Mike Post

I build technology for people with short shorts and long socks. Mobile engineer & runner.

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Request For Hacks

Today Product Hunt launched a hackathon, which I will be a mother fuckin’ judge of. As such, I’m going to suggest a few projects I am highly confident would be judged as awesome. DeEchoChamber For...

Product Hunt is having a worldwide hackathon in November, and due to my current state of unemployment since moving back to Toronto, I think I’m going to do something for it. 

I might as well, it’ll hone my skills even more for interview prep, and I have an evolving list of “ideas” in my iCloud Notes app that’s approaching 30 something ideas I’d like to try to build (or at least hope that someone else builds) within my lifetime. 

Part-parody and part-surprisingly-helpful-real-insight twitter & blogging identity @startupljackson is one of the judges. His blog post linked in the title stoked my imagination a bit and touched on an idea I’ve been floating regarding the increasingly subjective influence in journalism, even before the chaos surrounding the 2016 US election:

It’s a shame we talk about fake news, which is a frame oriented around the product of media rather than the process, and allows us to argue about a specific controversy within a news cycle. Are these facts real? Did Trump say X? Is Hillary a Y?

I’m much more interested in a conversation around the process of journalism and what constitutes good journalism. Are we reading good journalists? Does this article meet journalistic standards? As technology platforms, are were biasing towards promoting propaganda and suppressing by omission (e.g. feeds) informative journalism covering sensitive topics? Are we amplifying via discovery (e.g. trending topics) 4chan propaganda laundered through irrefutable media masquerading as journalism?

I believe an input to any solution addressing the “fake news” problem will involve using technology to track and score media, giving publications, authors (named and pseudonymous), and individual articles a “journalism score.” We know humans can do this reasonable well. Now we’re just debating whether we can do this with computers, which I suspect we can.

I don’t know, if I find a job in the next week then obviously I can’t commit to this. But I’ve only been searching for 6 weeks now and it’s most likely going to take me a little longer to find a good job that I’m satisfied with. So, hackathon time it is. 

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It makes complete sense that we have have fake news in a world of fake people.

Irony thought for the day

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Peace & love is not short term change

So, this is an interesting perspective. True and like most truths, kind of depressing. We are all just pawns in the top tier’s oppression:

Although slavery is kind of getting better. I’d much rather sit in an office than be in chains digging trenches. Hashtag under 16th century office.

I am still an optimist though, and I think that when looking at inequality and injustices over time, we are making progress. Just very very slowly, and to anyone who hasn't read more than 100 years of history, it would feel like we're going backwards.

But what this video illustrates very well is that we need to take in this context in our daily lives, probably for the rest of our lives, when interacting with anyone from a minority. The problem that no one is addressing is that many people think that they should get a free pass to violence.

It's very frustrating when you feel the judgemental eyes on you on a daily basis. I haven't had this from a racially marginalized perspective. I have had much anger in my life though from other forms of discrimination, and the majority of my life has been spent of the mindset of making change through "whatever it takes action".

I don't want to bring up Jesus because a lot of his true values have been hijacked by extremists in my generation, and many generations before me. This is why I was an atheist up until 5 years ago. Since having in depth reads of the new testament back then, Jesus made me realize that real, forgiving, tolerant, raw, peace, is the only part of the bigger picture... and that we can't SEE the bigger picture, and that's ok. Our brains are too small and closed minded still. You can see this daily. People don’t listen to each other, we say we can empathize because it’s cool to say so, but we really can't.

I struggle with not seeing things change in our current lives and respecting that unconditional peace & love really is the only thing that changes the world in the long term…because we can’t see this. Peace & love is not short term change. This is the hardest part because we're so used to dealing with problems in our daily lives, not thinking how they'll fit into the jigsaw in 1000 years, 10,000 years from now - so it's very hard for us to understand that violent action is not an effective form of change, when all we mostly see that forces change is violent action.

I'm slowly realizing that this is a fake change.

It's not permanent. Reading up on history, everything ruled by fear and hatred is eventually overthrown, no matter how "morally correct" the fear mongering change started out as. I actually loved the final movie of The Hunger Games because I think it conveyed this point very well too.

