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by Roberto Zoia

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssonk

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I recently finished reading It doesn’t have to be crazy at work, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson1. Jason and David are the co-founders of Basecamp, a project manager/real-time collaboration tool.

I liked the book very much. The argument is what the title says: it doesn’t have to be crazy at work for a company to be profitable and successful. It doesn’t have to be crazy for you if you are the founder/owner, and if doesn’t have to be crazy for you if you are an employee. Your work should not be equal to your life, and you shouldn’t expect it from your employees.

For context, Basecamp was founded 19 years ago. They’ve been profitable from month one and continue to grow their customer base every year. Although they’ve been contacted in the past by several VC firms, the only external founding they’ve accepted was a minority, no-control stake from Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos in 2006 2. They are not a public company, and don’t want to be one. They don’t have a CFO, not even a full-time accountant. Basecamp is on Forbes’ list of America’s Best Small Companies 2017. According to Forbes, this 60 employee company has an annual revenue of $25M.

I specially like their view on employees’ benefits3.

(…) we look at benefits as a way to help people get away from work and lead healthier, more interesting lives. Benefits that actually benefit them, not the company. Although the company clearly benefits, too, from having healthier, more interesting, well-rested workers.

Not a single benefit is aimed at trapping people at the office. Not a single benefit that would make someone prefer to be at work rather than at home. Not a single benefit that puts work ahead of life. Instead, plenty of reasons to close the laptop at a reasonable time so that there’s time to learn, cook, work out, and live life with family and friends. (p. 117-118)

If you are curious, you can check the Basecamp Employee Handbook.

The point of the book is not to adopt each practice as-is. As the authors say, what’s a best practice for one company is not necessarily so for others. That’s not the point of the book. The real question floating in the pages is: what is your company for?

Of course: be profitable, make money. But how much profit is enough, really?

  1. DHH is also known as the creator of the Rails framework for Ruby. In fact, Basecamp was the first Ruby on Rails app ever. ↩
  2. cfr  ↩
  3. Some of the benefits for Basecamp employees are, according to the book: fully paid vacations for everyone in the company up to $5,000 a year. Three-day weekends all summer. 30-day sabbaticals every three years. $1,000 per year continuing-education stipend you can use to learn anything non-work related. One monthly massage at an actual SPA, outside the office. $100 monthly fitness allowance. ↩

Finally, you can download your Kindle highlights

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I do most of my reading either on my Kindle device or on the Kindle app on my laptop. Highlighting and adding notes is an essential part of my reading process. It somehow replaces the marking of paragraphs and jotting down of annotations some people do when reading a physical book.

The Kindle app for MacOs has always been consistently bad. Particularly annoying was the fact that in order to download your highlights and notes, you had to rely on applications like clippings.io because Amazon didn’t support either functionality.

It’s incredible that such a basic feature had not been implemented by Amazon until now. Amazon’s latest Kindle app version not only let’s you review your highlights and notes side by side with the book, but also let’s you download them.

Screenshot 2018-12-11 22.29.08

Without doubt, your are Facebook’s product

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Ted Kramer is the founder of Six4Three, a company that relied on Facebook granting access to their users’ friends data for their business model to work. His company has an ongoing lawsuit with Facebook because of a policy change in 2014 that cut Kramer’s app access to that information.

Sue Halpern, writing for The Newyorker about Facebook, comments on some of Facebook’s internal documents that Kramer turned over to the British Parliament and were made public shortly afterwards:

The two hundred and fifty pages of internal Facebook documents show, irrefutably, that the company did indeed whitelist a number of lucrative business partners, including Netflix, Lyft, and Airbnb, allowing them continued and unfettered access to the accounts of Facebook users and their friends after the company claimed that it had stopped the practice.

And did you know that if you are an Android user, Facebook recorded your text messages and your call logs?

The documents also reveal that, in 2015, a permissions update for Android devices, which users were required to accept, included a feature that continuously uploaded text messages and call logs to Facebook.

I don’t know how deep is Zuckerberg involved in all this. Most of the time, he denies the facts. The CEO of a company, however, cannot not claim ‘not to know’ such things as their flagship app collecting their user’s text messages, or big advertisers being granted privileged access to user’s data. A CEO is not judged by his ‘good intentions’, but by his actions.

Kill Process

Coincidentaly, some days ago I finished reading William Hertling‘s novel Kill Process, a fictionary story about Tomo, the world’s largest Social Media company. Although all characters are fictional, you can’t stop associating Tomo with Facebook.

