Stef Lewandowski

The goal isn’t to run the marathon, it’s to become the kind of person who runs marathons

2020-03-14T00:00:00Z

Hi, I’m Stef. Six months ago, if you’d said I would be running a half marathon a week in March, I’d have laughed at you! You can read about my marathon story in this post.

So, the London Marathon is postponed. As are lots of other races, and I’m sure I’m feeling similar emotions to many folks who were looking forward to racing.

To be honest, today I’m actually feeling some sense of relief. I’ve been waking up at 2 AM and checking the feeds to see if other races were being cancelled. And each time another major city announced, it made me feel more and more certain this news was coming.

So I’m feeling stoic. The greater certainty is better than not knowing whether to push on with the training and fundraising or not.

There are more important and, frankly frightening, things going on in the world right now. It’s a luxurious position to be in to even be able to have the time in our weekly schedules to be able to take on these running challenges. And right now, the risks involved in these events just don’t weigh up against the benefits.

I’ve been weighing up whether to keep training and do a “virtual” run like Jon B is going to do, or whether to pause and aim for October instead.

I’ve decided on the latter. I started running in August/September last year, and it’s been quite a shift to where I am now. I feel fitter and stronger than I think I ever have. So by October I’ll be even stronger and feel even more ready for the marathon. I know that I could do it now, because of how I felt after my recent 30km run.

But why am I running? Would continuing and running the distance anyway be a good ending to this challenge? I don’t think so — it feels like a bit of an anticlimax, especially because I’ve been raising funds for charity around my “couch to marathon” story and how it relates to our neurodiverse family.

My wife Emily said something a few weeks ago that stuck with me and has helped me to have a stoic attitude to all of this.

“The goal isn’t to run the marathon, it’s to become the kind of person who runs marathons”.

I’ve found that really helpful, so I’m going to continue running long, but shorter-than-marathon distances through the summer and then aim for London in October.

This evening, to mark the end of my marathon training programme (thank you Run With Hal) I went out to set a benchmark.

10k, round the park, as fast as I could manage. 46:45 — That’s 3 minutes faster than my previous personal best!

A good way to start the next phase.

Thanks for following along everyone and I hope you’re adapting too!

If you’d like to follow along with my marathon story, I’m writing regularly on my running blog, publishing my runs on Strava, occasionally updating this Twitter thread, and posting on Instagram.

I’m running to raise funds for the National Autistic Society, so please check out my fundraising page and make a donation!

The point isn't to run the marathon, it's to become the kind of person who runs marathons

The point isn't to run the marathon, it's to become the kind of person who runs marathons - Stef…

Autism, kids, self-reflection and why I’m running the London Marathon for #Autism

2020-01-18T00:00:00Z

Hi! I’m Stef Lewandowski (@stef on Twitter/Instagram) and I’m a designer / sustainability startup founder living in London with my wife Emily Quinton and our four kids.

It was the end of the Summer, and a switch labelled “go for a run” seemed to flip on in my head. That switch is still stuck in the “on” position six months later!

This week I heard that I have a place in this year’s London Marathon, so I thought I’d share my running story from couch to track, and why I’m running to raise awareness about autism.

I’ve never really been a long-distance runner, or indeed someone who would even refer to themselves and include the word “run” anywhere.

At school (that was a long time ago now!) I used to enjoy sprinting. I was pretty fast, but I was injured in a race at about 16 and never really ran again.

Well, until now.

Running hasn’t come naturally to me. Modern life and work for many people seem to revolve around screens, and I took to that life earlier than most because of my combined interests in graphic design and computer science. Both involve a lot of screen-based work.

Looking back at my twenties and thirties, the only exercise I got was general walking around at an impatiently fast pace or going out dancing at night. I’ve never really felt comfortable going to a gym, or involving myself with sporty things — it’s always felt like someone else’s world. One where I don’t know the rules, what I’m supposed to do or even wear.

