPaper document for safe keeping.

So that’s the theory behind the system I’ve migrated to – and it works great. But what does it actually look like in practice? As an example, let’s look at my monthly project that backs up my family’s photos and videos. (My workflow is slightly insane, but I have “reasons”.) In OmniFocus, that project looked like this:

And that’s great. That gets the job done and makes sure I don’t miss a step. It also helps because some of these steps can take an hour or more of waiting around for data to transfer, so if I get distracted by something else while waiting, I know exactly where to pick back up from.

But, there’s also a lot of complexity behind each of those actions. The “configure server” step involves running a shell script. Where should that be stored? I find it’s a bit of a balancing act between keeping reference material contextualized alongside the task itself vs keeping it in some type of external storage (DEVONthink, Evernote, Apple Notes, Bear, etc). In this particular case, I like having it right there. And that’s not very easy with OmniFocus. (This isn’t me bitching about OF. I don’t think or know if it should even be a use case they support. There are better tools for that job, which is what I’m leading up to.)

Now, compare that to what the TaskPaper document for that project looks like:

Same thing – but now I can inline the information I need to complete each step. For this project, that happens to be all of the necessary shell commands.

So, , TaskPaper is great for this sort of thing. But as more and more of those documents are created each week and month, where do they all go? How are they managed, etc? Glad you asked.

They’re stored in a simple directory structure in a dedicated Dropbox folder, so they’re in sync and available on every device.

(I’ve removed a year’s worth of archives from that screenshot so you can see the full folder structure in a single image.)

It works like this:

• Lists is a top-level folder in my ~/Dropbox. The checklists that are active / incomplete and that I’m currently working on live in this folder.
  • _Templates stores the templates / original copies of the TaskPaper documents that I duplicate and work from.
  • _Archives is where the files go once they’re completed so I have a single place to search / reference in the future. Also, many times, it’s where incomplete lists go once I give up and abandon one for whatever reason – as is often the case when I just don’t get around to completely finishing my weekly review every Sunday.

Each file has the same name as the template it was duplicated from but with the current date prepended so I can keep track of things and also sort by date in Finder.

I know all of this may sound like overkill to lots of people (especially to my family and coworkers as I watch their eyes glaze over when I get excited and start rambling on about this stuff), but it keeps me on track. More importantly, because I have this system in place – one that works for my weird, specific way of doing things – it truly allows me to let go and do my work knowing that things won’t fall through the cracks.

When I first read the GTD book and was introduced to mind like water and all that stuff, the idea was fascinating to me because it echoed the feeling of flow that most developers (and tons of other creatives and professions, of course) strive to get into when doing focused work. And not having a bunch of baggage in your head about all the things you need to do but can’t yet actually do is freeing and makes it easier for me to do my best work.

Ok, enough philosophizing. Here’s the last thing. It’s a quick Keyboard Maestro macro I wrote that makes this workflow instant.

At any time on my Mac, I can hit ⌘⇧\ (my keyboard shortcut to bring up KM’s macro picker), type the name of a list template, and press ↵. Keyboard Maestro will duplicate the template, put it in the correct folder, give it the appropriate date formatted filename, and open it in TaskPaper.

The macro is smart in that you don’t have to manually specify each list you want to work with. Instead, just add a new template into the _Templates folder, and Keyboard Maestro will read its directory contents each time you run the macro. That way, everything’s always current and available.

And here’s the macro in all its glory, which you can download.

I just released a new plugin for Datasette, and it's pretty fun. datasette-search-all is a plugin written mostly in JavaScript that executes the same search query against every searchable table in every database connected to your Datasette instance.

You can try it out on my FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) search site, fara.datasettes.com - see Deploying a data API using GitHub Actions and Cloud Run for background on that project.

Here's a search for manafort across all four FARA tables (derived from CSVs originally pulled from the Justice Department bulk data site).

I've been planning to build cross-table search for Datasette for quite a while now. It's a potentially very difficult problem: searching a single table is easy, but the moment you attempt to search multiple tables you run into a number of challenges:

• Different tables have different columns. How do you present those in a single search interface?
• Full-text search relevance scores make sense within a single table (due to the statistics they rely on, see Exploring search relevance algorithms with SQLite) but cannot be compared across multiple tables.

I have an idea for how I can address these, but it involves creating a single separate full-text index table that incorporates text from many different tables, along with a complex set of indexing mechanisms (maybe driven by triggers) for keeping it up to date.

But maybe I was overthinking this?

While I stewed on the ideal way to solve this problem, projects like my FARA site were stuck without cross-table search. Then this morning I realized that there was another way: I could build pretty much the simplest thing that could possibly work (always a good plan in my experience).

Here's how the new plugin works: it scans through every table attached to Datasette looking for tables that are configured for full-text search. Then it presents a UI which can excute searches against ALL of those tables, and present the top five results from each one.

The scanning-for-searchable-tables happens in Python, but the actual searching is all in client-side JavaScript. The searches run in parallel, which means the user sees results from the fastest (smallest) tables first, then the larger, slower tables drop in at the bottom.

It's stupidly simple, but I really like the result. It's also a neat demonstration of running parallel SQL queries from JavaScript, a technique which I'm keen to apply to all sorts of other interesting problems.

JavaScript style

The JavaScript I wrote for this project is unconventional for 2020: it's a block of inline script on the page, using no libraries or frameworks, but taking advantage of modern niceties like backtick template literals and fetch().

The code is messy, short and extremely easy to change in the future. It doesn't require running a build tool. I'm pretty happy with it.

Adding a search form to the homepage

The other thing the plugin does is add a search box to the Datasette homepage (as seen on the FARA site) - but only if the attached databases contain at least one FTS-configured searchable table.

There are two parts to the implementation here. The first is a extra_template_vars() plugin hook which injects a searchable_tables variable into the hompage context - code here.

The second is a custom index.html template which ships with the plugin. When Datasette renders a template it looks first in the local --template-dirs folder (if that option was used), secondly in all of the installed plugins and finally in the Datasette set of default templates.

The new index.html template starts with {% extends "default:index.html" %}, which means it extends the default template that shipped with Datasette. It then redefines the description_source_license block from that template to conditionally show the search form.

I'm not at all happy with abusing description_source_license in this way - it just happens to be a block located at the top of that page. As I write more plugins that customize the Datasette UI in some way I continually run into this problem: plugins need to add markup to pages in specific points, but they also need to do so in a way that won't over-ride what other plugins are up to.

I'm beginning to formulate an idea for how Datasette can better support this, but until that's ready I'll be stuck with hacks like the one used here.

Using this with datasette-configure-fts and datasette-upload-csvs

The datasette-configure-fts plugin provides a simple UI for configuring search for different tables, by selecting which columns should be searchable.

Combining this with datasette-search-all is really powerful. It means you can dump a bunch of CSVs into Datasette (maybe using datasette-upload-csvs), select some columns and then run searches across all of those different data sources in one place.

Not bad for 93 lines of JavaScript and a bit of Python glue!

At first I was folling my eyes a bit as this article said things like "more concrete signs that your organisation isn’t nurturing a culture of innovation... include teams working in siloes, and decisions not being driven by data." But there's a nice turn about half way through where the author cites a Lawrie Phipps blog post (that I didn't see last fall when it came out) reflecting on eCampusOntario’s TESS2019 conference. "Phipps cites a successful ecosystem as 'creating an environment where people are able to perform, to do what they need to do, and where necessary reach into the community for support'. In simple terms: performance + creativity = innovation in practice." And this make a lot more sense to me than managerialism masquerading as innovation.

Working with Sephora on their community recently, I came across this message in the lobby:

[click here if the image doesn’t appear]

The line, “Even if we stumble, we will never stop building a community…” probably resonates with you as much as it does with me.

Be honest with your members. Mistakes will be made. People will sometimes get upset. But you’re part of a mission together to achieve something.

Even when you stumble, that mission remains.

In fact, when you stumble, only the mission remains.

Der Marshall Monitor II A.N.C. hat eine Taste hinter dem linken Ohr, mit dem man zwischen aktiver Geräuschunterdrückung und offenem Monitor umschalten kann. In meinem zweiten Review hatte ich beklagt, dass man damit das ANC nicht ganz abschalten kann. Die beiden anderen Modi taugen nämlich nicht, wenn es draußen stark weht. Die Windgeräusche am Mikro werden sonst nämlich verstärkt.

Mittlerweile habe ich einen Screenshot aus einem Manual erhalten, das mir nicht vorlag. Man kann ANC komplett abschalten, indem man den Knopf zwei Sekunden hält. Damit muss man nicht mehr die App auf dem Smartphone bemühen.

Das war die einige Nickeligkeit, die mich an dem neuen Monitor gestört hat. Ansonsten bin ich rundum zufrieden. Aktuell ist das mein liebstes Headset.

It was this quote in a tweet from Miles Berry that really made me sit up and take notice of the latest news about the Computing at School initiative:

“If computing increasingly means CS, it looks likely that hundreds of thousands of students, particularly girls and poorer students, will be disenfranchised from a digital education over the next few years.”