So where does that leave us now? What do we do, how do we act? As a white person, we haven’t been as oppressed as black people in the past 200 or more years (again, the video makes an excellent summary of this). So we need to start recognizing this and not just sweeping the problem of racial discrimination under the rug when we make a small dose of progress - I have been guilty of this. I tended to roll my eyes when the #BlackLivesMatter movement started because to me, we had solved a lot of the black inequalities in the 90’s. I mean hip hop was my #1 music of choice as a teen, it has infiltrated all kind of culture around the world. You just wouldn’t see that in the 80’s and prior. But ok, that’s my little bubble world - this is just a blip in time.

Just because we make some progress and take 2 steps forward, doesn’t mean that the 1 step back is solved as well. That’s where I think #BlackLivesMatter has a place, and I get that now. That movement though is not going to add to real change if it resorts to violence. The police brutality issue is a real issue, and it might be seen as too liberal or spineless for me to say that we shouldn’t “fight fire with fire” (again, I believed in this method for the first 30 years of my life). But it’s going to create the same issues, recycled with different minorities and different oppressors, if we alway resort to violence and intolerance as the answers just because they fix things fast. Fast does not matter. Permanent matters. Evolution matters. Love matters most in this.

For this reason I’m inspired mostly by protests in this form, and I’m hoping that this becomes the norm instead of looting and rioting:

It’s more than me hoping. It needs to become the norm. Otherwise we’re not going anywhere, we’re not progressing. 

Ironically, peaceful protests (the real kind, not the kind that CNN likes to falsely report is happening, and this media distortion is just as bad with non-racial protests such as G20, Occupy, etc) are the fastest way to bring about real change. Because they inspire and they spread love. That is what the world needs more of, not a constant cycle of violence to one-up whoever the current oppressors of the day turn out to be.

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Revenge, and seeing people getting off on revenge, makes me sad

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If you're not adopting sprints to build apps, you are trying to make your version of the tech industry work like the construction industry.

I've been trying to push sprints on agencies I've worked with, for years. But it has to be driven by the owner. Now I have the perfect reference bookmarked on Medium, so save me the ongoing sales pitches.

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It's trendy to brag you've made an app in 5 minutes.

Time to revisit this. I tweeted this last year, after reading a refreshingly honest blog post from Janie Clayton. 

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The faster you react, the less you think

Jason Fried

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Inheritance & composition are a married couple

As I’m digging in to see where the declarative programming trend started to infiltrate into mobile development, I came across this interesting write up on Facebook’s use of their Components library, by Adam Ernst. 

A brief disclaimer: my opinion on programming trends, is that programmers do themselves a huge disservice when they align exclusively to an ideology. 

That means I try to avoid the black & white, the extremity of “use this but never that”. Just like how I approach running. 

Putting aside the greater topic of Adam’s post, declarative vs imperative paradigms, it’s his brief exploration of inheritance vs composition that I also see a lot of from other programmers: 

If there’s one lesson I learned from scaling a large codebase, it’s this: avoid inheritance! Find ways to use composition or other patterns instead.

I see this all the time, that programmers have had a bad experience with X, so they avoid it. Sometimes we don’t need to run 180 degrees in the other direction, we just need to learn why it didn’t work, and use it to its advantage the next time.

I find that subclassing is best used to extend state (known as abstract inheritance), not extending methods (overriding). 

Use both, overuse none. I like to adopt this phrase for Inheritance vs Composition, but I think we can use it in a lot of places. 

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Emotional Intelligence is not stopping yourself from asking the hard questions. It’s accepting that you’ll ask hard questions, and embracing them from others without taking it offensively

More thoughts expanded on this here.

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When people take feedback on bugs personally, you know that blame features heavily in an organisation

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Are you being given up on?

We’ve all read this on Medium -  some line casually dropped into a story of some magical opportunity handed by a harmonious colleague. 

The line is usually downplayed, something like: 

“Jane gave me everything I needed to make it work”.

Or 

“Tom asked me if I wanted to head up the team”.

There are a lot of stories from people who have had subtle donations of opportunity. When I read this, it leaves me thinking, “Hold up. Who are these people? Do they actually exist in real life, and if so, how do I meet them?”.

After recently leaving a new job at an agency (I took the job on the assumption that they practised agile, and it turned out they weren’t. That is a deal breaker for me #DeveloperSanity), I’ve been reflecting long and hard about what kind of work culture I’m looking for. The actual work of programming doesn’t really change that much from project to project, app to app, company to company - what does change, is the work culture. 

I’ve found that those opportunities and culture taken for granted by the average Medium poster, are actually quite rare. In the trenches of reality, in my life, people avoid challenges more than they embrace them. They give up on others, and they give up prematurely. 

