Beeminder’s Achilles heel is that you need a meta-Beeminder to get yourself to create a Beeminder goal in the first place. (We sometimes call it Beeminder’s bootstrap problem.) Here’s a trick to mitigate that problem: Create a goal as soon as you think of it, but with an initial flat spot of a week or...

Sometimes Beeminder goals have loopholes, like you could dehydrate yourself to get your datapoint below the bright line on your weight-loss graph (please don’t!). There are plenty of things like that and I probably shouldn’t think too hard about more examples. Sometimes loopholes like that can ruin...

By popular demand… (I.e., thank you to our fantabulous community for the impetus to write this post!) This is crossposted at essay.dev. Not to brag but our users are constantly telling us that Beeminder’s customer support is shockingly good. The best they’ve ever seen, even. Long ago we wrote about...

This is crossposted at essay.dev which is clearly also for nerds! For years we’ve gotten advice to widen our appeal. We shall now explain why you’re all wrong. Let’s start with an intuition-shaping factoid: GitHub is focused 100% on developers even though writers and designers and many other categories...

I want to read more books. I already read a lot of books, but I want to read more! It sounds like that should be a simple thing to beemind. Do-more graph, set the rate to however many books I want to read per day/month/year, go! It has turned out that it’s a lot more complicated than that, and because...

Are you somehow stumbling upon this blog post without knowing anything about Beeminder? Hoo-boy are you in the wrong place. But here’s a frenzied attempt to catch you up in time: Beeminder graphs your progress toward goals by drawing a bright line, called the Yellow Brick Road, that you commit to having...

By popular demand — specifically, being the winner of our poll — we’re catching you up on the latest research on the marshmallow test!   The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment concluded that preschool kids who could resist gobbling a marshmallow for 15+ minutes in order to earn two marshmallows went on...

Programming note (not that kind of programming; we could call it a doubly meta note?): The blog is now mobile-friendly! You’re welcome. This week we (by which I mean our robotic minions, by which I mean Google Alerts) noticed a Beeminder-relevant blog post out on the internet. It’s very short so I can...

Writing software involves a lot of backing yourself into corners. For even the simplest-seeming program, you find yourself adding duct tape and chewing gum to satisfy different requirements and logic bugs that come up. Then you gradually whittle it back down and end up with a few simple lines and it’s...

This is crossposted on essay.dev. It seems like every time I talk about principles of software engineering to you all I get jaw-droppingly insightful replies. No pressure. Ok, if you google “documentation-driven development”, it seems to be a lot of people saying that documentation is so important that...