He was quoting an article from the New Statesman which can be found here. It describes the history of the rise of the CS curriculum in England. The key paragraph for me is:

The new curriculum was failing. While a tougher course had been introduced, few students were taking it and even fewer teachers could teach it. In many cases, even those who could felt uncomfortable doing so.

The government read the reports and has decided to respond. There’s now an enormous investment in England in trying to train new teachers. The question is whether that’s the right investment.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, the headline of this May 2019 article is “Teachers and students in decline: the computing ‘crisis’ in Scotland’s schools.”

Experts are urging the Scottish Government to take radical steps to boost computing science education to prevent the subject from being squeezed out of schools.

The teaching of computing in schools is in “crisis”, practitioners have told The Ferret, with classes shrinking and teachers in short supply. The latest official data shows that the number of children studying the subject declined last year, while the number of teachers has fallen over the last decade.

Despite a national focus on delivering science and technology education and economic development, schools are finding it increasingly difficult to teach computing science to young people, critics say.

Let’s explicitly consider the questions raised in these two articles. Have we defined CS education in such a way that it’s too hard to teach? That it’s not interesting to learn? Maybe that it’s too hard to learn?

I’ve been writing in the last few months about the surprisingly low uptake of CS education in the United States (for example, in this CACM Blog post). No more than 5% of high school students in any US state are getting any CS classes, from the data available. There is value in setting high standards for CS education (as Alan Kay has been arguing), but that’s an argument for the end goal. Where do we start with CS education? How quickly can and will students learn CS education? What does it mean for something to be too hard to teach or too hard to learn?

Overall, US is following a similar strategy as in England and Scotland for computing in K-12: standalone CS classes, heavy emphasis on in-service teacher development, and counting the number of students in CS classes and the number of teachers leading those classes. There is integrated CS in the US, but as far as I know, no state is tracking those numbers. Public policy tends to focus on things that can be measured. Most of the argument against integration says that too little CS is covered in integrated forms. 95% of US students getting no CS at all is even less coverage than CS in integrated forms.

Let’s consider two hypotheses:

Hypothesis #1: We know how to teach computer science in such a way that all students can learn what they need to be technically-literate citizens, or even to develop the prerequisite knowledge they need to be software professionals. We have not yet achieved this goal because we do not have enough teachers to implement the curriculum. Larger investments in teacher development (perhaps including stipends or better pay to CS teachers) would allow us to scale CS Ed to reach everyone.

Hypothesis #2: We have defined computer science education in a way that is too hard to teach (so too few teachers are unwilling to teach it), and that is too hard to learn (which includes not being motivating enough to recruit students or engage student interest in order to achieve learning).

Given the evidence we have in the US, England, and Scotland, which hypothesis is better supported? You may have a Hypothesis #3 or #4 which is also well-supported by the evidence — I am very interested in hearing it.

In general, we tend to take the “insider view” of CS Ed, as Kahneman warned about (see excerpt here). If you step outside CS Ed, are we making progress along a trajectory that leads to CS education for all? And how long is that trajectory? If you were an Education faculty member and learned that CS had less than 5% of US high school students enrolled, wouldn’t it be reasonable to consider it a fad and likely to pass?

As I wrote in my blog post about what I got wrong in the last decade, I no longer think that CS for All is a matter of access. We have to figure out how to improve participation. I’m in support of Hypothesis #2. We need to re-think what and how we teach CS education. Because of my work these days, I suspect that we made a mistake at the design level. I was involved in the early days of the AP CS Principles (AP CSP) process. Most of the AP CSP curricula I’m aware of were developed by and tested with some of the best CS teachers in the US. That design and development process doesn’t promise a curriculum that many teachers can teach and that most students will learn from.

I just got back from a three day visit in Norway, where they are about to roll-out an integration of CS activities (explicitly programming) into mathematics, science, music, and arts & crafts classes. (See workshop about this topic here.). Maybe that would result in more students learning some computer science. Did US, England, and Scotland make a mistake by emphasizing standalone CS classes over integration?

Hannah Davis works with machine learning, which relies on an input dataset to build a model of the world. Davis was working with a model for a while before realizing the underlying data was flawed:

This led to a perspective that has informed all of my work since: a dataset is a worldview. It encompasses the worldview of the people who scrape and collect the data, whether they’re researchers, artists, or companies. It encompasses the worldview of the labelers, whether they labeled the data manually, unknowingly, or through a third party service like Mechanical Turk, which comes with its own demographic biases. It encompasses the worldview of the inherent taxonomies created by the organizers, which in many cases are corporations whose motives are directly incompatible with a high quality of life.

Tags: bias, Hannah Davis

The Commit vision is to create a frictionless path between software engineers and world-changing opportunities. We want to create an ideal career experience for every software engineer, regardless of the group(s) they belong to. So how does a small startup of mostly over-represented men create an experience that caters to everyone in an equal and equitable way? We find the beginning and do the work.

Today is International Women’s Day. This year’s theme is “I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights.” For too long, much of tech industry culture has ignored the long standing issues of gender disparity.

A month ago, I joined six other team members from Commit to attend the Women In Tech Regatta conference. This was an opportunity for both women and men to learn about topics and issues that women in tech care about. We left the conference with new knowledge, and an increased drive to create a diverse and inclusive workplace.

For the men attending, some of us felt intimidated finding ourselves one of only a few other men in some sessions. Speaking with women throughout the two days, any discomfort was replaced by a renewed drive to be a part of these important conversations, to endeavour to understand the issues, perspectives and ideas, and to accept that this mission is not about being comfortable, it’s about creating a better space for everyone.

There was a structure to the conference sessions unlike others I have attended. All conference talks were two hours in length, and each one had part of the talk dedicated to breakout groups of attendees. This created a positive sense of connection I have not experienced at other conferences.

Some of the anecdotes and questions that had the most impact on me were: Women returning to work from maternity leave bring with them a new set of superpowers; most research on successful leadership only studies men; Why do organizations look away from, and in some cases condone or contain, toxic behaviour?

The conversation about diversity and inclusion was happening at Commit before we attended this conference. It’s safe to say this conference expanded the conversation and was a forcing function for us to reflect on where we are and where we want to be.

As of today approximately 14% of Commit Engineering Partners are women. We have two women on our leadership team. We know we must bring equality to these numbers. We also know that it doesn’t start or stop at gender lines and intersects through many others.

Our immediate plans are to review our existing processes and team documentation, asking questions such as, “Is this helping us create a diverse team and culture?”, “Is this helping us create an inclusive culture?”, and “Could this be detrimental to our diversity and inclusion efforts?” We are also pushing ourselves to review and update our recruiting process to attract and retain more women and individuals from underrepresented groups. We know this is just the start, but this is where we have found the beginning.

Working Out Loud: Diversity and Inclusion at Commit was originally published in Commit Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a field, tech prides itself on an appetite for risk, an embrace of quirky characters, and a taste for the dramatic. The drive to develop ahead-of-the-curve innovations that can be funded, scaled, and vaulted to market domination means that speed is more important than perfection, and the goal of “disruptive innovation” produces an unending flow of future-oriented products and services smattering out like the spray from a shotgun. In the wake of the few startups to achieve unicorn status lie the corpses of a thousand failed startups, some of them dead on arrival while others cling to life as long as possible before sputtering out.

This need for speed and appetite for risk is one reason why, over the past decade and a half, failure has gone from just an unfortunate byproduct of innovation to a powerful rhetorical trope within tech, with founders and corporate communicators alike embracing their failures, and telling and retelling their “failure stories” in TED talks, pitch decks, and fireside chats. “Sure, you’ll probably fail,” Paul Graham, entrepreneur and Y Combinator co-founder, tells start-up founders, “but even failure will get you to the ultimate goal faster than getting a job.” Dave McClure of 500 Startups agrees: “If you’re not willing to take the risk of failing and not experience failure, you’re never going to figure out what the right path is to success.”

It’s paradoxical but fundamentally unsurprising that the perverse incentives of venture capital could make failure cool. In a land of self-realization and life hacks, the ability to embrace failure seems to reflect a mature vulnerability and a zen acceptance of life’s temporary setbacks. But some people live with an awareness that they’re given no option but to fail. For those excluded from the mainstream economy or the acceptable confines of normative life, the contours of failure look very different. The failure described by the TED talk demographic and the failure experienced by queer people, poor people, and other marginalized communities is fundamentally different. One is a failure of product or a failure of market timing. The other is a failure to live “correctly.” This kind of failure comes with obvious penalties: social condemnation, precarious finances, and the sense of living in a world not designed for you.

Those consigned to existential failure have worked to reclaim and subvert their “failed” state long before tech grasped its marketing potential. Far from the narrative bluster of Silicon Valley, queers and other outcasts from the straight world have found a very different way of theorizing and detourning what it means to fail. “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style,” writes Quentin Crisp, in The Naked Civil Servant. The failure that Crisp describes is a queer failure, a failure to live a normal life with the normal trappings: like marriage-mortgage-babies, like a job that can be easily described at dinner parties. Writers like José Esteban Muñoz and Jack Halberstam use failure as a framework for utopian thinking, and artists from Jack Smith to Divine have embraced the abject and spectacular power of failure to transformative effect. For those unable to shape up and live right, failure can contain a nugget of emancipatory potential — the sense that another world is possible. 

