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Upside-Down Support
Friday, November 20th, 2020
Strategy Memo: Beeminder Is For Nerds
Saturday, November 7th, 2020
This is crossposted at essay.dev which is clearly also for nerds! For years we’ve gotten advice to »
Road Ratchet Revamp Redresses “Ratcheting Breaks Breaks” Bug
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... »
Happy Now, Beeminder?
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... »
How To Write Functional Specs II: The Spec-List
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... »
Blog-Post-Driven Development
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... »
The Anti-Magic Principle
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... »
X-Treme Nerd Interlude: Computing and Visualizing Level Curves of the Days-To-Derailment Function for the Upcoming Yellow Brick Half-Plane New World Order
Thursday, May 14th, 2020
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... »
How To Write Functional Specs
Thursday, March 12th, 2020
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
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... »