Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021
Beeminder’s bug classification system is like so:
Bitty Bugs are barely bothersome.
Baneful Bugs make Beeminder blatantly wrong, but not in any breach-of-contract way, unlike…
Bum-steer Bugs which may make you derail by leading you astray about the state of your graph, or, worse:
Bamboozle Bugs making our marketing mendacious... »
Friday, January 22nd, 2021
Since we like letting you all peek behind the curtain of Beeminder, let’s dive in with this internal strategy memo that our beeloved Queen Bee sent to the team last month, reproduced here verbatim:
Howdy my sweet bee people,
We’ve subjected you to a lot of polarized ideas about Beeminder pricing over the last month.
Whee! I’m... »
Saturday, January 9th, 2021
Announcement!
Beeminder has stopped selling lifetime plans.
Obviously if you already have one, we will honor it forever and ever .
We’re just not selling new ones.
We’ve thought about this hard and have five(ish) reasons:
Inability to give lifetime people premium credit
Special cases and complexity in the subscription logic
Lifetime plans take away your leverage as... »
Friday, November 20th, 2020
By popular demand… (I.e., thank you to our fantabulous
community for the impetus to
»
Saturday, November 7th, 2020
This is crossposted at essay.dev which is clearly also for nerds!
For years we’ve gotten advice to
»
Wednesday, October 14th, 2020
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... »
Friday, September 18th, 2020
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... »
Friday, September 4th, 2020
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... »
Monday, August 24th, 2020
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... »
Wednesday, May 27th, 2020
Being a fan of overly provocative titles, I was tempted to title this
“If-Statements Considered Harmful”.
Meaning that it’s so tempting to add little bits of intelligence to your app to make it do the sensible thing in different circumstances.
And that’s usually perfectly correct but the Anti-Magic Principle... »