So most of the time, I’m in front of a screen. My work happens in front of a screen. And even my side projects mostly revolve around making digital things on a screen. That’s not a great recipe for leading a healthy life.

I’ve increasingly noticed that being desk-bound has led me to feel stiff and inflexible. But worse than that. As my kids have been growing up, simple things like carrying them up to bed have also been getting more challenging. I’ve never felt particularly strong, and somehow I’d hoped that at this point in our family life we’d be taking them off for outdoorsy adventures. But on the occasions where we’ve done that I’ve often found myself with a pulled muscle or feeling puffed out.

Something needed to change, but until relatively recently, I’d felt unable to do anything about it. In the meantime, I’d been gaining weight each month, and also having a lot of difficulty with feeling stressed out and not sleeping well.

You can’t change what you can’t measure

The first shift happened in mid-2018 when I bought some life insurance and went with Vitality because they offered a “free” Apple watch. It’s free if you reach a certain level of physical activity each month. So with an attitude of “you can’t change what you can’t measure”, I signed up, got my watch and started monitoring my steps and heart rate.

For me, that one step — finding a way to measure my activity levels — was helpful in many ways that I wasn’t expecting. First, I realised that actually, I was walking a lot more than I had thought. That was reassuring. But the most significant immediate effect was improving my understanding of my heart.

In my family, there’s a history of heart problems. My dad suffered a heart attack in his forties, and I realised that I’d had a background level of stress about the same thing happening to me. The watch showed me that I wasn’t having any heart palpitations (even when I thought I was), and everything was relatively healthy, which was great news. But for several years I’d been stressed out, and that worry about my heart health had been causing something of a feedback loop — the more I felt stressed, the more I felt stressed about being stressed!

There’s a theme running through much of what I’ve experienced over the last few years, and I’m sure my wife Emily will roll her eyes at this. People can tell me the same thing over and over again, and I somehow put what they say to one side and find it hard to act on feedback that involves changes in my habits. But at some point, I’ll read something, or come to a conclusion through my thought process, and then suddenly it’s as if I’ve had a fantastic, novel idea that I have to put into action. It just happens to be precisely the same thing that people have been telling me for several years!

Disco leg

Drinking coffee was one of my regular habits — a lot of coffee. Back in 2018, I’d got to the point where I was drinking an entire caffetière every morning before I left the house, and then several coffees throughout the day. Some of my relatives are doctors, and they’d tell me occasionally when visiting that I really was having quite a lot of coffee. Hint hint. But it was only once I had the Apple Watch to do an experiment that I noticed that reducing my coffee was helping with my stress levels. Gradually over a few months, I weaned myself off, and for the last eighteen months or so, I’ve entirely cut it out.

My new coffee-free, less up-and-down self has come as something of a revelation. I’m not always feeling stressed out — it just was that I was hyped up on caffeine a lot of the time. My creative output has slowed somewhat, but goodness me, so has the confused flitting-around, vibrating “disco leg” and the intermittent inability to concentrate on one single task at a time.

So, I’d made a significant change, and was feeling better about myself in terms of how stressed out I was. But one thing that I wasn’t expecting was what would happen to my weight. The “disco leg” effect that I’d lived with for maybe twenty years meant that even when sitting still, I’d be more or less continually moving. Quite irritating for those sitting around me, I’m sure. But great for weight-loss, apparently!

Up and to the r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ wrong

I know this isn’t in the realms of being significantly overweight, but I started 2019 at 74 kilos, and by August I’d hit nearly 81, and I was into the “overweight” category for my height, with no signs of slowing. Yikes!

I love most charts that go up and to the right. Not this one of my weight, though.

For most of my adult life, I’ve also developed a need to have a regular afternoon nap. Strangely enough, if I’d drunk too much coffee, it would often mean I had to go to sleep, and I thought it was related. But having eradicated the coffee addiction, the naps were still there. And also something a little worse.

