Tag Archive

How To Write Functional Specs

Thursday, March 12th, 2020
How To Write Functional Specs

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... »

Death to Auto-Widening Yellow Brick Roads, Part 2

Monday, February 17th, 2020
Death to Auto-Widening Yellow Brick Roads, Part 2

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... »

Startups Not Eating Each Other Like Cannibalistic Dogs

Saturday, May 18th, 2019
Startups Not Eating Each Other Like Cannibalistic Dogs

Huge thanks to Malcolm Ocean, Christina Willner, and »

How You Talk Yourself Out Of Reporting A Bug

Wednesday, May 1st, 2019
How You Talk Yourself Out Of Reporting A Bug

It’s funny how universal it is for users (including programmers, including myself) to gravitate so strongly to “it’s probably just me / my crappy phone / my timezone / me not reading the webcopy / me not being deserving of love or working software / etc”. It might be an impulse to be kind and not... »

Beeminder Scholarships to Attend Quantified Self 2018 in Portland

Saturday, August 4th, 2018
Beeminder Scholarships to Attend Quantified Self 2018 in Portland

By coincidence the global Quantified Self conference is in our own hometown of Portland this year, September 22-23. Some of you will recall it was in Amsterdam last year and »

Slytherin 404 Errors

Thursday, July 19th, 2018
Slytherin 404 Errors

UPDATE for webdev nerds: We realized we meant “403 Forbidden” rather than “401 Not Authorized”. Here’s a little information leak we noticed and fixed some months (ok, the better part of a year — blush!) after we publicly launched in late 2011: Say our user Alice has two goals. One is her book reading... »

Barfing Cats and Other Stories from Talking to Weasels in Support

Wednesday, March 21st, 2018
Barfing Cats and Other Stories from Talking to Weasels in Support

We’ve written a lot about weaseling and cheating (combatting it, recovering from it) in Beeminderland, and about how we approach customer support. Today we thought we’d share some of our standard responses... »

Beeminder Is Sixy!

Thursday, October 19th, 2017
Beeminder Is Sixy!

The last year has flown by like a swarm of bees. We do one of these blog posts every year and they’re kind of a mix between a family Christmas letter and a state of the union address. We’ll spend a while congratulating ourselves on the charming new babies we made this last year, we’ll... »

The “I Will” System

Wednesday, August 9th, 2017
The “I Will” System

“80% of success is showing up.” — Woody Allen “It should be completely implausible to describe a startup’s CEO as a flake.” — Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston’s heuristic for successful startups “Let your ‘yes’ mean yes, and your ‘no’ mean no. Anything more than this comes... »

Our Label Ontology For Issue Tracking

Wednesday, March 1st, 2017
Our Label Ontology For Issue Tracking

UPDATE 2018 Mar: We made some changes! Like changing “REQ” for “feature request” to the semi-standard “RFE” for “request for enhancement” (because the former looked too much like “required” or “requisition”). And adding the “ABC” label for non-technical contributors. See also the comparison with GitHub’s default labels at the end of the post. UPDATE 2018 Jul: OMG, the... »

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