⌘ ⌥ ⎋

[cmdoptesc]

WhatsApp - Why we don’t sell ads (2012)

We wanted to spend our time building a service people wanted to use because it worked and saved them money and made their lives better in a small way. We knew that we could charge people directly if we could do all those things. We knew we could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads.

No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow. We know people go to sleep excited about who they chatted with that day (and disappointed about who they didn't). We want WhatsApp to be the product that keeps you awake... and that you reach for in the morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to see an advertisement.

Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it's all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out... And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

— WhatsApp, Why we don’t sell ads. June 2012

[cmdoptesc]

Easy guide to making your own [githubname].github.io page.

GitHub is awesome. It's so awesome that they even provide you with super basic web hosting for static pages, so you can re-up your old GeoCities site. However, their documentation isn't that stellar, so I wrote up this quick little guide...

1) Make a new repo on GitHub with the following name: [username].github.io

The name before github.io needs to be your exact GitHub handle. So if you're xSk8oRDiEx on GitHub, it'll be xsk8ordiex.github.io, sorry.

2) Once the repo is created, go to the settings (last item in the menu on the right):

3) Click on the Automatic Page Generator (you can skip writing in content on the following page):

4) Select a template and click publish!

Great! Within 15 minutes, you should be able to visit yourname.github.io (or in my case, cmdoptesc.github.io). And to edit the site, clone down the repo and edit it like any other static site. If you want to run Node.js, you'll have to look to paid hosting, or get a trial at Heroku, or Nodejitsu.

Hope this helps!

    Follow-ups:

If you own a domain and would like to direct it to yourname.github.io, check out GitHub's help page. In short, it's a two-step process of (1) modifying information on your registrar (e.g. NameCheap or Gandi) like this:

And (2) adding a CNAME file to the root of the repo. CNAME should have no extensions, and should contain one simple line: yourdomain.com

Individual repos (aka projects) on your account can have their own pages, which will take the form of yourname.github.io/[repo name], or yourdomain.com/[repo name]. You can do this manually, or again with the automatic page generator. The basics here is creating a branch named gh-pages in the individual repo.

[cmdoptesc]

Yishang Wong on performance reviews and career ladders

The CEO of Reddit, Yishang Wong, has some great views on the performance review process that feel really pertinent given my company's upcoming roundtable discussions:

No one is interested in feedback (if they really wanted feedback, they could get it any time they wanted by asking their manager how they were doing), they just come under the belief that a performance review process will somehow magically uncover the fact that they are the true superstar.

[...]

Instead, hundreds of management hours will be sunk into creating a “fair” and “consistent” performance review process, it will be executed, everyone will have to write some painful and awkward self-evaluations, everyone will have to write a bunch of painful and awkward peer evaluations, and then managers will (at best) discover what they already knew about everyone’s performance and – possibly this is the only good thing that comes out of the entire process – the people who suck will awkwardly get told that they suck. Typically this last thing does not even happen.

[...]

As a bonus, you might have also acquired a “career ladder.” In technology startups, these things are a joke.  They come about because people in Class 2 and Class 3, after seeing their Class 1 peers get promoted and given raises, ask their managers, “What’s my career path here?”  This is a euphemism for “How do I get a raise and promotion too?”  (The Class 4 people, at least the ones who know they’re Class 4, are again just happy they haven’t been fired)

[...]

In Silicon Valley, there is no career ladder within a single company. [...] The “career ladder” concept is a holdover from the 1950s manufacturing era, where you might work at a company for 30 years and slowly work your way up, where you had a career at a single company. In the Valley, the median tenure for an employee at a startup is 4.5 years. That’s not a career.

[...]

Your real “promotion” is what happens when you leave the company and are recognized as having become better (through working and improving your skills) than you were 4-5 years ago and are thus offered a better job at your next startup.

[cmdoptesc]

All science is becoming data science.

When the Wikileaks material came out, you're not going to pour yourself a pot of coffee and pour over those materials, print them all out, and go through them one-by-one. You're going to write algorithms that do this kind of [data] analysis; word-use analysis, look for e-mail chains and dialogues; these sort of computational methods in order to analyse that material. Journalism itself is a computational enterprise, it's a data science problem, or it's amenable to data science technique. As a data scientist, the world is your oyster.

- Bill Howe, Intro to Data Science on Coursera

[pieratt]

[cmdoptesc]

Why do I hate this job so much? What is wrong with me that I’m so entitled? People the world over have jobs they don’t like, why am I unable to stick this out?

I could wax on this for a while (and I did, but then deleted all the paragraphs), but I think it comes down to the fact that, for some people, work is personal. Personal in the same way that singing or playing the piano or painting is personal.

As a creative person, you’ve been given the ability to build things from nothing by way of hard work over long periods of time. Creation is a deeply personal and rewarding activity, which means that your Work should also be deeply personal and rewarding. If it’s not, then something is amiss.

Creation is entirely dependent on ownership.

Ownership not as a percentage of equity, but as a measure of your ability to change things for the better. To build and grow and fail and learn. This is no small thing. Creativity is the manifestation of lateral thinking, and without tangible results, it becomes stunted. We have to see the fruits of our labors, good or bad, or there’s no motivation to proceed, nothing to learn from to inform the next decision.