I run a lot. Sometimes I get coached for my running. One coach I worked with didn’t ever give me a training schedule, despite paying for 3 months of, you know, training. When I challenged him about this, he just said, “come to the workouts”. He only had 2 workouts a week, so that wasn’t enough. A coach should tell you what to do every day, even on rest days. After I challenged him, he gave up on me. There was no feedback, no communication. I was a “too hard” project, merely because I had the audacity to ask for the service that I paid for.

When my wife went to a nutritionist, she got the assessment of everything that she was eating. She asked her what she ate for breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc, and how much? The nutritionist was dumbfounded, as she thought there was nothing wrong with how my wife was eating. So the nutritionist allocated her to the “too hard” bin and gave up on her. Because my wife didn’t approach her from a lifestyle of eating KFC buckets for breakfast, the nutritionist knew she wouldn’t get an OMG testimonial of magical weight loss.

When somebody has a desire for quality, they don’t want to give up on you. They enjoy being tested and being challenged. When somebody gives up on you, that’s the biggest indicator that they don’t strive for quality.

So if you give up on people, and you’re from a place of being a coach, providing a service, or being a mentor, ask yourself, “do I stand for quality?”.

And if you’re the person being given up on, forget about this person, cast them aside - life is too short to tolerate poor quality. Look at this way, you dodged a bullet, you got a sign to cut out this person/service.

The final example I want to give is when I was working in a kitchen as a trainee cook. The head chef, Lars, approached me and said, “I’m almost ready to give up on you”. Unless I would pull my weight in X areas. At the time this was extra heart wrenching, because I felt like I was by no means slacking, and was already overwhelmed with trying to learn a completely foreign new craft. 

Somehow I didn’t get defeated and was determined to turn things around. I ended up getting really good at my area, which was wood fired pizzas, and became a main goto person of Lars for any challenges that came up in the kitchen. On years of reflection, I probably didn’t get defeated because Lars was equally as good at giving positive feedback with every small improvement. 

That was a situation where somebody didn’t give up on me. He was the last great work mentor I had. 17 years later, and not many people have come close to giving work ethic changing feedback.  

Lars was a great example in my life on how to not give up on somebody - by telling them where they stand, and what they need to work on! So please, have that conversation. 

Say, “I’m almost giving up on you because of X”. If you can’t say that externally, then internally don’t give up at all. 

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Small town mentality in a big city. 

Toronto is pretty progressive when it comes to a lot of things. But when it comes to public transport, it’s in denial that it’s one of the biggest cities in western civilisation.  

I spent 5 years living in Toronto, and my wife is from there, we’ll be back someday. But whenever somebody asks me when I’m coming back to Toronto, I’ll point them to this graphic and ask, “how is this issue going?”.

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Move well and make things

Recently I blogged on my running blog, FitFriend Runs, about how we tend to latch onto extremes. In regards to running anyway, it’s a combination of things that lead to success, rather than one magic pill that we do. 

I have had a lot more success when it comes to running than business, so I can say that without any doubt, from what I’ve seen in myself and in many others, that it’s a combination of processes that makes a good athlete. 

In our work culture, everybody wants to move fast. It’s trendy! 

Dave Girouard singles out speed as the secret weapon in business, it’s the magic pill:

I’ve long believed that speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win. Speed is a defining characteristic — if not the defining characteristic — of the leader in virtually every industry you look at.

This isn’t really accurate. There are many examples in history of companies having waited/been late, maybe being 2nd, 3rd, to market, then owning that market. LinkedIn, Instagram, and even Facebook, are some I can think of off the top of my head. 

Accuracy question marks aside, more importantly I don’t believe this mentality is helpful anymore.

Getting back to running, I never made as much progress over 15 years than the recent past 2 years where I slowed down all of my runs, and adopted 80/20 running. Saving my speedy days only for 20% of the week. What is the result? Fastest race times of my life!

Things might be different for well funded VC startups. But in the trenches, most companies I've worked for break things more than they build things. This is a problem. Speed is actually slowing them down.

Yesterday I read a thing on a bunch of high profile well funded companies (Fab, Groupon, etc) who have failed because they moved too fast. They didn't have a quality distinguishing experience. 