The dreaded lethargy

I’ll talk a little more about this towards the end of the article. Mixed in with all the hyperactivity of the coffee-fuelled days, I also had a habit — I’m not sure how to put this really — of just not being able to get out of bed very quickly in the mornings.

Some weekends I’d struggle to get going for hours, and when you’re a father of four, it’s just not fair for everyone around you, particularly for your wife, to not be able to pitch in equally. I’ve always wanted to be less sluggish in the mornings, but I’d not found a way to address it.

Sadly, cutting coffee didn’t significantly reduce that lethargy. It probably helped, but it was still there. For those of you who know me, it may be quite surprising to hear that I’ve struggled with this because I’ve always tried to have a very high output level of creativity. I’ve certainly found it quite difficult to square the two sides of who I am, and I know that the family have found it confusing at times.

Are the kids… autistic?

As a family, we’ve had a fair few things to work through over the last couple of years. Emily and I have four children together, so it’s a busy household with lots going on pretty much all the time. Now, all families have their peculiarities, and all children have individual needs, strengths and behaviours that mean you have to adapt your parenting technique to support them.

For us, we’d been struggling for some time to understand two of our kids. Emily spent some time reading and became convinced that they weren’t being naughty, they were autistic, and we needed to adapt our home environment and parenting style to support them.

The kitchen hit 50 degrees centigrade this Summer — is that hot enough to cook?

So, it’s August 2019. The Summer is in full swing. We’re running an experiment to see if we can cook an egg on the floor of our kitchen in the heat, as you do!

And we’d recently received confirmation from qualified autism professionals that Emily was right.

We were pleased about the diagnoses because it meant we could get the right support in place, and we could stop wondering whether we were wrong about our conclusions.

Wait… am I too?

Throughout the diagnosis process, I read about autism, and the more I read, the more empathy I had for what I found, and for how the children are. A lot of what I read seemed very familiar to me. Getting absorbed by whatever you are focused on and not hearing people speaking to you. Loving understanding a topic to a deep level. Jumping from topic to topic in a way that to others seems disjointed. Arranging things into patterns. These all felt like things that I experience. I could empathise a lot.

So I went for a diagnosis myself. It took a while to get an appointment, but August rolled around. I went for a pleasant interview, discussed how I see the world, how I find that I behave, some of the quirks that I’ve spotted in myself over the years, and answered questionnaires about my preferences. And I came home with the same result as the kids, with potentially ADHD in the mix too. That will probably explain the multiple browser windows I have open right now as I write this, each one with so many tabs open that I can only see a string of icons.

I was pleased to finally have some answers to questions about why I’ve always felt somewhat different from those around me. Why is it that I’m happy tweeting my heart out to strangers, but can’t respond to text messages from friends without worrying about it for days or weeks? Why do I always get wiped out for days after social events? Why do I get so frustrated when someone asks me to do something that is clearly stupid and wrong (in my opinion — it probably isn’t)?

A positive experience for the family

On the positive side, and there are tons of positives here, I now understand a lot more about my approach to life and work. For instance, why I’ve obsessed about finding “flow” in my work. Or how I’m good at connecting up disparate ideas and putting them together in a way that seems obvious to me, but innovative to others.

There’s a lot of talk about how autism is a “spectrum”, but as I understand it, it’s more of a bag of traits. Some folks have traits that some would describe as more severe than others, or indeed a mix of characteristics entirely different to another person in the autism category. If you’ve met me in person, you might be surprised that I’d be in the same category as perhaps someone who has more obviously autistic behaviours.

After my diagnosis, I felt a rush of clarity over the following weeks, and I now wish that I’d done it earlier in life. I’m in my early 40s, and looking back at my 20s and 30s I can see how if I’d known about my strengths and weaknesses a little more, I’d have avoided some of the more frustrating moments. You know — the ones that I am always running over in my head again and again — another autistic trait!

