Tag Archive

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... »

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Hello Bright Red Line

Thursday, May 27th, 2021
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Hello Bright Red Line

I believe this is our first blog post with a theme song. Remember last year when we replaced Beeminder’s Yellow Brick Road with a so-called »

Beeminder’s Achilles Heel

Tuesday, December 15th, 2020
Beeminder’s Achilles Heel

Beeminder’s Achilles heel is that you need a meta-Beeminder to get yourself to create a Beeminder goal in the first place. (We sometimes call it Beeminder’s bootstrap problem.) Here’s a trick to mitigate that problem: Create a goal as soon as you think of it, but with an initial flat spot of a week or a month or... »

Road Ratchet Revamp Redresses “Ratcheting Breaks Breaks” Bug

Wednesday, October 14th, 2020
Road Ratchet Revamp Redresses “Ratcheting Breaks Breaks” Bug

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... »

Announcement: The Yellow Brick Half-Plane Has Arrived

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020
Announcement: The Yellow Brick Half-Plane Has Arrived

Until today Beeminder had a fundamental design flaw that was baked in from literally day one. The first line of code for what would become Beeminder was to draw a line on a graph in Mathematica from a target weight to a goal... »

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
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

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... »

Feature Unannouncement: Death To Custom Lane Widths

Friday, May 1st, 2020
Feature Unannouncement: Death To Custom Lane Widths

This is the next phase in our elaborate evil plan codenamed Yellow Brick Half-Plane. Benevolent plan, I meant to say. The previous phase was killing off auto-widening yellow brick roads. Background: Yellow Brick Whatnow? To start at the very beginning… The Yellow Brick Road is the path on your... »

Schedule Breaks On All The Things!

Monday, April 20th, 2020
Schedule Breaks On All The Things!

There’s a huge irony in us shipping this feature during the coronavirus lockdown. Namely, none of us need it for the foreseeable future! Our calendars are like an infinite Euclidean half-plane covered in fresh snow. (Ok, fine, I floated that claim among some hardcore Beeminder users and they vehemently disagreed. Examples of why this is great during a pandemic... »

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... »

Feature Unannouncement: Auto-Widening Yellow Brick Roads Have Gone Manual

Tuesday, January 28th, 2020
Feature Unannouncement: Auto-Widening Yellow Brick Roads Have Gone Manual

In which we explain how a big feature of early Beeminder, auto-widening yellow brick roads, was wrong-headed and what we’re doing now instead. This is Part 1 with Just The Facts and the probably-very-safe-assumption that you don’t care about the convoluted... »