I’ve worked mostly in places they throw all process out the door, to the point where nobody knows what each other is working on. There’s no agile, there’s nothing. Why? Because it “wastes too much time”. This seems to be almost like a waterfall model of working, without even knowing it. Because building things in secrecy or with little communication, leads to mutant deliveries that the customer didn’t want. 

From what I’ve heard from most other people, is that this is normal now. Moving so fast that you lose track of vision is the status quo. That’s what everybody’s doing! So why would any company wanting to have an edge, do what everybody else is doing? 

And we’re seriously confused when we see tweets like this:

Of course that’s what we got! “Move fast and break things” is not the same as “move well and make things”. It starts by us wanting quality first, then we can go from there.

Moving fast should only be very cyclical, it should only apply in certain phases. It only makes up a part of good, quality, market winning, products. Just like in running.

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I’ve never heard of emotional debt before, but I like it, and it makes sense: 

But the one thing you really can’t accumulate is emotional debt between the founders. I think that’s the number one killer of startups. You have the little issues that build up on a daily basis, the little tensions, and you don’t address it. And then when something big comes up you kind of are discussing everything else.

What we do [to prevent] that, well, each company has to figure out its own thing. For us it’s surfing.

I definitely think that emotional debt isn’t exclusive to co-founders, and that most people come across this at the employee level. 

It’ll be worth it if companies recognised this and had surfing trips to minimise the debt. Ok maybe not surf trips as a go to solution, some are closer to the mountains so a ski trip would be more appropriate. 

Kidding. Whatever works really. But the reality is that emotional debt does exists, at varying extent to different companies. 

I’ve always found that companies with the most open and transparent cultures automatically have a lower rate of emotional debt - people at these companies are willing to have minor uncomfortable conversations early and often, before they blow up into major issues. 

[fitfriendruns]

Best songs of 2015

Another year, another awkward experience of trying to figure out the best way to post a top 10 song list into Tumblr.

Last year it took me way too long to figure it out so I just gave up. I really wish there was a better way to do this on @staff than posting YouTube links, as I hate the ads, and embedding videos is limited to 5. If anyone’s got a better way to do this, please tell me.

I’m going to follow through with it this year, because I like to compile a list of my favorite songs for later reference anyway, and I may as well share them publicly. Ranked from best to least best:

1. Mansionair - Speak Easy

Holy Christmas wreath. This is one of those songs that forces you to pause whatever you’re doing, and think. I can’t believe the amazing production qualities on this too, the polish is just in the right places.

Especially soothing to listen to when passing out on the couch after a Sunday long run ;)

2. JR JR - Gone

This was seriously at a tie for number 1, I love this song. It’s as uplifting as much as it is relaxing too.

What do you call this borderline folk and electronic indie style of music, folk fusion? Anyway, I’m not a fan of folk but I’m a fan of its modern take.  

They deserve extra kudos for the amazing half body dance moves in the video.

3. Alex Winston - Down Low

One of the best songs of the year from this strong female artist. Now, this is an example of how far we’ve come with music over the past 20 years. On one hand it’s cheaper and more accessible than ever (thank you Songza and Apple Music). But on the other hand this is exactly the type of high quality song that wouldn’t even existed, without breaking into the top 10 a few decades ago!

That’s kind of sad, but it usually goes that more recently artist’s 2nd or 3rd songs break through now (see Future Islands, their masterpiece is Give Us The Wind from 2010. Give us the what now?). If they manage to pull off music as equally as amazing.

4. Tame Impala - Eventually

I used to be big on psychedelic fusion music in the late 90′s (remember Kula Shaker, or the Dandy Warhols…anyone?). While I’ve mellowed in my obsession on this genre, every few years a song comes out and reminds me how good this can be!

5. ODESZA - Light

One of those amazing songs where there’s no audible lyrics in the chorus. I’ve always thought that good music is about the melody and production, and less about the lyrical content. This one proves it to me again.

From Seattle, this song has the ability to be big & dramatic, but soothing.

6. Pure Bathing Culture - Pray For Rain

If you’ve heard this song before watching the video, be warned - the video starts off normal but then gets WEIRD. But if commentary on the state of narcissism is what you’re after, then this is required viewing. Musically, this reminds of Fleetwood Mac at their peak.

7. Future Islands - A Song for Our Grandfathers

Yes, this song might have technically been released on their 2014 album. But I have this compulsion to rate FI in my yearly lists since 2011, when Give Us The Wind was the best song I’ve heard from anyone in many years.

