TIL that 4 AM is way too goddamn early to record a podcast. Apologies if I'm more chipper than usual, that's probably the coffee talking.
Had some great e-mails this show. You should keep the streak alive and mouth off with your fingers at podcast@searls.co.
Savor this version, folks. Gonna be at least a few weeks until you'll have another one.
It is finished. As mentioned elsewhere, I gave my final conference presentation at Rails World 2024 in Toronto back in September.
The tremendous organizers did me a solid by humoring my request to provide the audio and video feeds they recorded of my talk, which allowed me to create my own edit in the same basic style I've used since discovering screen recording. You can view it on YouTube if you want.
Why watch this one when the official video is also on YouTube? Well, here's what the very exclusive and deluxe and never-before-seen Searls Cut gets you:
Anyway, if you haven't seen the talk yet, I hope you'll give it a watch. The presentation summarizes a year of my work but it also embeds countless little things life taught me over the 15 years since I started speaking at user groups and regional conferences.
But this chapter of my life has now concluded. I'm excited to be moving on to other things. In the meantime, you can stay tuned to my podcast and subscribe to my newsletter while I get to work.
There’s a device in my office closet that makes a pairing beep every few days. No idea what causes it. Could be any of two hundred devices spread across thirty bins and cubbies.
I will die not knowing.
From Apple's support page for connecting an Apple Watch to Wi-Fi:
Note: Apple Watch won’t connect to public networks that require logins, subscriptions, or profiles. These networks, called captive networks, can include free and pay networks in places like businesses, schools, dorms, apartments, hotels, and stores.
This has indeed been my experience ever since buying the Series 0 in 2015. But because the Apple Watch can piggyback off its parent iPhone for data over Bluetooth—and because most people are never more than a few feet from their phone—odds are you've never even noticed that attempting to join a Wi-Fi network with a captive portal would silently fail instead of bringing up a WebKit view.
The people have been clamoring (clamoring!) for a demo of the hot new strength-training system everyone's been talking about, and today Becky has answered their call:
My program, Build with Becky, is designed to make progressive strength training approachable, enjoyable, and sustainable. It’s about helping people get comfortable with lifting, stay consistent, and build confidence using a structured yet mindful, grace-filled approach. 💪
If you've got 3 minutes and a functioning set of eyeballs, I hope you'll give this demo a watch. This video is the cherry on top of several years of work, and I'm incredibly impressed by how well this web app realizes Becky's vision for a more graceful approach to strength training.
One of the skills I've improved most over the course of my career is Dreading.
I used to dread work that'd actually turn out to be easy or otherwise let a a crushing slog catch me off guard. But now my sense of dread is finely tuned! I was really dreading editing this video and boy was that the correct reaction.
This may surprise some people, because I've been staunchly opposed to the privatization of space exploration my whole life and have been rooting against SpaceX from day one, but I'm a big man… I'm not afraid to admit when I'm wrong.
I've been watching the news, studying the issue closely, and I've changed my position. NASA should award SpaceX as many billions of dollars as it takes to send Elon Musk to Mars as soon as possible.
Using a Mac to get work done without Vision Pro for the first time in months this morning, and… wow, this fucking sucks.
Free idea: a browser extension that reaches through the screen and slaps you in the face when you accidentally add an item to your Amazon cart that’s shipped & sold by a third party reseller.
My first and only keynote at RubyConf was 10 years ago this week. The Social Coding Contract turned out to be a pretty accurate read on where things in open source were going for the next decade.
The one and only time I drew hundreds of slides with stick figures on a Wacom tablet. youtube.com/watch?v=HFRU6eQKp4Y
For macOS Sequoia 16, Apple should announce a ground-up rewrite of Time Machine that—under the hood—is literally just a GUI on top of rsync.
Three years of trying to get Time Machine to sync to a network share, and never got it to work once. rsync: got it in one.
It is Wednesday, my dudes! This is normally a weekend listen, but there are new Macs to talk about. I wanted to give you the absolute freshest, least accurate information I can about all these neat new computers that I WILL NOT BE BUYING BECAUSE TIM COOK IS A COWARD.
Write something you want to say in all caps over at podcast@searls.co and maybe I'll scream it on the show!