Hertling goes deep to describe Tomo’s monetarization practices, which are all frighteningly plausible. Angie, Kill Process’ main character and one of Tomo’s first employees, no longer feels comfortable working for Tomo. She realizes that even if the company she works for has been severly questioned for their use and monetarization of user’s data, Tomo has a lock-in on their users:

Data ownership is a big deal. Users stay on Tomo, even when they hate us, because their friends are here. If they want to remain in contact with their friends, they’re stuck with us. Everyone is jointly locked in together.

I don’t think we are there yet. Facebook doesn’t have such a lock in on their users… yet. One thing is for sure, however: for Facebook you not only are the product, but a very lucrative one.

Update 2018-12-10: Another look at how creepy has Facebook become.

The Future of Education

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Seth Godin recently shared the audio version of Stop Stealing Dreams in Akimbo, his weekly podcast. Next, he dedicated a whole episode to answering questions, mostly about education, and then recorded a third podcast provocately titled “Getting in (to a famous college)”.

Maybe you are a parent and have kids that go to school. Maybe you are a teacher, or a student. For all of us, Education plays such a critical role in defining the future of society, that this topic should be relevant to everyone.

You may agree or not with Seth’s vision of education. That’s not the point. The point is to start a conversation, beginning with the question What is education for?

I hope you’ll find this content so thought-provoking as I do.

If you like, you can grab the PDF version of Stop Stealing Dreams, or watch it on video.

Zettelkasten, a method for note-taking

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Having a repository for the things you learn is more relevant than ever. Facts can be easily checked using the internet. However, the process of connecting ideas, and formulating relevant questions, comes from deep reading and reflection.

Last weekend I discovered a method for note-taking called Zettelkasten. This method was devised by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who used it as an aid in his research throughout his life1. For context, during his life Luhmann published more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles on various subjects. Luhmann referred to his Zettelkästen as his zweites Gehirn, his second brain2.

Most of the things I’ve learned about Zettelkästen comes from the excellent zettelkasten.de website by Christian Tietze and Sascha Fast. At first, I thought about buying Sascha Fast’s book Die Zettelkasgtenmethode to learn the method. But alas, there’s no ebook version available. Having it shipped to Peru, aside of time issues, almost doubles the price of the book. So I resorted to reading enough of the articles on the website to gain a working knowledge of Zettelkasten.

A Repository for Knowledge

The basic idea behind Zettelkasten is to build a repository of the knowledge you gain through the years. The idea is similar to what Paul Jun, of Creative Mastery, writes about keeping a Commonplace Book, or Ryan Holiday’s notecard system. Zettelkasten adds the powerful idea of linking notes to create a web of interlinked knowledge.

I’ve been taking notes of what I read for years, first on index cards, then Filemaker, then Evernote and, more recently, using Bear. After a couple of days of appying some of the concepts of Zettelkasten, I’m really impressed in how my understanding of what I read has improved, and more important, the consistency of the system.

Instead of explaining the technique by itself, I’ll describe how I’ve incorporated it into my reading workflow.

I read most of my books on the Kindle, either using the physical device or the MacOs app on my laptop. While reading, I highlight paragraphs as I see fit, and add notes using the corresponding feature on the Kindle.

Later, on the Kindle app on my laptop, I process the highlighted paragraphs and notes. I copy each highlighted paragraph to Bear, using a separate note for each concept. (Zettelkasten refers to this as atomicity.) Each note is given a unique identifier and an appropriate title3.

Each note is also given tags for classification. Good tagging helps with accuracy when searching. The method’s recommendation is to use tags for objects, and not for subjects4. In the same note, I write down the ideas I had in mind when highlighting the paragraph, or any connection that comes to mind during this process.

Context notes are used as a map to a series of notes. A context note that outlines a more complex concept or broader subject, using links to other notes in the process. For example, while I’m reading a book, I build an outline of the things I find relevant, based on my highlights and notes of the book. Each of the outline’s items links to a separate note explaining the idea in more detail, and usually contains the highlighted text of the book.

While this process takes more time, it helps with understanding what you read at a different level, and making connection with other concepts and ideas. I’m interested in reading more books, but not if it goes against comprehension.