But this song was just released as a single this year, it was my favourite songs on the album anyway, and you have to check out the family feel of the video. These guys put their heart into everything.

8. The Paper Kites - Electric Indigo

I’m already enough of a sucker for a delay effect on a snare drum as it is, without having an amazing voice and melody on the top!

The video tells a fun little young romance story, so go check it out. #danceorgo

9. Alvarez Kings - Tell Tale Heart

“We’re allllllllreeady there”! I may be not much of a lyrics guy, but these just jump out at you.

One of those songs that would’ve romped into the Billboard top 10 when Friends was in its 1st season, but has barely gained 1000 YouTube views. Oh well, another song that’s our little secret ;)

10. Halsey - Colors

Stop it! Just stop with the good music in 2015 already. My “other mentions” section is getting filled up enough as it is.

Is Halsey responsible for the colored hair trend that’s making a comeback? This song has exploded since the first time I was hunting around on YouTube for a clip, and it still doesn’t have one.

Her voice in this song - as well as the style - almost makes her sound Swedish. I’ve always been a fan of Sweden’s very melancholic pop style merged with unique soundscapes. But I was surprised to find out she’s American.

11. Grace Mitchell - Raceday

I can’t stop. I have to include one more. I broke the rule - 10 becomes 11. This song is actually good enough to be 1st on any list though, and it’s hardly even been played anywhere (as of writing this, YouTube views is at a staggering low of 3,469)! That’s how strong 2015 has been for music.

Another song that’s tragically going to drift off without getting recognised, listen to it while you can. Play before a race if you’re a runner like me.

Other mentions

Check these out if you’re bored and you have the time to search for more seriously good music:

Years & Years - King

BØRNS - The Emotion

ALPINE - Foolish

Oh Wonder - Lose It

Kaleo - Way Down We Go

Peking Duk - Take Me Over

Poema - Forget You In LA

Pumarosa - Priestess

Daughter - Doing The Right Thing

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This is from my running blog, but I’m reposting here because music kind of applies to both. 

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How do you figure out the culture of a company you’ve never worked for?

Corporate culture is more important to your happiness than the salary, title or position. But how can you find out what the corporate culture is?

I’m going to have this as a reference when approaching companies in future: 

There are lots of organizations where people laugh at unique jokes, speak in unusual jargon, decorate their office spaces in unconventional ways, or have funky rules and norms. But the more defining parts of a culture are its values. Values are the principles people say are important and, more crucially, the principles people show are important through their actions.

In interviews, I usually ask the company if they adopt some form of agile. Because anybody with a strong sense of agile, will be in sync with my disdain for over managing or under managing a project. 

But agile is turning out to be too broad of a test. Most companies I’ve worked for say they’ve adopted it, but then it’s turned out that they don’t really use it...favouring complete anarchy (no exaggeration) and the miscommunication, tensions, and deluded expectations that go with it! 

Something is seriously wrong with the 0% project management model that most small to mid size Canadian companies adopt. I have no idea if the same problem exists in the US. 

In short, I really need to revise my little psychology test I ask during interviews. There needs to be a way to get a sense of a company’s values, and I’m going to figure it out.

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New startup model is missing one thing

This is a pretty creative approach, it'll be great to see it succeed. It definitely seems like it would be more efficient to have people validating an idea who are experienced at doing this!

Pioneer Square Labs calls itself a “startup studio.” It is not an accelerator, incubator, or venture fund. Rather, it’s a small 8-person team of founders, developers, and designers that rapidly test and validate new startup ideas before recruiting an executive team to build out an actual spin-off company.

One major problem I can think of though, is that this doesn't attract new talent - validate MVP with proven experienced founders, then palm it off to proven experienced executives. 

Where's the fresh blood that adds to the creativity process? At what stage do they inject the visionary, who sees it as their god-given life mission to bring X product to the world?  

PSL might argue that it'll come in the form of employees (this is just an assumption), but employees don't have any real freedom to execute their ideas or vision. Employees have a platform at best.  

A solution would be to involve 1 or 2 startup newcomers during the process of each MVP cycle - with the intention of the newcomer/s possibly taking/sharing the reigns of the company offshoot. 

If they involve someone in the industry of each idea, they'll also attract newcomers with passion. E.g, validating a baking delivery app, recruit the owner of a baking business who supplies to cafes; validating a running app, recruit a runner who's showed major progress vs their peers; etc. These people have existing networks to customers in the space too, that can only help in the process.