In a world enamored by “fail fast” tech narratives, what becomes of the existential losers? The recuperation of failure props up the status quo, propelling disappointed founders and burned-out coders back into the mulcher of startup churn and labor exploitation. Compared with the utopian promise of queer failure, tech failure is shallow, smoothed over, a denial of the radical possibilities that become possible when you realize that system is stacked against you, and can — must — be made otherwise. What would it look like to take failure seriously again?

The market forces that drive the tech world demand big risks and new ideas that are likely to fizzle out, but occasionally pay off in the form of a unicorn. In this context, failure can be a badge of pride. To fail because your product is too future-looking for the current market, or to push your code to the point of failure in order to find its weak points and improve them — these are failures worth crowing about. “We spend most of our time breaking things and trying to prove we are wrong” says Astro Teller of Google’s R&D lab X in his 2016 TED talk. “Run at all the hardest parts of the problem first,” he advocates. “Get excited and cheer, ‘Hey, how are we going to kill our project today?’” Famous mandates like Facebook’s now-retired “move fast and break things” urge developers towards fast failure, a kind of creative destruction (of your own weak product, of an entire disruptable industry) valued because of its prioritization of speed and potential to lead to innovation.

Arising from software development, a “fail fast” ideology prizes rapid iteration, short feedback loops, and products that can be tested and improved incrementally. This approach is practical, and fits the nature of the product: the mostly-immaterial nature of code and the ability to perpetually update software even after it ships means that a bug or a failed app is cheaper and less logistically horrifying than a failed clothing line or a failed ocean liner. In this context, “failure” is a momentary result to be iterated out of, rather than an existential state.

From there, “fail fast” efficiently leapfrogged into the rhetorical toolboxes of the start-up class. Famously, the start-up world lives and dies on its storytelling. Pitch decks paint a picture to potential funders. Product websites disclose and obfuscate in equal measure. Most crucially, start-up founders need to be able to craft a personal narrative and backstory that will win over investors and early hires alike. These story formats tend to follow the contours of the Hero’s Journey as described by Joseph Campbell. In this narrative format, success cannot come easy: a trial by fire — a period staring into the abyss — is required before the hero returns victorious, killer app idea in hand. And so, founders learn to frame their stories in a way that highlights and valorizes their moments of past “failure” (a startup that fizzled, an acquisition that fell through, a co-founder that flounced).

The failure story is so established a trope as to have a conference dedicated to it: FailCon. Inaugurated in 2009, it provides a forum for these narratives of bombed first startups and subsequent months eating ramen, stories which work to emphasize an entrepreneurs’ ability to iterate quickly and pivot towards future success, or to demonstrate their grit and appetite for risk. The self-aggrandizing embrace of failure is found in 20-something start-up hopefuls and industry veterans alike. Richard Branson, serial entrepreneur and self-mythologizer, describes his approach to failure by pointing to a (much quoted, always decontextualized) line from Samuel Becket’s Worstward Ho: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.” “The quote is from the playwright, Samuel Beckett,” he says, “but it could just as easily come from the mouth of yours truly.” While Beckett surely adds an air of gravitas to the proceedings, stripped of context (as his words generally are in their tech-world application), “fail better” becomes just a slightly more literary version of “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

When nestled into a longer story that leads to an optimistic apex, it’s clear that “failure” is not an existential defeat, but more of a necessary milestone in an entrepreneur’s development, like object permanence or potty training. Silicon Valley failure is socially acceptable because it’s utterly de-risked, for investors at least. It’s a cost of doing business — and not even a very big cost. In the world of venture capital, “failures don’t matter much, the small successes don’t matter much, and the giant returns are where everything happens,” says Sam Altman, investor and ex-president of Y Combinator. “The alternate name we came up with for 500 Startups was ‘fail factory,’” Dave McClure says.

For founders it’s no doubt devastating to have your business fail: “I had that feeling of ‘Holy shit, we’re fucked’ a lot,” says the anonymous engineer interviewed by Logic magazine, about the period during which his startup was foundering. Still, he acknowledges, “because there’s always more money being pumped into tech, it’s a soft landing for almost anyone whose startup fails.” For this narrow class, failure doesn’t mean financial ruin or social derision, but rather the cushier options of getting acquired, getting hired, or abandoning your failson of a startup for something new and shinier.

The ability to abandon the burned-out carapace of your failure like Tom Cruise walking away from a flaming car is only available to a certain segment of the population. For others, failure adheres like tar and feathers, not something that can easily be escaped. More realistically, for people that don’t — can’t — engineer their lives into a shape of success, failure looks less like a skin to slough off and more like a state of being. In his book Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, Scott Sandage describes the development of failure as a “state of being” that sticks and spoils. He follows the term “loser” from its original business usage in the early 19th century, when it referred to someone who lost money due to market circumstances outside their control, to its current incarnation wherein financial failure points to a failure “in the man.” As Sandage describes it, the logic of business metastasized throughout the 20th century, casting its market judgement on human lives, sparing few.

The later 20th century is full of different theorizations of failure, and subcultures that used and embraced failure as a point of pride. The gloomy pessimism of 1970s Britain found a clarion call in “no future,” the punks’ lament and catch cry, a reaction to the jobless outlook and prudish social mores of the mainstream. The early ’90s ushered in a new wave of American failure, if you could call GenX a failed generation or even much of anything. The uncomfortable winds of the end of history were blowing, temp jobs seemed destined to become the future of work (true), and pressing the eject button on mainstream life with the other losers and Slackers was momentarily a culturally compelling choice.

Despite the declarative power of negation and refusal, “no future” was often a conscious posture (albeit a vital posture) against the mainstream, one that was assumed on purpose by subjects that could generally reenter the flow of normative life if and when they decided they could stomach it. For as many punk rock failures of Thatcherite Britain that stayed weird, more curdled into disfunction or reactionary politics; the slacked-out Xers of Reagan and Bush America generally failed upwards into regular jobs and a settled middle age. However, not everyone can grin and bear their way into the mainstream. It’s a privilege to sell out, however reluctantly.

The scarlet letter of failure manifests in different ways for different groups. It might be an inability to function “normally,” due to a brain that works differently or the physical marker of a wheelchair or an unruly organ that needs constant tracking and maintenance. It might be a “wrong” affect, a visibly queer way of moving through the world or a cultural modality out of synch with your surroundings. It might be living a life asynchronously to others, failing to achieve the temporal markers of financial independence, heterosexual romance and coupling, reproduction. For those marked by existential failure, it’s not possible to bootstrap your way out of a failed state and back into the flow of winning. Because in all these cases, failure is linked to an inability to be useful to capital: a sin punishable by rejection, exile, even death.

In the face of these existential threats, a very different kind of “pro failure” theory and rhetoric emerged in the ’90s and 2000s. Queer writers, activists, and artists (often excluded from mainstream institutions and success for reasons listed above) have embraced and reclaimed failure, theorizing a specific modality of “queer failure” as art form and as survival tactic. In opposition to tech failure (narrativized as a painful-but-necessary station of the cross that fosters wisdom and tenacity), queer failure is deviant, risky, and oppositional, shaped by those who’ve found their future always-already nullified by capitalism’s normative demands. Queer failure is also utopian and visionary. Without the option to slot back into the mainstream, failure becomes a point of departure, a rupture, a sideways trajectory into something new. There are futures beyond no future.

In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam charts a skewed pathway through a series of texts, examining the ways the queer (or queered) subject fails at normative life in the gendered, racialized, colonial, rigid landscapes of contemporary capitalism, before choosing instead to embrace failure as a preferred alternative to all of that. In contrast to the thwarted forms of punk nihilism and sporting losers, Halberstam locates failure specifically “within that range of political affects that we call queer.” This queer failure has a style or aesthetic, one which “works with rather than against failure and inhabits the darkness.” Halberstam applies the lens of queer failure to queer texts and performers, but also to other historically oppressed and othered peoples, bound collectively by darkness, hurt, and divergent desire. In affirming the social and symbolic connection between queerness and negativity, The Queer Art of Failure and its antecedents reject the positivism and conformist politics of the system that casts so many aside.

Queer failure offers more than just solace in defeat. In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz describes how queer failure opens up a portal to a kind of futurism of the disenfranchised. As rejects from the normative order, Muñoz shows how failures and losers might choose instead to say goodbye to all that: to striving for straight approval, to struggling in a system that hates you, to acceptability politics. He suggests a “stepping out of time and place, leaving the here and now of straight time” (that is, the temporal regimen of childhood, then college, then heterosexual romance, then marriage, then jobs then kids then…) for an alternative kind of “queer futurity.” In queer futurity one might find and produce a kind of ecstatic temporality, an out-of-timeness accessible through collective pleasure or through drugs or through art.

