Weeknotes 2024 W01: Product tiers

Happy new year! This is the first time that the last week of the year does not extend into the next year, which I’ve complained about before.¹¹¹ See Week­notes 2022 W52: Crisis, and before that Week­notes 2021 W52.  This makes me happy, but now Tom is upset. Can’t win.

On January 1st, it occurred to me that the weekdays have WTF in them. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Truly an insightful start to 2024.

I wrote up my Expenses for 2023. My expenses were up 35–40%, which is considerably more than I anticipated.

The winter blues have finally hit me this week. Not just me, from what I can tell. Blah.

I moved my web site to Uberspace. It is now using renewable energy.

The move was remarkably simple, and it’s rather nice to be using a more old-school approach for hosting sites. It gives me a good amount of control over how I want my web site to behave, like being specific about how I cache assets.

The deployment is much faster, too. I use git push (wrapped in nanoc deploy) which immediately updates the web site using a post-receive hook. It’s wonderful.

The contact page is now using PHP. Nanoc generates PHP pages just fine.

I’ve had a question on my mind lately: why are there some products that I love to use, while other products are just… meh?

I’ve been using Bear and Fastmail for years, and they are fantastic. On occasion I play around with alternatives, but I consistently keep coming back to them. More recently, I have added Things 3 and Scrivener to this collection — two more delightful products.

In the second tier, there are things like SoundCloud and YNAB. Those too are good, but not nearly as great as the products in the first tier.

There is a specific difference between products in these two tiers. For SoundCloud and YNAB, the current primary purpose is to make money (for investors, or for others). It used to be different for SoundCloud: back when I worked there, it was a magical place where people cared about the product, and had vision. Money was a problem for later. I can’t speak for YNAB, but I imagine it has been on a similar journey.

Then there is the third and bottom tier, which contains the products that exist purely for making a profit. For these products, the focus is not on the product itself, but on sales. The companies behind those products have large sales departments, and company all-hands presentations are in large part about progress on hitting sales targets.

The products in the third tier are not great. Their quality does not matter, as long as they can be sold. A sense of progress is important: there are frequent updates that bring more eye candy and add more advanced features (like AI, I suppose). Because these products are of secondary importance, they are often riddled with bugs and often painfully slow to use. This sort of software is often written in a hurry. As a software developer having worked in these situations, I have felt the never-ending pressure of artificial deadlines to deliver new products and new features. There is no time to do it right: no time to refactor; no time to go slow and write a good implementation.

In the last few years, I’ve worked at a few companies where sales are more important than the product. They are frustrating places to work at, because I cannot help but care about my craft; I get attached to the stuff I do. I care, but others do not, and I cannot make people care.

Cue burnout.

At SoundCloud, I sometimes spent long days working, because I cared, because others cared, because the work mattered to everyone. I spent gargantuan amounts of time on Nanoc, because it is a product that matters. I spent time on building closecontact because it too mattered; there was no sales mindset at all (it was provided for free at a net loss, even).

My quest for 2024, I suppose, is to figure out what this means for my career going forward.

Quick bits:

• I have switched my main browser to Firefox. It is a good browser.

• I am back at work, and I had forgotten how quiet my apartment used to be without the Intel MacBook Pro’s fans. I really don’t miss the Intel laptops.

Entertainment:

• I am rewatching Firefly,²²² Firefly, written and directed by Joss Whedon (Mutant Enemy Productions, 20th Century Fox Television, 2002).  and oh, it is so much fun. It was already old when I watched it for the first time, but now it feels really old.

Links:

• 24 Hopes for 2024 (Olu Niyi-Awosusi): I like lists like these, and now I absolutely want to make my own.

• Cold-blooded software (Patrick Dubroy): Far too many of my own projects are “warm-blooded software” now that I think about it, and that explains why all of them died.