Inside-voice links follow:
tl;dr, pollsters are twisting twice as many knobs in 2024 as they were in 2016 (due to skewed and decreased response rates and scrutiny of past misses). Separately, a 50/50 tied result is likely to catch the least shit in the event of another polling miss next week.
The shocking conclusion? Pollsters are twisting the knobs such that most results come in around 50/50. More knobs, more bias. goodauthority.org/news/election-poll-vote2024-data-pollster-choices-weighting/
Three quick takes on ChatGPT integration in iOS 18.2:
Trying to follow Ricky's advice and migrate one login at a time (testing each one, deleting defunct ones, adding 2FA as I go) from iPassword to Apple Passwords and… it took me 4 hours just to get through sites that start with "A".
Fuck. rmondello.com/2024/09/19/consider-slowing-down-when-switching-password-managers/
Look, all I want from political news—literally the only thing I’m asking for, and it isn’t much—is to tell me the literal future exactly as it will unfold so that my brain can go back to focusing on anything else.
TFW you notice the only written review for your podcast is from your wife.
Something has been stuck in my craw for several years/decades and I'm finally ready to do something about it.
Most software companies start from a place of, "let's make a simple useful thing and charge a fair price for it." And everything goes great for about fifteen minutes before they eventually concede all that simplicity and utility in order to establish additional revenue streams, or achieve planet-wide scale, or return an obscene multiple to their investors.
And who suffers when that happens? We do.
My favorite example is expense-tracking software. The Earth used to be populated with a diverse array of straightforward, easy-to-use apps that could ingest receipts, pretend a bunch of south Asians painstakingly categorizing those receipts were actually artificial intelligence, and export reports for your bookkeeper or accountant.
So far so good.
But at some point, some angel investor somewhere said, "what if we issued our own credit cards and then kept all the swipe fees for ourselves? And sold analytics based on what products and services companies were buying? Wouldn't that make us way more money than charging $5/month?" His name was Chad.
Corporate buyers embraced this model, because it meant no longer paying a subscription for expense-tracking software. But what was the experience like for users? Tough shit, nobody asked. They just work here. Instead, employees were strong-armed into activating those corporate cards and using them for all their reimbursable expenses—even if it meant losing out on literal thousands of dollars in cash back and rewards from their personal cards. Meanwhile, the apps themselves went to shit, because engineering teams that had previously only demonstrated competency in successfully putting a spreadsheet on the Internet were now also forced to provide the myriad card management services one would expect from Chase (~15,000 people in engineering), Capital One (~10,000), and American Express (~7000).
Fraudulent transaction on your corporate card? Good luck. Need to issue a chargeback against a vendor? Have fun. Oh, and everybody's so busy fighting fires and applying for better jobs elsewhere that nobody has time to actually work on the expense-tracking part of the expense-tracking software anymore, so don't expect any of the bugs preventing you from getting reimbursed to be fixed from now on. In fact, you know what, just for asking, here: have some extra bugs. And that was the state of the market before 2022! Things are even worse now that the free-money well has runneth dry. Now, none of those companies have a prayer of keeping all 14 plates spinning as the lifeless husk of what had been a growing engineering team has been remanded to work in an otherwise empty office building as executives watch their runway evaporate and investors start turning up the heat.
All for something that literally could have been a spreadsheet.
So anyway, yeah, fuck those apps.
So, starting in 2025, whenever I come across a problem that is poorly served by the current crop of SaaS products, I'm going to build my own little tool that does the job. And, if you're lucky, I'll release it as part of an eventual fuckthis.app suite of apps. And whatever I build, it's going to be opinionated, because it'll have been built with only my needs in mind. (Or maybe sometimes, like, a specific sibling or spouse of mine or something.) If whatever I make happens to be exactly what you need, trust me: that will be due to sheer and unintentional coincidence. But honestly, if your options are limited to, "try out whatever shit Justin uses," and picking over the scraps of the VC-funded graveyard that is the current SaaS industry, I might take those odds.
Also, I'm pre-announcing this today because it's entirely possible I'll never release anything at all. Software is a pain in the ass and the only valid reason for creating it is because every other approach has failed.
Who the hell called it "yelling at people to teach them stuff" and not "verbal insightment"?!