Of course, the essence of utopia is in its non-place-ness, its impossibility and not-yet-ness. Glimpses of queer futurism can be traced, though, from Samuel Delaney’s breathless accounts of cruising between the trucks and vans at the Christopher street docks, a liminal space where “35, 50, 100 all-but-strangers” connect in a libidinal saturation that was “hugely ordered, highly social, attentive, and grounded in a certain care, if not community” up through the self-documentation of queer punk squats and fabled collective houses, to the queer and trans Black and Latino community of the uptown drag ball scene. In the formation of temporary communities of the dispossessed or self-exiled, queer failure takes its shape from the inability — the refusal — to be useful to capital or to adhere to recieved ideas of value. In its place can come a flourishing of queer collectivity and a sense of style oriented towards a new (as yet impossible) lifeworld. While often fleeting — Muñoz refers to queerness and queer utopianism as a kind of “anticipatory illumination” — and thwarted by the cruel requirements of capital and the straight economy, queer utopian thought enables a yearning for something other. In this way, queer failure is utopian, offering a “kernel of potentiality” in its excessive, visionary difference.

For those stuck outside of the normal, queer failure offers instead to explode the normal and to explore modes of being beyond capitalism, in ecstatic temporalities or alternative kinships or in refusing to work. To embrace failure is a vulnerable act that demonstrates solidarity with other “failed” people — from radical crips to refugees — and builds space to imagine an identity, and a life, outside the structures that would punish you for your transgressions. Maybe, suggests Halberstam, “in losing we will find another way of making meaning,” one in which “no one gets left behind.” Queer failure imagines a future beyond the current regime, and a life where failure can be ecstatic, collective, and radical.

It is tempting to think that tech has coopted failure, rerouting the narrative away from failure as a utopian project for outsiders towards failure as a waypoint for society’s winners. And indeed the ideology of tech failure and the “growth mindset” have remarkable power, even within groups that can never hope to achieve conventional “success.” Queer activists point out that legal “wins” like gay marriage and anti-discrimination laws can never offer true liberation in which queer modes of being are acceptable and celebrated. Companies and self-help gurus push an ideology of personal responsibility and “leveling up” to the poor and working class people they target — people often excluded from formal employment due to their class, education, or family responsibilities. Multilevel marketing companies like doTerra and Herbalife target stay-at-home moms and immigrant communities with their chirpy marketing and empowerment rhetoric, promising exponential profits and flexible schedules to people who have few other options for lucrative employment. For capitalism’s outsiders and losers, “fail fast and iterate towards success” is a toxic mandate, impossible and self-defeating.

Even within tech — as the anonymous engineer interviewed by Logic goes on to say — the ability to eke success from past failures is not evenly distributed. Social capital and relationships still define which founders are allowed to fail up, and which are left in the digital dust. For every engineer that stays in the game and achieves success, there are others that drop out. “Failing up” in Silicon Valley is much less of an option for women, people with children, and queer and gender nonconforming people. Without the old boys network or the ability to adhere to the unspoken social codes (the perfect pitch deck, the Allbirds, the half-zip sweater), a failed company can mark the end of a career. Equally, for people whose identity or background leads them to balk against unjust industry practices — like the five Googlers, including three trans employees, recently fired for worker organizing — failure can be imposed from above. The privilege to frame your own failure, and to wield that narrative for future success, is granted only to a select few.

For the founders and funders who do have the privilege of failing upwards, there are still consequences to a failed startup or a fizzled fund. They’re just generally consequences that trickle downwards, affecting those who are already marginalized. A failed startup may have major impacts for the users of the startup’s product, or the community they deliver services to. Failure can mean that a medical device no longer functions because the the data platform it ran on went out of business. Failure can mean that a vital community is forced to dissipate because the app it relied on for communication is no longer updated. For the affected users, tech failure can be existentially threatening. By only looking at failure from the perspective of the tech producers, a whole raft of damage and loss is made invisible.

The aesthetic and politics of “failure” outlined by Muñoz and Halberstam is inimical to the tech world’s valorization of iteration and the “growth mindset” that pivots one towards success and product-market fit. Tech failure is able to be painlessly recouped because it’s not personal. It’s not you that failed, it’s your product (or your customers). Compared with startup founders and entrepreneurs, queers and other marginalized groups don’t have the privilege of depersonalizing failure. Where tech failure is situational and impersonal, queer failure is existential.

In a surprising way, however, queer failure as defined by Muñoz has something in common with tech failure. Utopian queer failure is future-looking, an arrow that flies out of sync with the shitty present. Tech failure is also often a result of out-of-syncness, a slight misaim into a future market that doesn’t arrive on time. Both are a failure to be useful to capital, an inability to align with the temporality of the market. Tech failure generally results in a do-over, a new initiative or new product that hopes to hit right the second time round, finding its market and making its millions. But what would it look like for those moving through the gauntlet of tech failure to choose a different path that sees failure as a point of rupture, an opportunity to create different kinds of technology and solidarity outside of the damaging strictures of Silicon Valley? What would utopian tech failure look like? A coterie of failed founders defecting from tech to code for communism? Disgruntled biotech crews hacking together open source insulin? Even just an individual refusal to take the L and come back swinging.

For those inside and outside the industry, I propose that there could be a better way to fail. Maybe we can treat failure as an opportunity to reassess the system that forces us to fail until we learn to succeed within a narrow set of market parameters. These structures serve investors and other holders of capital at the expense of entrepreneurs, and certainly at the expense of the wider public. Logic’s anonymous engineer hits on this true failure of venture-driven innovation, saying “It’s not that I consider myself a failure for not having built a successful business. The failure I feel is more personal: it’s that I spent my time on building a small social app instead of something that would have been more meaningful.” Queer time is yet to come. Similarly, technology beyond capitalism is yet to come. But in imagining the generative collective potential of tech failure, maybe we can begin to catch a glimpse of it.

Ich halte nichts davon, Klopapier oder Ravioli zu bunkern. Aber Ihr werdet dieses Jahr ein gescheites Fieberthermometer brauchen. Und da empfehle ich das Gerät, mit dem mir das Klinikpersonal die Temperatur gemessen hat. Wichtig ist übrigens ein Nachtlicht, damit man niemanden wecken muss. Leute mit kleinen Kindern haben sowas, andere eher nicht. Und die Dinger werden jetzt schon knapp. Vielleicht auch noch ein paar Schutzkappen mitkaufen, denn die muss man regelmäßig wechseln, damit der Ohrschmalz das Ergebnis nicht verfälscht.

Das Withings Thermo misst die Temperatur an der Schläfe und überträgt die Werte an das Smartphone. Das Gerät habe ich nicht, aber ich stelle mir das zur Dokumentation sehr gut vor.

Remarkably, this single storey retail building has remained undeveloped for a century. Today it’s a “Irish” bar, but in 1922 (three years after it was built) it was the showroom for Dodge Brothers motor cars. We saw it in the street context in an earlier post, in 1926, when it had become a store selling stoves and ranges. An earlier building had been erected in 1913, designed by Parr, McKenzie and Day for Union Welding Co, but that only cost $500. This building was designed by W M Dodd and cost $6,300. Their client. was McQueen, Mrs. M. J. (of 1455 Laurier Ave). It’s helpful that we know the home address, as there were two McQueen families living on Laurier Avenue. 1455 Laurier was slightly inaccurate, but 1453 was home to James McQueen, and his wife Mary Jane. When she developed this building she was aged 70, and James was ten years older. Two daughters were living with them, Annie and Kate (who was a teacher at King Edward High School). Mary Jane McQueen had also developed two houses on Granville Street in 1903, while James had carried out several developments, also mostly on Granville Street, but also in the West End.

The entire family had been born in Ontario, and Kate bequeathed some of the family papers to the City Archives, which tell us how James made the family fortunes “File includes a traveller’s descriptive account entitled Trip to Vancouver, by James McQueen (1891); correspondence and other material concerning McQueen’s real estate holdings, including receipts re: building at Bute and Haro Streets (1895); and miscellaneous personal papers.” There’s also a 1970s radio interview where she discusses how the family moved from Ontario to BC in the 1890s to settle her uncle’s estate. The uncle was James Whetham, a doctor who developed several important early Vancouver buildings, so Mary Jane had a lifetime experience in property development.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA Trans N20

0954

NetNewsWire, which was relaunched on the Mac last August, is now available on iOS and iPadOS. Like its Mac counterpart, the iOS and iPadOS version is built on a foundation of fast syncing and sensible, bug-free design. As with any 1.0 app, there are additional features and refinements I hope to see in future releases. Unlike most 1.0 releases, though, you won’t find lots of rough edges and bugs. NetNewsWire is ready to be your primary RSS client today.

NetNewsWire running in dark mode on the Mac (left) and iPad (right).

One of the strengths of NetNewsWire is that if you’ve used the Mac app, the iOS and iPadOS version is immediately familiar, while also feeling right at home on an iPhone or iPad. I wish I could say the same about most apps, but I can’t. Whether it’s an iOS or iPadOS app moving to the Mac or the other direction, too often the core experience of an app is replicated without accounting for the unique qualities of the platform to which it’s being added.

That isn’t the case with NetNewsWire. The app benefits from the same careful attention to detail that the Mac app does, but adapted for the iOS/iPadOS environment.