  1. I’m not writing to endorse Luhman’s sociology theories, because I don’t know anything about them. This article is about his note-taking method. ↩
  2. cfr Ein Zettelkasten war Lumens zweites Gehirn. ↩
  3. I’m using the recommended format in the Zettelkasten.de site of date-time to create a unique identifier. For example, 20181113131025 for a note created on 2018-11-13 at 13:10:25. (I actually use TextExpander to create the ID automatically.) The note title becomes then “20181113131025 Cultural assimilation in empires” instead of “Cultural assimilation in empires”. This ensures that each note is uniquely identified. ↩
  4. Check this article by Sacha Tietze for some insights on how to use tags effectively: The Difference Between Good Tags and Bad Tags. ↩

Featured image photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.

Origin Story

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I can’t remember exactly when I learned to program, but I’m almost sure that at the end of 1981, at the age of 12, I was already programming in BASIC.

Before 1981, my experience with computers was limited to borrowing some time in an Apple computer at my father’s office, learning to program the basics of the TI-59 calculator (again, thanks to an engineer in my father’s office who was relly into computers), and devouring every computer magazine I could get my hands on1.

In February 1981, life changed. I went with my familty to Florida for vacations. Some weeks before I had totally failed at convincing my parents to buy me an Apple II+ with occasion of our forthcomming holidays. But I got lucky. During the trip, we met by chance with a very close friend of my father. He had just bought Commodore VIC-20 for his kids. This friend told my father his view on the role computers would play in our future, and the importance of exposing their children to technology. He even gave us the address of the shop in Miami where he had bought his computer, the name of the salesman, along with the exact list of things we had to buy2.

I realize now why my strategy to convince my parent’s to buy a computer had failed: the VIC-20 was around $100, while the Apple II+ was around $1,000. In retrospect, I suppose that it made more sense to my parents buy the VIC-20, and spend some money in a cassette player to store programns, and some ROM cartriges with a couples of games, and some other programs.

I was totally happy with the VIC-20. When we returned from the trip, my parents got me and old black and white 12″ TV to use as a monitor. I’m sure that monitor used transistor bulbs, because you had to wait around a minute for something to show on the screen after you turned it on.

The VIC-20 came with a nice booklet that thought how to program in BASIC. When you turned on the VIC, other computers of the time, you were dumped directly into the BASIC interpreter: a welcome screen and a blinking cursor. I had some game cartriges, and the VIC manuals, so BASIC was the right thing to learn. I devoured the booklet. I ran all the examples, and tried some of my own.

Some time later my parents signed me up for a BASIC computer class. The classes gave me some structure to my understanding of the language, and the possibility of receiving feedback about the simple programs I wrote. We were only three or four kids in the class, the rest were grown-ups. (I remember that the final project was a program that displayed a bunch of data as a bar-chart graphic.)

My parents where pretty supportive to my computer obsessions. For example, they helped me subscribe to a handful of computer magazines: Byte Magazine, Compute!, and Creative Computing. I waited eagerly for each issue to arrive. I read them throughly from cover to cover, even if I didn’t understand everything. I shelved every issue carefully in my bookshelf, beside my books, as someone stores a precious treasure. I spent hours typing the code from those magazine pages into my computer and saving it to cassette tapes. Sometimes I enrolled my two younger sisters to help me type, with the promise of playing, once they were finished, the great game they were helping to type in.

Byte Magazine, January 1984

Compute!, August 1984

The VIC-20 was my introduction to the 6502 Assembly Language. Manufactured by Rockwell, the 6502 was the CPU used by most of the personal computers of the time. Thanks to its low cost, this CPU was one of the key players in the home computer revolution of the 1980s.

In front of the VIC-20, with the help of a simple program I copied from one of the magazines, I played with some rudementary assembly code. But it was not until some time later, when the VIC was replaced by an Atari 800XL, that I really started to programming in Assembler. I learned about things like memory maps, pointers, indirection, storage registers, screen address space… Again, I could not have done this if it were not with the help of some excellent books like Mapping the Atari by Ian Chadwick, and in this case, the awesome MAC/65 Macro Assembler by Optimized Systems Software,

I got so deep into computers that my parents decided to move my computer gear out of my room, and put it somewhere more public, so I didn’t stay awake all night punching at the keyboard3. This were pre-internet days, and I had no modem access, so if I was in front of the computer I was either playing games or learning something…

I also had an insatiable appetite for books. Aside from tech-related books, I read science-fiction and fantasy. My father read a lot. There were always books at home. To this day, I can ask him at anytime what book is he currently reading, because I’m sure he’s always reading something. I remember that a couple of times every month, my father would take me to a local library, where he would purchase a couple of books for himself and, with his help, I would pick a couple of books for me. My father finished his books during the week. Most of the time so would I. I read most of Jules Verne, Emilio Salgary, and others during that time. In 1984, where all computer magazines where writing about Orwell’s novel 1984, I bought the novel and binge-read it.

