27 Apr 2021 On 3rd March, Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp (a company that runs an online project management tool and Hey, a privacy-focused email service) tweeted: Company culture is not written down, it’s acted out. A company’s culture is a 50-day moving average of how it is, not how it thinks it is, wants to be, or was supposed to be. Fifty-five short days later, on 26th April, he would publish a long and baffling blog post entitled “Changes at Basecamp. (Read...)

27 Mar 2021 In 2014, a Tumblr post featuring an implausible anecdote involving a homeless man dancing to Gangnam Style and a miserly rich man being shamed in front of a crowd of applauding strangers was posted to Reddit, where it was roundly mocked. Over the years, Oppa Homeless Style, as it became known, became an infamous part of the ‘Tumblr canon,’ a widely-acknowledged example of the absurdity of a platform at the time famed for hosting naïve teens and ‘social justice warriors’ (a term used by people who think opposing social injustice and oppression is a bad thing, for some reason. (Read...)

12 Oct 2019 Here are three disturbing ideas: There is more infrastructure in the world than you think; The infrastructure you rely on is more vulnerable than you think; The people in charge of managing that infrastructure either don’t realise that it’s infrastructure, or don’t care. What do I mean by ‘infrastructure’? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as: infrastructure (noun) The basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise. (Read...)

6 Jul 2019 Today is Pride in London. Many tech firms have been festooned in rainbow bunting for the last week, and some app developers have even changed their apps’ icons to suggest solidarity with LGBTQ+ people. It’s important to remember that Pride is, fundamentally, a protest. This year marks 50 years since the Stonewall Riots, when the queer community in New York City rose up against the police’s violent oppression—an uprising led by drag queens and queer people of colour. (Read...)