For background on the Yellow Brick Half-Plane that a normal human could conceivably care about, see our previous post on how we’re killing the custom lane widths feature. This post is strictly for abnormal humans, and/or, more realistically, for ourselves, because math is fun, and for our future selves,...

This is the next phase in our elaborate evil plan codenamed Yellow Brick Half-Plane. Benevolent plan, I meant to say. The previous phase was killing off auto-widening yellow brick roads. Background: Yellow Brick Whatnow? To start at the very beginning… The Yellow Brick Road is the path on your graph...

There’s a huge irony in us shipping this feature during the coronavirus lockdown. Namely, none of us need it for the foreseeable future! Our calendars are like an infinite Euclidean half-plane covered in fresh snow. (Ok, fine, I floated that claim among some hardcore Beeminder users and they vehemently...

Your beloved Support Czar Nikki (AKA shanaqui) is next in our trapped-in-our-apartments blog series (previously: Mary on creating challenges) and gives some inspiring examples of how they’re beeminding their health, happiness, and higher education (like learning more about COVID-19!). Everything’s...

Welcome to our new trapped-in-our-apartments blog series, where we tell you how we workerbees are coping with our coronavirus confinements. Mary Renaud is kicking it off with her strategy of challenging herself to finish fun or difficult feats before we’re released from captivity. She’s got some great...

We’re assuming here that you’re already conceptually on board with writing specs. If you’re skeptical, Joel Spolsky will set you straight! Here’s my own mini-pitch for specs: Writing software involves a lot of backing yourself into corners. For even the simplest-seeming program, you find yourself adding...

The startup egg-basket principle is: put all your eggs in one basket. Be laser-focused on the one thing you’re best at. If you’re scrambling for survival, focus only on the one most promising thing for making the startup sustainable. For example, most startups should focus exclusively on their premium...

If you’re just tuning in, and if you care about this for pragmatic rather than philosophical reasons, you’ll want to start with (or stick with) our announcement that we have fully killed off auto-widening yellow brick roads. This is the part where we philosophize about why this is a good idea. Equivalently:...

In which we explain how a big feature of early Beeminder, auto-widening yellow brick roads, was wrong-headed and what we’re doing now instead. This is Part 1 with Just The Facts and the probably-very-safe-assumption that you don’t care about the convoluted history and just want to know how your graphs...

This is our 14th press roundup! The internet seems to just keep on loving us. We’re very touched! Our last one was a year ago, making this one pretty much a 2019 year-in-review, Beeminder-buzz-wise. (Speaking of years-in-review, we also collected a list of things Beeminder did in 2019 on the forum.)...