For users, that means a few things. Like the Mac app, NetNewsWire is fast and reliable. I follow hundreds of feeds, and NetNewsWire loads new articles as fast and often faster than any other RSS client I’ve used. The app is also rock solid. If you’ve followed the team developing NetNewsWire, you know they’ve been relentlessly squashing bugs for weeks leading up to the launch and the dedication shows. All software has bugs, but good luck finding one in NetNewsWire.

The dependability of NewNewWire is notable because it stands apart from typical 1.0 releases, but it isn’t enough. It’s that dependability coupled with NetNewsWire’s platform-specific functionality and interactions that really make the difference.

The articles list can be expanded to hide the source list.

NetNewsWire’s UI follows a three-column approach that works well for RSS readers. On the iPad, you’ll find the sources on the left, an article list in the middle, and articles on the right. The article list can be expanded to hide the source list, providing more room for the article pane. On the iPhone, each column is a separate view that you tap or swipe through, moving back and forth through the source list, article list, and article views. In addition to that traditional navigation, NetNewsWire provides dedicated buttons in the toolbar of the article list and article views to move to the next unread item.

NetNewsWire on the iPhone.

NetNewsWire’s source list includes sections for Smart Feeds, On My iPhone or iPad,¹ and feeds and folders from any RSS services you use. Each section can be collapsed or expanded using the disclosure triangles next to the section or folder.

As the name suggests, Smart Feeds are automatically-generated collections of articles from the feeds you follow and include Today, All Unread, and Starred. My favorite of the three is Today, which is an excellent way to catch up on the latest news when I get behind on my feeds. All Unread is a handy way to see everything that is new without navigating through individual sources and filtering to view only unread items. Finally, Starred is a list of any articles you’ve marked with a star, which many people use as a bookmark system for things they want to return to later.

I like Smart Feeds a lot and would love to see them expanded in the future. Apps like Fiery Feeds and lire have implemented similar features, which can also create lists based on the publication frequency of feeds, for example. Ideally, though, I’d like Smart Feeds that are user-customizable based on a wide variety of criteria like publication frequency, date of publication, author, publication, and more. Also, as much as I personally like NetNewsWire’s Smart Feeds, I think there ought to be a setting to hide some or all of them to help users who want to streamline their source list.

Each entry in the article list column includes a blue dot if the article is unread, the source website’s favicon, the title of the story, the date or time of publication, and depending on how many lines you’ve allocated to each entry, a snippet from the beginning of the article. The column can be filtered to show all articles or just unread ones with a button at the top of the column. There’s also a Mark All as Read button at the bottom of the column that can be set to show a confirmation alert. On the iPhone or when the iPad is in Split View, this column also includes a button to take you to the next unread article.

Browsing stories from a single publication moves the favicon to the top of the column, making more space for headlines.

The article list changes subtly when you’re looking at a list of stories from a single publication. The favicon moves to the top of the column, providing extra room for the title of each piece. That means fewer titles are truncated, which I love.

Also, you can tap on the name of the publication at the top of the article list for feed-specific settings that allow you to turn on notifications for just that publication and force the feed to always be viewed in Reader View, the chief benefit of which is showing full articles from feeds that only display part of a story. Publication-level notifications are local-only, though, so the settings do not sync, nor do notifications show up on any of your other devices.

NetNewsWire includes publication-specific settings that are accessed by tapping the publication name in the article column.

Pulling down on the article list reveals a search field with two options that appear when you tap into it: ‘Here,’ meaning whichever folder or publication you are currently viewing, and ‘All Articles,’ which searches everything. Search is a fairly standard feature in RSS clients, but the ability to quickly switch between searching the articles you are viewing currently and everything without navigating to an ‘all feeds’ view first is an excellent touch. NetNewsWire doesn’t have thumbnail previews of an article’s hero image in the articles list like some other RSS readers do, but it’s not something I miss.

The final column is the article view. From the top of the column, you can navigate from one story to the next and back regardless of whether it is marked read. Beneath each article is a toolbar featuring a navigation button that moves down the article list from one unread story to the next. From that same toolbar, you can also mark articles as unread, star them, toggle Reader View on and off, and share a story using the share sheet.

NetNewsWire in light and dark mode.

So far, the functionality I’ve covered is largely the same as what NetNewsWire offers on the Mac. It does all those things well and reliably, but the app also includes many OS-specific features that make it a pleasure to use on iPhone and iPad, including dark mode, Split View, context menus, keyboard shortcuts, and Shortcuts support.

As someone who primarily uses dark mode, I appreciate that NetNewsWire follows my system settings. However, some users prefer dark mode for things like reading apps only, so a manual override setting would be a nice addition to the app.

In my testing, Split View has performed flawlessly on both my tiny iPad mini and 12.9-inch iPad Pro. The only UI glitch I’ve noticed is that in all but the smallest Split View, the button for moving to the next unread article appears beneath both the article list and article view columns, which isn’t necessary. It’s a small thing, and the buttons work as you’d expect, but the button should probably only be in the article view toolbar, as is the case when the app is in full-screen mode.

Examples of NetNewsWire's extensive use of context menus on the iPad and iPhone.

It’s fantastic to see NetNewsWire adopt native context menus on the iPhone and iPad. For individual stories, there are options to mark it as read, add a star, mark everything above or below the current story as read, mark everything in the current feed as read, open the article in the browser, and share the article. For folders, there are options to rename or delete the folder. Feeds include options to get information on the feed, open its homepage, copy the feed URL, mark everything in the feed as read, rename it, and delete it. Finally, for sources, the context menu can open the service’s settings, mark everything in it as read, or deactivate it. That’s a lot of options that make managing feeds easier than drilling down through layers of settings, which I appreciate. The only thing I’d like to see added to context menus that NetNewsWire doesn’t currently support is rich previews when you long-press an article title.

NetNewsWire also features extensive keyboard shortcut support.

Just as extensive as the context menu support is NetNewsWire’s support for keyboard shortcuts. The app has 29 separate keyboard shortcuts that cover every common action for navigating and managing your feeds. As someone who uses my iPad with a keyboard connected most of the time, I absolutely love the thought and care that has gone into this list of shortcuts. Not only is it extensive, but it makes great use of single key shortcuts that don’t require any modifier as well as the arrow keys, space bar, and return. Although many iPad apps support keyboard shortcuts, few developers have put as much effort into offering a full complement of their app’s features via the keyboard.

NetNewsWire also supports Shortcuts. You’ll find NetNewsWire in the Apps section of Shortcuts’ action directory, where actions exist to add a feed and view folders, Smart Feeds, and individual publications that you’ve recently opened.

The Add Feed action accepts feed URLs and has a parameter for adding it to On My iPhone or iPad, Feedbin, or Feedly, depending on which services you have activated in NetNewsWire. It’s a great addition that eliminates the need for using a separate utility like Feed Hawk to add RSS feeds.

Actions for viewing specific folders and feeds are useful too, but I’d like to see NetNewsWire take its Shortcuts support further. The app that’s done the most with Shortcuts so far is Fiery Feeds, but even it has room to expand its support. Ideally, I’d like to see a view action with options to pick the feed or folder viewed, the time frame of the articles retrieved, and whether they are read or unread. I’d also like the option to mark articles read or unread or add stars with the same sort of parameters. Also, an option to search my feeds via a shortcut would be fantastic. By combining multiple actions and a rich set of parameters, NetNewsWire wouldn’t have to expand its Smart Feeds, as I suggested above. Instead, users could create their own with Shortcuts.

NetNewsWire even supports multiwindowing on the iPad. I don’t expect I’ll scan through two feeds at once very often, but I appreciate the flexibility. Multiwindowing is the sort of functionality that encourages experimentation with new workflows that will make the app valuable to a wider audience.

About the only iPadOS-specific feature NetNewsWire doesn’t support that I’d like to see added is drag and drop. The best implementation of this that I’ve seen is in lire, which generates a rich link preview in apps that support it, like Notes, and a simple URL in apps that don’t. The share sheet is a decent alternative, but sometimes it’s just easier to grab an article and drop it in an app that you already have on-screen rather than tapping through the share button and an extension’s UI.

There are also two shortcomings of the iOS and iPadOS version of NetNewsWire it shares with the Mac app. The first is the small number of sync services it supports. Feedbin and Feedly are supported, which are both popular choices, but there are many more feed services available to users that I hope are on the roadmap for future updates.

Second, I’d like more control over the reading experience. It’s not that I don’t like the design of NetNewsWire, but I spend a lot of time in my RSS reader on devices of all sizes. I like to tweak things like text size, line spacing, margins, and font to suit each device and my personal tastes. NetNewsWire supports Dynamic Type, but there’s more I’d like to tweak, and I’d like the ability to adjust type size independently of my system settings.

NetNewsWire has come a long way in the six months since the Mac version debuted. I didn’t expect to see an iOS version release so quickly after the Mac app, but I’m glad it has been. Having apps available and in sync across multiple platforms is increasingly important to users as their computing expands beyond a single device. With its expansion to iOS and iPadOS, I expect that NetNewsWire, which has already seen a substantial number of downloads on the Mac and during the iOS beta, will take off. It’s not just that there are a lot of iPhone and iPad users, it’s that being on three platforms makes each one inherently more useful for users. As a result, I expect the Mac version of the app to see a bump too.