Enter a fantastic little app called Couch to 5K

The revelations continued that month. One of the requirements of the “free” Apple watch deal I mentioned is that you have to get a regular health check-up. So I went in for mine and had something of a surprising result. My cholesterol (or rather one type, the not so positive type) was registering as “high”. Not scarily so, but enough to make me stop and think. As I said, there’s a history of heart disease in my family, and this wasn’t a great sign. Maybe in this time of self-reflection, I should look again at that exercise thing?

At the end of Summer heat, two of my kids were interested in going for a run. Emily has been suffering from an injury for a while, so couldn’t go with them. All eyes turned to me. “Alright then”, I said, reluctantly, and put on some old running shoes and some shorts.

Couch to 5K is a simple running app that’s aimed at complete beginners when it comes to running. It’s a programme of runs that helps you get off the couch, and over nine weeks to reach the point where you can run five kilometres non-stop. It’s a set of encouraging “podcasts” with a few famous folks from TV giving you instruction and encouragement each week.

My first Couch to 5k run was super slow, but speed isn’t the point!

On that first run, it was a series of sixty-second bursts of running with ninety seconds in between each one, for maybe twenty minutes. I could barely manage hose sixty seconds runs without being puffed out! The kids initially enjoyed it, and we ran around our local park.

My guide was Sanjeev Kohli, and I enjoyed his dry humour and light-hearted approach, but you can pick from other folks — Michael Jordan for instance.

Since that first run at the end of August, I’ve been running at least three times every week! The app steadily moves up through levels of difficulty and duration.

I’m not sure why it took me until week six to tweet about it, perhaps I didn’t want to make a public promise about something I might drop. But I did tweet. It’s now become a thread of my progress from those early runs to what I’m doing today.

Here’s me on 15th of October:

A tweet by @stef

And four days later I’d completed my first 5k run. Each Saturday at the park at the end of my road, there’s a Parkrun. If you’re not familiar, it’s a regular meetup on Saturdays all over the world where folks get together to run or walk five kilometres.

A few weeks later:

A tweet by @stef

Then on Christmas day:

A tweet by @stef

And I started a new decade with something of a challenge:

A tweet by @stef

As has been pointed out, maybe not those shorts with those leggings.

Each week, I’ve been steadily getting faster and running further. I’m now closing in on twenty-two minutes to run those five kilometres and completing at least one ten-kilometre run once per week.

If you’d asked me at the start of 2019 about any of this, I’d have laughed at the thought that I’d be running like this.

Perhaps this is where that sometimes super useful autistic, laser-focus comes in handy. There’s so much about running that lends itself to the kind of personality that loves collecting 33,562 typefaces at the age of fifteen and trying to be able to name them all.

The results so far

Let’s talk about results then! I’m now running three times per week and running further and faster each week too:

Distance covered per week since I started running

One noticeable impact of running is that you lose weight as you go. This week I’ve got back to exactly where I was last year!

A chart of my weight. When do you think I started running?

This is at a steady, healthy rate too. I’m not doing any crash dieting here. I’ve adjusted my diet somewhat over the year, to try to get it more climate-change-compatible. Less meat, more nuts, seeds and vegetables but I’m not following any particular plan. I just added running and over five months lost the five kilos I’d gained.

There’s more than that, though. The lethargy I mentioned — that inability to get out of bed at the weekend — it’s not entirely gone, but I’ve got a real purpose to get out of bed in the morning. I get up earlier most days of the week now, and I don’t feel the need to have a slow start even on the days when I’m not running.

Even more than the loss of lethargy, I’m finding that while I’m running, I get time to think things through a lot more than if I’m compulsively staring at the screen. My screen-time is down considerably, and I’m feeling better for it. I’d generally say, taking up running has had a beneficial effect on my overall mental health. I just feel happier, stronger and more able to deal with challenges that come along.

