Tag Archive

Announcement: Signing Up For Beeminder Requires Hard-Committing To Use Beeminder

Friday, March 10th, 2023
Announcement: Signing Up For Beeminder Requires Hard-Committing To Use Beeminder

That’s right my little bees: we put a commitment device in our commitment device to bring out the commitment flavor of the commitment device. Does everyone know the soup nazi from Seinfeld? Basically it’s an interesting episode in Seinfeldnomics (and boy howdy do we like economics)... »

Beeminder’s Plans To Take Over The World

Thursday, February 23rd, 2023
Beeminder’s Plans To Take Over The World

“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.” — Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality I came across this draft from 2010 or 2011, before we’d publicly launched and with just a smattering of beta users we’d recruited one by one. It had a note-to-self: “rewrite this to sound... »

X-Treme Nerd Interlude: How To Upgrade Your Stripe Checkout Integration In Just Four Easy Years!

Friday, February 10th, 2023
X-Treme Nerd Interlude: How To Upgrade Your Stripe Checkout Integration In Just Four Easy Years!

Circa 2019 or so Stripe released a big update to their Checkout product, the previous iteration of which we’ve been using to collect your payment... »

Dumbest Hill To Die On: Automating Your Copyright Year is Lies

Thursday, January 12th, 2023
Dumbest Hill To Die On: Automating Your Copyright Year is Lies

I’ve been railing against automated copyright dates for years but just learned Serine Molecule scooped me in Copyright Notices Are Not Clocks: You should update the copyright year whenever you make nontrivial, copyrightable changes to your work. Not every year, and definitely not automatically. If you do it automatically, you... »

Beeminder ♥ Beeminder: Introducing the Meta Integration

Friday, December 30th, 2022
Beeminder ♥ Beeminder: Introducing the Meta Integration

Imagine if signing up for Beeminder meant committing to use Beeminder. As part of signing up, you’d create a meta goal measuring the number of total datapoints added on all your other goals. Now the clock would be ticking to get an object-level goal created and to start adding data to it! That vision may... »

A Funny Story About “Backing Up Your Website”

Wednesday, July 20th, 2022
A Funny Story About “Backing Up Your Website”

Huge thanks to Geoff Hubbard (aka insti) for a delightful meetup in Copenhagen, including board games and nerding out about Beeminder and other topics. We just got home and Beeminder wants us to publish a blog post.... »

Both Sides Now

Thursday, May 12th, 2022
Both Sides Now

Way back in 2014 we blogged about how people who wanted to mind both sides of the red line (called the Yellow Brick Road in those days) were all wrong to want that. We’re still pretty opiniated and still aren’t adding this as a feature, but... »

Backlog Freshening For Humans

Thursday, March 31st, 2022
Backlog Freshening For Humans

This is a sequel to the previous post on Backlog Freshening. It’s been gratifying to hear testimonials from you all about how valuable you’ve found this — for tasks in TaskWarrior, songs in one’s piano... »

The Bright Red Staircase

Wednesday, January 26th, 2022
The Bright Red Staircase

This is still pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing but it makes me very happy. Not just because I love pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing (we could say Product Vision if we wanted to sound more respectable) but because a couple years ago this sounded preposterously theoretical and fantastical and now it sounds inevitable and kind of obvious. We are making steady progress... »

Calendialing

Thursday, December 2nd, 2021
Calendialing

This is adapted from a forum post which was adapted from a daily beemail which was adapted from a fiftieth of Brent Yorgey’s brilliant, »