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.)...

Announcement! We’ve reworked Gmail goals to use a label instead of an arbitrary search query, because Google is making us. (Not just us. Any app wanting access to things like arbitrary search queries has to go through a $10k+ security audit now!) If you need to do something about your Gmail goal to keep...

Here’s a thing users really hated about Beeminder until today: when Beeminder told them they needed to floss their teeth 0.23 times or archive 6.8 emails or whatever nonsensical / physically impossible thing. I personally shrugged that off for years. Obviously you just mentally take the ceiling of...

It’s now been ten years since the publication of Gollwitzer et al’s paper about, as the internet interpreted it, keeping your goals to yourself. I think I’ve heard variants of “did you hear that science shows that you’re more likely to achieve your goals if you don’t tell anyone?” many dozens of times...

We have a new official integration partner! Except arguably not official, nor a partner. Project Euler is philosophically opposed to any kind of commercialization. So much so that the founder and all volunteers who contribute to it have committed to never profit financially from doing so. Pretty hard...