My parents enforced a lights-off rule so I wouldn’t stay awake reading at night and blury-eyed during the day. Luckily, I had a flashlight. I would go under my bed sheet’s with the lantern and manage an extra two-hours of uninterrupted reading.

In 1985 the Atari 800XL was replaced again, this time by an Apple IIc. I felt in love with the machine and with Apple the company. I read everything I could about Apple, about Jobs and specially Wozniak. I read with awe the story about how Woz designed the Apple Disk II controller –the hardware and code that controls how the diskette reader worked and connected to the computer– to use only 9 chips instead of the disk supplier’s original 40. He designed the circuit not only to be efficient, more advanced than anything available at the time, with more data capacity than it’s competitors, but he also took care that the circuits were beautifully laid out on the board.

Thanks to two excellent books, Beneath Apple DOS and Beneath Apple ProDOS, I learned about Apple’s operating systems. The book explained in detail the workings of the disk controller code, which indirectly helped me learn how unlock protected software. I learned how to copy the controller code4, modify the copy to read a program from disk without running it, so I could patch its code and remove the protection code, and write the unprotected copy to a new disk. That year, I also began subscribing to Doctor Dobb’s Journal… of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia (DDJ). The issues from those years where probably the best articles I’ve read ever about computer programming5.

The story goes on and on. At one point, I opened the Apple IIc to replace it’s CPU with a piggyback board with extra memory. I don’t remember exactly when I built my first PC by buying the hardware in sepparate pieces, but it was probably in the first years of university. I self-learned many different languages and framewors: C, then Pascal, then C++, then PHP, HTML, Java, Javascript, Python… For several years I run my own mail server in a headless computer in a closet. I’ve had affairs with Lisp and Clojure. I wrote a static blogging engine from scratch. I’ve fiddled with embedded devices, from PLCs to Arduinos and Raspberri PIs. You get it.

This is my origin story. Part wizard, part sorcerer, my magical powers come from the intertwinning of computers, books, and an insatiable appetite for self-learning6. (And needless to say, great parents.)

✼✼✼✼✼✼

I started writing this post after reading Time’s article titled Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal. Borrowing from my own experience learning BASIC when I was a kid, my initial idea was to write about how kids can learn a lot more than we give them credit, if we encourage them and help them develop a growth mindset, using Carol Dweck‘s meaning of the word.

As word kept flowing, the article became more about my passion for computers, books, and furious learning. 1,500+ words later, I realized that I had written my origin story.

An Origin Story “refers to how characters gained their superpowers and/or the circumstances under which they became superheroes or supervillains7“. Seth Godin explains and expands on this concept in the July 11, 2018 of his podcast Akimbo:

What’s your origin story? What was the incident that got you started on this path? And what was the choice you made after the incident occured. (…) To often we don’t realize that the origin story doesn’t have to match our destiny. We can change it, we can make a choice. With great power comes great responsibility.

We all have an origin story we tell us about ourselves. If we haven’t made it explicit, then it’s the story we uncounsciously repeat in our minds. What we need to realize that the story is not finished. We are the authors, we can change the narrative.

So, where did you get your special superpowers?

  1. OK, I should also consider countless hours staring fascinated at the screen and printer of my father’s company IBM System/32, which they used for processing the payroll. I still remember some commands: SEU ROBERTO, P to open the file editor. ↩
  2. The list included, surprisingly, a Forth implementation for the VIC. As I learned later, Forth is a computer language created for programming embedded and real time applications. I never did anything in Forth at the time, probably because I had no book to learn from. ↩
  3. I can reveal now that my parent’s strategy didn’t work. I would wait until they felt asleep watching TV and then I would turn the computer on and spend an extra two hours in front of the screen. ↩
  4. If memory doesn’t fail me, it resided at hex address $C600 in memory. ↩
  5. Sadly, some years later, the quality of the magazine faltered as they tried to become mainstream. Finally the magazine discontinued its printed edition and became an online section of InformationWeek. ↩
  6. If I had to name a fourth thread, it would be photography. But that’s for another story. ↩
  7. cfr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_story ↩