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Dion Almaer

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Archives for August 2017

Operating System? Help Me Operate

August 28, 2017 Leave a Comment


I want my computing platforms to help me reach goals and get things done. At this point, I have hacked and slashed my current “system” which involved manual process and automated scripts, to try to help me progress.

However, I often feel like I am fighting my environment, and long for an update to my devices that say “ok, let’s really help you be super human”.

Beyond using Google tools (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Calendar, etc), I also use Asana, Coach.me, and Anki to store, track, and learn. I trick out my Gmail, somewhat akin to how Greg Wilson does, and after reading Algorithms to Live By I stopped trying to build the perfect system and embraced things like caching. My hacks make sure that important data gets into multiple systems, allowing me to search from any of them and get to what I need.

When I saw that Thomas and Amy were working on a new task system: Sweep it reminded me of the friction that I face with driving habits. I have found that I can become reliable at doing something when I do it daily. The difference between doing something twice a week vs. daily is huge for me, so I try hard to find a way to make the unit of work a daily thing, even though for many things this isn’t possible.

How do I handle daily habits via my phone?

I have a folder called “👊” that houses the apps that represent a habit. In there lives a tracker app, such as Coach.me (there are others such as HabitHub (Android, soon iOS) or Productive (on iOS)) to make sure I am tracking the work. In here I track the daily status for things like: Exercise, Study, Ate Healthy, etc. I have alerts in the morning and evening to make sure to check in and check off. Some of the apps have that built in, else you need to just use the Calendar.

The rest of the folder contains the specific apps that map to the activities. E.g. 100 push ups for a quick exercise, Duolingo for language learning, Headspace for meditation, Metabolic for food tracking, etc.

This manual tracking is far from ideal and what I really need are the following features:

Smart notifications

You want to be reminded and nudged to do the work, but in a smart way. Elevate has a smart notification system that will only bother you at a certain time if you haven’t done the work (duh).

Some of the trackers have decent features here, but still often go a lil off. I don’t need to be told “there are 4 items to be done today”, I got that.

Google Calendar has a feature specifically for habits, based on the acquisition of Timeful. You need to block time to get things done. Sure, you can block off a set time, and that can work, but the habit feature is smarter than that. If an emergency meeting is placed right over your time slot it will find another time for you, to make sure you don’t miss it.

Smart badges

Show me how many I have left as a badge. Productive even has a nice option where you can tag a habit to a time of the day, and not show you a count if it isn’t time yet.

Usage detection

For habits that have an app associated with them, they know when you are actually complete (vs. the app just being launched say). It would be nice to have an API so the app could give that information to the system. Then you would get tasks auto checked off, and could even show badge colors (yellow for started but not complete?).

Some activities that aren’t simply about app usage could still track. Were you at the gym for an hour? Did you run or bike? There is a lot of context that can be used.

Magic Folder

I want to go beyond a folder. On Android you can create a much deeper experience, which I hope to see. I would love to have a rich widget that shows me information and auto hides apps when they are done for the day.

I haven’t even gotten to the tracking of actual outcomes yet. In a world where so many of the brightest minds are fighting for attention, I am hoping that we can pivot the zero sum game of 24 hours a day to start helping us become productive.

What do you find useful in the daily slog?

Ecosystem Engineering

August 17, 2017 Leave a Comment

“An ecosystem engineer is any organism that creates, significantly modifies, maintains or destroys a habitat”

— Wikipedia

When you are working on platforms, you have the needs of the producers, consumers, and the market itself. As the market, or platform owner, your job is to make sure that the ecosystem as a whole is healthy.

One key is to not get too greedy at the platform layer, as Bill Gates put it:

“A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”

This is somewhat common sense, but why do we often do such a poor job of taking care of our ecosystems?

One reason is that it is a hard, complex slog. When you are building something new you have a lovely green field and pivoting doesn’t have the number of side effects. You don’t have as many dependencies to manage, so you can run fast and break things. You have built a lean product team with top notch engineers who are cranking through their sprints like Usain Bolt.

Then something happens. The success of the work slowly changes the game, and before you know it you may be in a situation where the team members don’t really know it has changed! The incentive structures in the company may have been setup to reward the wrong things.

For example, as an engineer, the way to get promoted is to tackle harder and more complex problems, delivering fantastic solutions, in record and reliable time. You level up by showing how your craft has improved. This may be utterly at odds with the needs of the day.

Let’s look at a real world example. The Web is too slow and this causes a major drag to the ecosystem health, resulting in the current epidemic. If you are an engineer on a browser team, you will be working on more and more complex technical solutions to either:

  • Taking the existing content, speed it up in the browser. Incredible work has been done here, and it gets harder and harder (and more complex). Compare older browsers and how they blitted pixels to the screen vs. the complex GPU architecture that is in there now.
  • Build new standards and implementations that have faster paths. This is geological time, and a ton of work too…… and the solution isn’t enough, you need adoption.

If your core metrics are based on browser metrics, these are the paths you will take. However, if your core metrics are around the speed of the Web at large, which includes other browsers, then your point of view may change. Your investigation occurs at another layer and you may end up with totally different conclusions.

For example, WordPress is a huge percentage of the Web, including new content. This may have you conclude that helping make WordPress faster (better AMP support, service workers, etc etc) will actually generate a truly massive impact on the perceived performance of the Web at large, and it may also cause a competitive push with other CMSes. We see this happen again and again. For example, Flipkart being the “Google Maps of PWA” drove a lot of mindshare in India on investing in performance, especially from the eCommerce vertical. But this work is far from sexy. Many engineers would rather NIH yet another amazing CMS versus go in and make WordPress better.

Engineering teams are naturally working on the next feature / version of the platform. Take something like iOS or Android. Their yearly drumbeat is intense. I get to see this first hand by witnessing the mammoth effort that the Android team takes on. As we tick to the N+1 version, it is natural to focus on solutions there, but the ecosystem lags behind.

This is why work such as the Android Support Library came from Chris Banes, an engineer in Android DevRel. If you are talking to developers everyday, you are living in the real world constraints of today.

It is critical that we line up the outcomes at the ecosystem level, allowing you to really wrestle with the problems that you face at scale. It is important to look at all the tools at your disposal to enact the painful, necessary change. You need to think through all of the carrots and sticks. This kind of engineering effort deals with much outside of the scope of code. Psychology, and economics, can be front and center.

This is when other functions come in. Is the full go to market team in line with the same metrics? E.g. BD, Marketing, Sales? When everything is aligned magic happens, however often I see this break down due to us wanting to break down the problem into small chunks. If we aren’t tying everything together we end up with small product teams that are focused on their product, versus the ecosystem. The goals revolve around adoption. Everyone is pushing their shiny thing.

As I continue to see this pattern, I keep realizing that we need more ecosystem engineering, and we need to change the incentives to truly allow “Product Excellence”.


NOTE: There are some teams that I have seen that go above and beyond here. One great example here is Rick Byers and his team, and their maniacal dedication to bring predictability to the platform.

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The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.

Dion Almaer

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