Tag Archive

Beeminder ♥ trydeepwork.com

Thursday, May 25th, 2023
Beeminder ♥ trydeepwork.com

We’re excited to announce our official integration with trydeepwork.com! See also the announcement on the trydeepwork blog which is also a pretty brilliant introduction to Beeminder’s philosophy. Cal Newport’s classic book Deep Work is quite popular with Beeminder users [1], so we predict a lot of you will... »

Smithing Your Habits

Wednesday, May 10th, 2023
Smithing Your Habits

This is a guest post by Melissa Smith of Datasmithing! If you like Beeminder and other Beeminder-adjacent things like BaaS or Complice, but want more troubleshooting and guidance, you might like Datasmithing. (You might also like her blog which includes such gems as the graph paper... »

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... »

Psychological Pricing

Thursday, September 29th, 2022
Psychological Pricing

The other day (a Very Other day, because I’ve pulled this from the bottom of Quite A Pile of blog post drafts) we were musing idly amongst ourselves about what the psychological effect would be if Beeminder pledges were amounts like $4.99. The answer is it doesn’t matter because I can’t stand so-called »

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.... »

Beeminder But On The Blockchain?

Thursday, May 26th, 2022
Beeminder But On The Blockchain?

Let us start by saving you a lot of time: No. Beeminder does not need to or want to be on the blockchain. Are you still here? We figured we’d write about this now because a new Beeminder competitor called »

Backlog Freshening

Friday, March 18th, 2022
Backlog Freshening

Last time we talked about the control systems approach to backlogs. Quick recap: make a manual do-more goal where you add a +1 for completing something and keep adjusting the slope of the bright red line such that the backlog keeps steadily shrinking. This works not just for clearing a backlog but for winning the red queen race — dispatching things at roughly the rate they're coming in at and preventing another backlog from accumulating.... »