Doing something like this requires support from other people. For me, my family are super encouraging. If you’re reading this thinking “sounds great, but I don’t have a family to rally around me, or know any runners to help me”, you might find Strava useful. I’ve set up an account on there and share my runs as I go. I have a tiny following of thirty or so people, but goodness me, every “like” on one of my posts, or thoughtful comment, is so helpful to keep me motivated. You’ll be surprised who pops up from your contacts list or Facebook friends who’re also doing some running and may want to share a few tips. To those following me on Strava, thank you for your encouragement!

My challenge to myself this year

So, what now? I’ve just told you how I got away from the screen, started running, slowly improved, sped up, got to a 5k, then a 10k… I think you know where this is going! I’ve now signed up for three running events. I won’t call them “races” because, well, I’m not going to win any of them, but I’m going to try to complete them in a good time for me.

First, the London Winter Run, a 10k run around central London. I’m going to try to complete it in less than 50 minutes.
Then, on my birthday weekend, 29th of March, I’m going to be running my first half marathon, the London Landmarks Half Marathon.
And then just a month later, I’ve just found out that I have a place in the London Marathon on the 26th of April.

Through all this, I’ll be raising some much-needed funds for the folks who run the National Autistic Society. They’re a well-organised charity that’s worked for years in the UK and more broadly to put forward a positive, realistic image of what autism is all about, and continues to support research on the topic.

I’m quite frustrated in some ways that I’ve missed out on understanding myself in such a fundamental way. I feel like I’ve only seen a small part of the picture of myself for too long, and I’m now zooming out.

Luckily this is at a time when two very important people in my life have also discovered that they are somewhat different from their peers, and can grow up knowing it.

Shifting awareness about autism

So I’m pleased that kids who are growing up in a world where folks are being similarly diagnosed at an age where they can form a foundational understanding of themselves. And I find it so helpful seeing prominent, talented people now talking about this.

Greta Thunberg and Chris Packham spring to mind as people who I would count as role models for autistic kids. One of the “superpowers” I often read about around autistic folks, is our strong moral compass. I’ve fallen out with people in the past because I just couldn’t work on something that was misaligned with what I thought was the right thing to do.

Given some of the horrific news that’s emerging around global heating, and how terrible feedback loops are now kicking in in Australia for instance, I think we’ll need people with that unwavering moral conviction to make change happen. And in a world increasingly driven AI, creativity and innovation are going to become rare and valuable skills — folks who have autistic skills including deep focus, or combining diverse references, I believe will be in high demand.

It’s a bit late for me to make huge changes in my life based on what I now know. I’ve already adapted over time, but I’m using this new information to help make sure that I have good relationships at work, I focus even more than I have done on working well with others, and trying to reduce stress in my day-to-day.

I hope you’ll support me in my marathon efforts

One of the main things I want to do over the next few years is to raise awareness that there are lots of folks who fall into the category of “autistic”, and we’re talented, capable people who can make a huge difference to the world. We may have a few quirks or may find some things difficult, but the modern world will do well to include autistic folks who have a wide range of skills and abilities.

So, I’ll run. And I’ll be posting online about how I’m doing as I go. And every kilometre that I run will be to try to get us closer to that future.

I’d love to have your support along the way an occasional thumbs up on my Strava page would be lovely. But even more than that…

It would be wonderful if you’d contribute via my fundraising page.

Thanks for reading, and if this inspires you to download the Couch To 5K app, then go and do it, and happy running!

Cheers,

Stef

Edited in September 2026 to take out some detail about my children. The rest is as I wrote it in January 2020.

✔︎ See the kids during daylight hours

2017-06-16T00:00:00Z

A year ago I left a well-paid tech job to turn a side-project into a business. I’ve started and grown several businesses, with some success, some failure and a lot of learning in between. This time, though, I’m taking a very different approach.