I hope I’m correct because having another high-quality option for reading RSS feeds pushes every app in the category to continue to improve and try new things. That’s great for users and RSS.

If the lack of an iOS and iPadOS version of NetNewsWire has kept you from trying it in the past, I encourage you to give it a try. There’s really nothing to lose because the app is free to download on the App Store and the Mac version, which I reviewed last August, is available directly from Ranchero Software’s website.

Support MacStories Directly

Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.

Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.

This is sad, but it was definitely the right call.

And it is a postponement towards the end of November, not an outright cancellation. For those who have never heard of Pixels Camp, it is the largest and most popular Portuguese hackathon, and one of the few technology events that would lose a lot of impact by moving to an online-only model.

Current Situation

As I type this we have 31 39 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Portugal (all detected within one week), with 300 339 others in various stages of assessment, vigilance or preventive quarantine.

Most notably, the President of the Republic has self-quarantined.

Many of the above are in the northern part of the country (including at least one college campus from which hail many of the hundreds of students that travel to the event every year), and largely linked to trips to Italy (business travel there is common in that part of the country, which caters to fashion and shoe industries).

Both government and the medical establishment have been stepping up public awareness and preventive/reactive measures (field hospitals are already in place, some schools have been closed, etc.), but everything points to figures climbing steeply over the next few days and weeks, and there will certainly be criticism about delays in taking action.

Fortunately, we have a national health system that (mostly) works, doctors at key hospitals/medical faculties are openly sharing internal planning and awareness sessions on YouTube and there is an open debate about remote working and how the government will support people who have to be quarantined–which is a vastly different situation from, say, the United States.

Wash your hands, people. That is the best thing you can possibly do.

Go get it on the App Store! Also see the announcement on the NetNewsWire blog and see the NetNewsWire home page for details.

It’s free and open source. Even though it’s labeled as 5.0, it’s a brand-new app, a fresh start for an app that originally appeared on the App Store on day one.

The big difference is not the price tag — there have been free versions of NetNewsWire before — and it’s not just that it’s open source. It’s that there’s a great team of volunteers behind it now.

Many are coders, for sure — and one of them, Maurice Parker, is the lead developer for the iOS version. We also have Kiel Gillard on Feedly syncing, Nate Weaver on under-the-hood goodness and CSS magic, and many more.

There are also designers, writers, and testers. Brad Ellis made the app icon, which I love. Ryan Dotson wrote the excellent help book.

Our friends at Feedbin generously run the web service that provides the Reader view, and they’ve helped with a number of technical issues.

And, at this writing, we have 8,211 people testing via TestFlight — and they’ve been great reporting crashes and bugs, making feature requests, and providing all kinds of feedback. Having that kind of huge community support has meant everything to the quality of the app. This release is dedicated to them.

I love saying that NetNewsWire is a team. Yes, sure, I wrote the bones and I manage the project and I put my name on it — but this team and what they’ve accomplished makes me so very, very proud and happy. 🎸🐯💥

Vicki Boykis riffing off the George Box quote, “All models are wrong, some are useful.”:

The point is that, whatever data you dig into, at any given point in time, that looks solid on the surface, will be a complete mess underneath, plagued by undefined values, faulty studies, small sample problems, plagiarism, and all of the rest of the beautiful mess that is human life.

Just as all deep learning NLP models are really grad students reading phone books, if you dig deep enough, you’ll get to a place where your number is wrong or calculated differently than you’ve assumed.

I think of statistics as uncertainty management. It’s about estimates and figuring out how much you can trust them. Working with data is rarely about getting an exact truth.

Tags: uncertainty, Vicki Boykis

The coronavirus can possibly infect a lot more people than there are those who can provide medical care. But if we slow the spread, and there are fewer people in need of care at the same time, the difference might be less overbearing. This version of the “flatten the curve” graphic by Alexander Radtke, first made by Rosamund Pearce for The Economist, illustrates the difference in animated form.

Tags: Alexander Radtke, coronavirus, curves, health care, Rosamund Pearce

People love their neighbourhood small businesses. Politicians say they’re the lifeblood of the community.

But one of the most perplexing parts of covering city hall is hearing the constant stories about how this or that small business went through hell to get a minor commercial-renovation permit. Some just give up; others grit their teeth and spend tens of thousands in rent on their empty spaces. It’s been a problem since I started covering cities 25 years ago and no one seems to know how to change it.

In the meantime, here’s my Globe story on the bizarre mazes some have to run and what the consequences are. As the economy gets battered heavily this year, cities’ ability to foster small businesses instead of hobbling them will be key to maintaining a healthy city.

Full text below

Colette Griffiths and Chris Allen were thrilled when they were chosen as tenants by the retiring owners of the Federal Store, a small grocery near the intersection of two bike routes in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.

Their vision was for a new 21st-century-style grocery store/cafe/deli. The shop would be a distribution hub for organic groceries, while serving as a community gathering spot for cyclists and walkers in the densely populated neighbourhood. It was exactly the kind of place that the city, in theory, would embrace. Politicians and planners talk fervently about support for local producers, the benefits of neighbourhood shopping and the importance of green retailing.

But five months after the young couple started paying rent on the small space, covering the $2,000 monthly cost with the salaries from their jobs in restaurant management and restaurant design, they were no closer to a permit.

The series of city staffers they talked to raised various objections, different each time. One thought that the plans for the place just didn’t “feel” like a grocery store. Another wanted to see a complete list of groceries that they would stock. No one had any kind of printed description or list of criteria that could help them figure out what they needed to do to satisfy everyone.

“We were pretty close to running out of money,” Ms. Griffiths said of their permitting efforts in 2017.

Business owners, retail experts and the people who manage the city’s small-business improvement associations say the bureaucratic and utterly inconsistent process of permitting for the renovations often needed for a new business has become an enormous barrier.

“I’ve been in the industry 13 years and what I hear repeatedly is two main things: It takes too long and the things being asked are unnecessary and costly,” said Michelle Barile, the executive director of the West Broadway Business Improvement Association.

A HIDDEN BUSINESS-KILLER

It has become an issue that many say is almost as much of a business-killer as the now high-profile problem of skyrocketing property taxes. While the tax issue is getting a lot of attention, with the province scrambling to provide an interim solution after a year of meetings with mayors, the commercial-renovation permit messes are often relegated to a bullet-point mention in city reports about “licensing issues.”

A tracking graph on the city’s recently introduced “dashboard” of key statistics says that the average waiting time for a minor commercial-renovation permit as of December, 2019 was 5.4 weeks.

But no one in the business community thinks that this figure reflects anything like what is really going on, especially since many businesses spend weeks or months going back and forth with staff before even filing for their official permit.

Not every business experiences the hurdle of getting a commercial-renovation permit every year.

Out of the city’s approximately 60,000 licensed businesses, about 11,000 are currently listed as “pending” for permits, including everything from Tiffany’s and the Fairmont Vancouver Hotel, where there might be just a minor change in use or ownership, to genuinely new shops, offices and restaurants.

Some, like the new Breakfast Table restaurant that took over the old Ouisi spot on South Granville, are able to open almost immediately. But many cannot.

And the roadblocks put in the way of one operation on a street end up affecting others nearby. Streets where businesses are waiting for permits look like they are plagued with vacancies, something that casts a pall on the whole area.

“The problem is the vacancy sign stays up while the process goes on,” said Ivy Haisell, the executive director for the South Granville business association. That leads to perceptions and sometimes media stories about how “the area is dying.”

Representatives of various neighbourhood business associations can list the casualties: The Mouse Trap cheese shop on Main Street, where owners waited so long for its permits that it closed four days after opening because they ran out of money; the experienced Whistler restaurateur who spent $300,000 waiting to get the permits for a new outlet at Main and 16th and was blocked by city staff who said he needed a significant number of parking spots. That was an impossibility on a site where the building covered almost every square foot of the lot. By the time the city’s Board of Variance ruled that he didn’t need to provide the parking, he had given up and sold to the ubiquitous Brown’s chain.

DELAYS NOT JUST A VANCOUVER PROBLEM

And, while the City of Vancouver is often named as the problem child of the region when it comes to many building issues, those in retail say the slowdown for commercial-renovation permits is now a regional one.

“The building-permit problem is pretty much everywhere,” said Sean Ogilvie, a vice-president at the commercial broker Lee & Associates, where he is described as someone with a track record in dealing with multiple or long-term vacancy issues.

He used to negotiate what’s called a “fixturing period” of four to six weeks for new tenants – that’s the time when they’re dealing with permits and renos, before they can officially open and start making money. They don’t pay rent during the fixturing period, something that landlords have to absorb.

“It used to be that a really big grocery store or a restaurant, that would be four months,” said Mr. Ogilvie. “Now, it’s six months just for the permit. Shoe store A to shoe store B, it takes six months. It pains me because people don’t realize what a problem it is.”

That time lost is critical for small businesses, which often need six months or a year after opening to “incubate,” as insiders call it. That’s the period when they slowly ramp up their business before becoming fully profitable. They need a capital cushion to survive that – a cushion that has the stuffing taken out of it if they have to wait months to open.

