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A studio, not an office

by John Jago
10 blocks • 2 months ago

Small Technology Foundation — what is s…

Constraint Systems

“The act of needing to create, not for someone else, but for a spiritual purpose”

Grace Wales Bonner

Harrison Metal — Factory vs. Studio

From 2006 to 2014, I taught at Stanford University. This is the story of one of the activities I used in the classroom. The activity is called Factory vs. Studio. It’s a live simulation in the classroom that helps students understand the importance of start conditions when they’re managing a team.

Here’s how it works. First you pick four people to work in the Factory and four other people to work in something called the creative Studio. They each get the same exact assignment: produce a children’s book for kids aged 3 to 7. The story has to have commercial appeal and merchandising potential.

Michael Dearing

https://medium.com/@mcgd/factory-vs-studio-fb83b3fe9e14

Factory vs. Studio

+7 more blocks

Work logs

by John Jago
14 blocks • 3 months ago

These days on GitHub I come across projects like CodeEdit and AFFiNE which have the disclaimer I’ve seen one too many times. It’s usually preceded by a warning emoji and mentions that it’s super alpha and not ready for production use. Browsing through public projects, it starts to become funny how common it is.

Some are clones of existing products that end up getting lots of stars on GitHub for no reason other than being the open source alternative of that product. I bet 98% of people don’t even go as far as cloning the repo, let alone running it. Maybe glancing at the name, the README, and the live demo, if there is one. What do the stars really mean, then?

Some projects are doomed to remain in alpha but provide a hopeful glimpse at a brighter future.

There’s no conclusion here, just my thoughts while browsing GitHub.

GitHub is full of alpha projects

I wasn’t sure what direction to take my online writing recently. Was I writing stuff worth reading? Are the topics too mixed? What should I write next?

I decided to go through every blog I have bookmarked and list out the characteristics of the ones I feel drawn to, the ones that I eagerly await their next post, as well as the characteristics of the ones I don’t care about. I want my own blog to be in the former category, so I was curious how its characteristics compared to these two lists.

The blogs that I genuinely enjoy reading have the following in common:

the websites are uniquely designed by the writer themselves (no template or default themes)
analyses go to a depth that many don’t dare to reach
they counter popular perspectives
they offer a perspective that may cause a reader to change their own
they share life lessons
they exhibit an intense attention to detail in everything they do
authentic and unapologetic
the people behind them feel human and it’s obvious who is wriring
they are not overly focused on a single topic, but the background they’re coming from is clear

The ones I do not feel drawn to:

use a default or overused theme on whatever blogging medium they’re on
focus on too specific of a topic and never venture outside that topic
are trying too hard (to be funny, to be something)
make frequent, small posts that takes less than a few minutes to read
post way too often
have a poorly designed or confusing to navigate website (often because they’re trying too hard to make it look cool)
too professional
look like a web app? lol
talk too much about abstract topics or ideals that don’t manifest in reality
set in Times New Roman
too commercial
too much like a résumé

After doing this, I feel clarity on what keeps me coming back for the pleasure of reading.

Characteristics of blogs I genuinely en…

There’s a kind of free tier that I appreciate when products have. It’s when the free tier has a quota, that if you stay below, you don’t pay anything. Even better, it’s when that quota is related to how likely you are to be making money yourself when exceeding that limit.

For example, Buttondown is a newsletter software, and you don’t pay if you have less than 100 subscribers. This is perfect because it gives people who are just starting out the freedom to experiment for a while, without worrying about going broke. On the other hand, those with thousands of subscribers, most likely making money off it, pay their fair share.

For not an example, in Write.as you currently have to pay to get started, no matter how little you write or how small of an audience you have. This isn’t the worst, because you are paying the tool, and if that tool keeps improving, even paying a subscription makes sense. But there’s some hesitation if every tool asks to pay like this. It’s hard to experiment when you don’t have a lot of money.

Products that make money when the people using them make money, and that don’t ask for money if the people using them don’t make any, have a fair pricing model that allows breathing space to figure out to how succeed using that product.

Of course, not every product has a natural quota to measure. It’s something I’m going to deliberate carefully when pricing my own products.

Let me make money first

The other day, I created a few social media banners to make better use of that space.

Previously, I would have used GIMP or Photoshop to create the graphic, and I would have struggled through the process.

After seeing Figma become popular, I decided to give it a try. It worked out well, and I was impressed! The workflow for creating non-photographic graphics is intuitive. Why was I trying to use a photo editor in the first place? Of course, there is Adobe Illustrator, but that was released 35 years ago! They might have gone through a few rewrites, but over those 35 years, it has accumulated a lot of complexity that isn’t needed to create simple banners.

With Figma’s canvas approach, I can create multiple graphics in one file, but I also have the ability to select only parts of it to export to PNG. This works really well because you often don’t know what you’re going to need along the way to a finished design. Much of the struggle of the other programs was not having the space to experiment. No more juggling open files!

The user experience of Figma is a lesson. Many people say they’re not good at graphic design, but perhaps nothing is really difficult, and it’s just our tools that are lacking.

Nothing is difficult, blame the tools —…

For the longest time, I didn’t have any analytics on my websites. I didn’t know where visitors came from. In fact, I didn’t know if there were visitors at all.

Google Analytics has given web analytics a bad rep, for many reasons, but there are solutions out there now that respect privacy, don’t slow down your website, and are pleasant to use. From my research, Fathom, Plausible, and Simple Analytics are the most modern and popular as of today. There are similar products that have been around for a long time. They’re probably just as good, just not as sleek.

At the time of writing, Fathom seems to be the original privacy-friendly analytics that is cheapest per traffic and has the sleekest UI, Plausible is a clone that has more features and a less elegant UI, and I'm not sure about Simple Analytics since I didn’t want to spend time trying a third one. The formula for these are standard and there’s not too much new after the second one.