Asked last week about the problems with commercial-renovation permitting, a senior bureaucrat at Vancouver City Hall replied via e-mail, suggesting delays were mostly the applicant’s fault.

“Our most recent analysis of the permits that have been open in our system for longer than seven weeks shows that the majority of these permits are waiting for customers to take action (either to respond to our questions (14 per cent), call to book their inspections (47 per cent), or to pay their outstanding fees (6 per cent),” said the message from Mark Greenfield, director of operations, development, buildings and licensing.

Getting the permit is only the first step in a small-business’s process toward opening. The renovations themselves, which can’t start until the permit is in hand, can then take weeks or months after that.

APPROVAL CAME THROUGH A FLUKE

That was the situation for the two hopeful Federal Store owners. Ms. Griffiths and Mr. Allen knew that they needed to do some renovations to make the little space, which Mark and Fong Kwok had run as a traditional old-style convenience store for decades after arriving from Shanghai in their 20s, more contemporary. They wanted larger windows, new floor tiles, a food-prep area, and they needed to close off the doorway that used to lead to the Kwoks’s kitchen in the attached duplex next door.

Their first visit to the city-permitting office was promising. The enthusiastic young man at the counter, someone they only ever knew as Mike, said he knew the store well, biked past it often, and thought they would have no trouble getting permits for the needed renovations quickly. He gave them a checklist and wished them well.

Their friends had told them, “If you find someone supportive at city hall, stick with that person, even if you have to wait for them.” But the young couple thought their situation was so simple that they would do fine, no matter what.

For the next few months, different people in the permitting department raised different objections every time they went in.

Finally, five months after their first visit, they went in, discouraged and on the point of giving up. Mike saw them across the room and came over. “How’s it going,” he wanted to know. “You must be open by now.” No, they said, and explained the problem. At that, Mike went to the counter with them, talked to the woman they’d been dealing with that day, dismissed her quibbling over this and that, and stamped and signed the papers they needed.

“I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t been there that day,” said Ms. Griffiths, as she sips a tea in the now-bustling small space that has become a popular neighbourhood hangout.

The problems are not restricted to first-timers or those with food as part of their products. Although restaurants, delis and grocery stores routinely go through complicated sets of hoops, even experienced business owners who have nothing to do with food say that they’ve run into the same delays.

Elsa Biernat ran five children’s clothing shops in Edmonton for 10 years during the 1980s and ‘90s, making a healthy living and never waiting more than a couple of weeks to open. After a decade in Dubai after her husband got a job there, she returned to Vancouver to be close to their daughter. She was too restless to do nothing, so she started another business.

Ms. Biernat, who has a degree in economics and exudes stylish professionalism, picked a walkable block near Broadway and Macdonald in Kitsilano for her new store, Lola’s Kids Clothes, which sells children’s wear imported from France, Spain and New York, among other places.

She signed a lease in December of 2016, where the rent was less than the near $10,000 a month she pays now for the 1,100-square-foot space, but still hefty.

She thought she would be open in a couple of weeks, since all she needed was a new sign with the business name on the front, some extra electrical outlets, a room divider, and shelving and rods for hanging clothes along the walls.

Instead, she wasn’t able to open until late March, while she paid rent and had $80,000 worth of inventory sitting on the floor. There were problems with the sign being slightly larger than what the rules allowed. She needed an engineer’s drawing to spell out exactly what the room divider would look like.

Vancouver city politicians and senior managers have talked for years, decades, about improving the permitting process. But all the talk seems to go nowhere.

Councillor Michael Wiebe knows the problems intimately through his own operation of a restaurant and lounge in Mount Pleasant. He notes that the difficulties are especially hard for small independents because chain operations will often hire a consultant or in-house specialist to do nothing but deal with city-licence issues.

He believes a fix is possible. He said he’s excited about the recent appointment of Jessie Adcock, the city’s former chief technology officer, to the role of general manager of buildings and licensing.

“Everyone knows there’s a problem, they just don’t know what the next step is,” Mr. Wiebe said. “But we need to change the way they think. Our goal should be to help a business, not just give them a list. And smaller businesses shouldn’t get treated like a big development company.”

One of the benefits of doing migrations for Reclaim Hosting internauts is getting to see how different hosting companies operate. Many use cPanel which is familiar territory for us at Reclaim, but ever so often you come across some pretty different dashboard, such as Dreamhost. But recently I got a peek at the Kinsta user dashboard, and it definitely smacks of a next-generation hosting environment. 

So what do I mean by that? Well, it is container-driven hosting infrastructure run on top of Google’s Cloud. Given you effectively lease your own container as server, they’re not providing shared hosting at all, but rather isolated, scalable hosting environments. While Kinsta has limited their offering to WordPress,* what they’re doing could be imagined beyond any one app—albeit with the accompanying complexity of managing numerous container images. What’s more, they have optimized their environment for speed and elastically scale for intensive resourcing needs. It’s like AWS with a dead-simple user interface that assumes someone else will be managing all the disparate pieces.  Here is a look at the Dashboard that highlights resource usage. Notice the 3 important data points are visits, Content Delivery Network (CDN) usage, and disk usage:

Kinsta has their own Content Delivery Network built into their product, which helps with site load times. Having it baked-in means your clients will not need to use Cloudflare, or similar tools. They also have slick backup/restore options similar to Digital Ocean’s:

In fact, the interface in general reminds me a lot of Digital Ocean’s: simple, sparse, and easy-to-use. I was also struck by the way they abstract things out that would otherwise be lost in a sea of icons in cPanel, such as SSL certificates and forcing https. And then there are things you could never do on shared hosting like restarting PHP. Additionally, you have WordPress specific tools like site caching, debugging, and a search and replace for the database:

What’s more, you can also abstract out the WordPress plugins into the Kinsta dashboard to get a quick look at version numbers and what plugins have and have not been upgraded:

Not sure this is all that much more convenient than the WordPress admin area, but the idea of abstracting out pieces of the application and integrating them into the hosting user dashboard is interesting. 

We’ve been thinking a lot about what a next generation hosting environment for both our shared hosting and Domains schools might look like, and that exercise is a powerful lesson in thinking through your user interface experience. All driven by the question: “How can we abstract the things our users depend on from tools like WHM and WHMCS to create a more simplified, focused web hosting tool?” One that remains tricky is thinking through user management and billing, so always interesting to see these things baked in the the dashboard.

Probably the two biggest differences between Kinsta and cPanel-based shared hosting services like Reclaim Hosting are options and pricing. Kinsta is designed for WordPress exclusively, and it appeals to folks who want to optimize it for higher traffic demands. This is not a sandbox, although you can run a development environment alongside your production environment. You pay $30 a month for the lowest plan which includes 1 WordPress site and up to 20,000 monthly visitors. While more expensive than most shared hosting options, which is understandable, it is on par with the cost of setting up a 4GB or 8 GB droplet on Digital Ocean to run your WordPress site with weekly backups (something I do currently). I am considering moving my site again to Kinsta to get a sense of the differences, and explore a bit more what it ‘s like as a customer to work within a mass market container-based infrastructure provider—something that definitely intrigues me. Kinsta has, from what I can see on a cursory glance, done a pretty impressive job with just that. 

I think Kinsta points to the possible emergence of a different market than Digital Ocean, AWS, and similar cloud-based infrastructure companies (one actually built on top of them, much like Kinsta is built on top of Google Cloud). While these companies appeal to developers who can and will spin up their own servers an then take the time to setup a wide range of environments (whether container-based or more old gold LAMP stack stuff) to install an application, Kinsta does all that for you. It’s container-based WordPress hosting made simple, while also providing some options for folks who want a bit more such as SSH access, SFTP, etc. The fact it is a container provides more freedom in that regard, but I wonder where the limits lie. For example, I can’t imagine you change PHP versions, which is probably a good thing,  but I’d be interested to find out more. Anyway, here’s to moving the bava yet again in the name of progress and learning 

*Which with 30% + of all websites is a decent-sized market to target, I mean the majority of Reclaimers also use WordPress.

Images of Apple-owned Beats’ unannounced Powerbeats 4 earbuds have leaked online along with details about their specs.

WinFuture reports that the earbuds are going to have up to 15 hours of battery life, which is three hours more than what you get with the Powerbeats 3 that were released in 2016.

Further, five minutes of charging will also reportedly give users 60 minutes of playback.

The earbuds are rumoured to use Apple’s new H1 wireless chip, which suggests that they will have support for voice features like “Hey Siri.” They will also reportedly come in black, white and red.

We first heard about the new earbuds back in January when icons of them appeared in iOS. Last month, the earbuds appeared in an FCC listing.

It’s unknown when the new earbuds may launch, and there also isn’t any word on pricing yet. Due to major tech events getting cancelled because of the coronavirus, it’s likely that the event that these earbuds were going to be revealed at could be postponed.

Image credit: WinFuture

Source: WinFuture

The post Powerbeats 4 images and specs leak online appeared first on MobileSyrup.

GM-owned Cadillac is cancelling its upcoming electric vehicle reveal event amid concerns surrounding the coronavirus.

In late February, the automaker announced that it was on the preparing to reveal an all-electric SUV based on its new BEV3 battery platform.

Now, GM is scaling back the launch keynote, according to The Verge, and so far, the launch event hasn’t been rescheduled.

Alongside this news, we have also learned that the company’s SUV is called the Lyriq. This EV will be followed up by an electric sedan called the Celestiq.

GM will likely clarify how it plans to reveal these vehicles soon. The car manufacturer could livestream a pre-recorded event, similar to how other companies have adapted to the health concerns surrounding COVID-19.

MobileSyrup will update this post with more information once it becomes available.

Source: The Verge 

The post Cadillac cancels April electric vehicle reveal over coronavirus concerns appeared first on MobileSyrup.

I came across this list on twitter; the UK Top 40 as imagined by AI. Apparently. Clearly, clearly, the best song title on there is Billion Sex so I thought I should do a track called that before someone else did. So, yesterday, I did.

(Loosely. It doesn't actually contain the words 'billion sex'. I'm an artist.)

I quite like this one. It's got a good beat. And a good bass line.

Since my release policy remains that there's a new track on Spotify etc on the first of every month you can't hear it there yet. It's programmed for April 1. But it is on Bandcamp and Soundcloud and you can watch the highly engaging video on instagram. (Highly engaging culturally, not statistically)

It means I now have four tracks so I'm wondering about compiling them into an EP. Maybe on vinyl. Does anyone know how to do that?

I'm also gutted to learn that I've missed the inaugural Minidisc Day because that would have been right up my street. Maybe next year.

Audience-wise things seem to have peaked. I'm down to 13 monthly listeners on Spotify. (Is that because it's early in the month? Is it a calendar month or a rolling 30-day period? It's unclear.)

I don't even attract much attention from the spammers on Soundcloud with the word 'sex' in the title of the song. Just three in 24 hours. I'm beginning to think that the RSS massive isn't as dense with promotional opportunity as it once was. Are none of you lot influencers? Maybe I'm going to have to tweet about this stuff. Oh God.

Amazon said that it has removed hundreds of thousands of products and suspended thousands of sellers amid price gouging on its website.

It has removed 530,000 high-priced products and suspended 2,500 sellers. This comes after several sellers were listing hand sanitizer and face masks at ridiculously high prices.

The online retailer says that it is proactively monitoring the marketplace for high prices and enforcing its fair pricing policy to protect its customers.

CNBC found that some face masks that were originally priced at $13.98 USD (about $17 CAD) had been increased to $195 USD (about $261 CAD).

Amazon now says that it is detecting price gouging by comparing prices submitted by sellers with historic prices offered in the marketplace. It is also using machine learning to aid with the human monitoring.

The company also recently banned any products that falsely claimed to prevent or cure the coronavirus. Amazon notified third-party merchants that it was going to remove listings that claimed to stop the spread of the virus.

Source: CNBC, Amazon

The post Amazon removes thousands of products due to coronavirus price gouging appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Inc has an article on how the major service providers with tools for remote work are all jumping in around the Coronavirus situation, by offering free trials of various services. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts and LogMeIn are all looking to gain market share with the free offers. The moves are smart marketing as "stimulating trial" is one of the most successful tactics that can be deployed by a brand. The offers also have a second benefit. They may promote some brand switching as a result because now if you're a Slack based organization, but a Microsoft house, you have no excuse to not give Teams a shot. And if you're a G Suite user, you may want to see what's up with it.

For Cisco, it's an opportunity to showoff and possibly win back some former WebEx users. A lot has changed with WebEx over the past few years, so capitalizing on Covid-19 to get some traction isn't a bad move at all.

But remote work is going to need more than Teams, GoToMeeting, Hangouts, Zoom and WebEx to make people "productie remote workers." The sharing of files, uploading of documents, notifications about actions, all have to be integrated too. New zaps from Zapier that enable richer notifications, updates to documents, and other alerts will start to become the norm. Tracking all this in some reference capable format will be needed. Documentation of who did what, who said what will also become a necessity, as remoteness can lead to both freewheeling, or overlooking of the details.

While Zapier can be looked at as the connectivity between apps that automates routine tasks, the platform is really the connective tissue of so much data being moved from one bucket to another, all in a way that anyone with a basic sense of moving this from here to there can master. Tools like HighTail, WeTransfer, TransferNow, Firefox Send and more are going to see more use too as people working remotely find that not being on the same LAN is slowing them down when it comes to sharing. Slack's file upload to a thread, group or individual is also good as is their integration with Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive. 

For coordination between home and work balance, tools like Calendly and Woven will take on new uses. Before when mom or dad was working in the office, hours were pretty well set in place. Now, with parents or spouses working from home, family members and even neighbors need to understand that WFH doesn't mean a day off. Using  preset calendaring tool links will make it easier for family and friends to see when mom or dad can help with something, like a ride to school, a pick up after or a lift to meet up with friends. It will also allow kids to not schedule friends over who could be making more noise than mom or dad is used to when working in the traditional office. 

Tools that help make remote work happen aren't the end of the solution. It's about putting all the pieces together to allow for home/work balance and easing the frustration that the new remote workers may experience from the start. 

P.S. It was fun to read Shelly Palmer's article on becoming a remote working badass. In reading it I was checking off how much of what he's suggesting I've been doing or the services we're using for as long as most have been around.  Here's my list of what I've done or are doing personally, and within the business:

• Workspace
• Hours
• Rules for Others
• Morning Ritual (I have end of day rituals for different days too)
• Time Management
• Daily Quitting Time (it varies by day, time zone or location)
• Different Phone Number (Google Voice is ideal for this)
• Conference Calls
• Solid Broadband Connection (I once bought a house based on who the provider wasn't)
• Collaborative and Messaging Tools (I can still remember when introducing Slack to the team and Skype as our primary way to communicate)
• Project Management-We have been using Basecamp since Basecamp 1
• GSuite-what a war it was to get some people off of Office or Outlook.
• Acting like you're in the office -now in an apartment building vs. a freestanding house this is key for deliveries and more
• Scheduling calls like meetings -I use UberConference for most of my scheduled calls, sometimes Zoom and even Skype or
• Signal depending on who I'm talking to and have for years.
• Voice check ins--it's like managing by walking around without the exercise
• Daily Stand Ups-even when we don't talk, a short chat solves a lot of issues before they arise. We hold one every day 30 minutes everyone has officially started their day.

I'll add a few more:

• Softphone for your laptop or desktop
• Quality headset
• Desktop lighting to look good on a conference call
• Mobile app connected to your cloud voice provider's phone system
• Desktop or travel size speakerphone
• HD webcam, not just what's in your laptop or tablet
• iPad -my mini is my all around mobile device of choice 

A good week in which I,

• Visited an event space very close to our home
• Did a workshop with the Dutch National Archives
• Worked on the EU High Value Data list research
• Scoped out a handful of practical actions on making the food use and catering at a province more circular, as part of our work with their circular economy team by using better data
• Discussed information ethics with a client
• Worked on microsubsidies for energy poverty
• Discussed ensuring data sovereignty during procurement in a client organisation
• Had a fun day in Enschede with my old fraternity
• Celebrated both E’s parents’ birthdays with the entire family in our home and a nearby restaurant
• Helped E as she fell ill Sunday evening (no not that).

mkalus shared this story from Fefes Blog.

"We have tested SARS-CoV-2 isolated from a patient and found that camostat mesilate blocks entry of the virus into lung cells," says Markus Hoffmann, the lead author of the study. Camostat mesilate is a drug approved in Japan for use in pancreatic inflammation. "Our results suggest that camostat mesilate might also protect against COVID-19," says Markus Hoffmann. "This should be investigated in clinical trials."

I suspect my early experiences with organizations were similar to most. Most of what we encountered was pretty simple to see and understand. We were students in a classroom, there was a teacher in the front of the room and a principal down the hall. Add a librarian, a school nurse, and the cafeteria ladies and you pretty much had it all.

At the other extreme, we tried to get the phone company or the Department of Motor Vehicles to help with a simple problem and encountered bewildering complexity. Why organizations looked the way they do wasn’t a question that occupied much of my attention.

My path to organization change and design was by way of programming and information systems design. What I learned in systems design was that complexity was the enemy. You had to understand the complexity of the problem you wanted to solve for there to be any hope of crafting a solution. The biggest mistake you could make was to miss some essential element of the complexity. The second biggest mistake was to add complexity by accident with your solution.

My technology training and experience tackled complexity with notions of designed modularity and looking for the natural places to carve the overarching system into discrete pieces.  There’s a rich assortment of models for thinking about problems of organizational design. I’ve taught them and I’ve used them. What I’m working through now is whether I can articulate a stack of organizational ideas that might help keep the complexity under control when looking at a new problem.

One organizational stack that intrigues me is

• Purpose
• Power
• Process
• Practice
• People

I like the alliteration and I think the layers are largely self-defining/self-explanatory. I can see how I might map what I observe onto layers and how I might navigate up or down the stack while exploring a design question.

I’m now curious whether this cursory perspective is enough to generate some reaction.

The post Picking an organizational stack appeared first on McGee's Musings.