Makelight, the learning community we’ve set up, is a collaboration with my wife, Emily. We’re a family of six. We’re working from home. We’re not doing this with any investment behind us (yet!) and a few of our priorities are very different to what I was trying to achieve with previous ventures.

Last year, a week or so after going “all in” with Emily, I tweeted:

A tweet by @stef

Amazingly, a year on and these things are holding true. It’s been hard, but we’ve stuck to the plan and managed to build an exciting business that we’re also able to make a living from working on.

As you get older and have kids, your priorities shift. Somewhere in the haze of pre- and early-parent life I recall times where I’d work solidly from morning into the early hours of the next morning on repeat. I’d clock up hundred hour work-weeks and just keep on going. I’ve written about work heroism in the past, and I’m pretty determined not to end up back in that situation.

Don’t be absent

This week I saw a Tweet that really made me pause and shake my head. Here it is (note it’s since been shown not to be this man’s quote).

A tweet by @TaylorLorenz

This is an ad by Apple. Or rather, it’s just someone on a team in Apple who’s able to make adverts and is looking for something striking to promote.

Before you send a grumpy tweet about this, Andrew Kemendo has already said that he didn’t say this or agree to appear in the ad, which was subsequently pulled.

“Not something to brag about” is how I feel about this too. There’s a pervading view that I’ve encountered and been part of in the past that encourages this kind of work heroism.

If you recall, Google famously set up one of the principles of their company and how they wanted to conduct themselves using a simple phrase “Don’t be evil”. I quite like the idea that in building Makelight we‘ll be making “Don’t be absent” a big part of out mission.

You can do a startup and have kids

I get the impression that a lot of folks think doing a startup with kids just isn’t possible. Certainly the format of the various “startup accelerator” programmes seem to share the view that the only way to get on in the world is to relocate somewhere for a three month period, work all the hours available to you at a desk and avoid all distractions. Great, but kids don’t fit into that.

At some point as a parent working in the world of “tech” (which is pretty much any industry now) you might face a choice about a next step in your career. Depending on what matters to you and how much risk you can stomach, you might choose one of these:

Should you take a safe job with a guaranteed monthly salary that might pay less in the short term, but won’t suddenly change or stop?
Or perhaps you should join one of these high-risk startups, again on a salary, but with a big potential upside if the company were to do well and sell for a lot money?
Or perhaps be a freelancer or consultant, charging by the project and running a tiny one-person company, with lots of flexibility, but a high risk of cashflow being choppy?
Or even start your own high-risk business and build something awesome that might just guarantee a strong future for you and the family?

I’ve done all of these at one point or another over the last ten years, and each time we’ve shifted up what I’m doing with my time and what we’re doing as a family, something has had to give. For a while, “do a startup” just didn’t seem possible. So I did consulting for a while instead. You might have to hold back on that burning idea for a bit too. Our breakthrough was all about how we were spending our evenings to chip away at a side-project without risking house and home in the first instance.

The thing is, it is possible to do what we’re doing with Makelight —set up a passion business, bootstrapped without starting with loads of cash in the bank, working from home, building something with big potential that fits around family life with four kids and that pays the bills. And that ticks a good few of those things off the list.

It’s super hard, but it’s possible. It’s just that often many of us don’t have the knowledge of how to to it. Through the Makelight membership community, we’re helping people in a similar situation with knowledge, tools and support. It’s one of the big things we’re about — helping folks build their own resilient micro-business, develop their side-project, build their online following and lots more. All of these things lead to more optionality and potential good outcomes for the folk in the community.

Acceptable risk

But what about the risk? Even small risks gets magnified as a parent, because any disruption to family life is also magnified.

Just because you have kids though, surely these risks shouldn’t stop you entirely from trying to achieve your life goals?

A constant consideration that’s part of every major decision once you become a parent is “What if it goes wrong? What would that mean for the kids?”

The thing is, new businesses more often than not, don’t work. Anyone can draw out a financial model with all the numbers going up and to the right, but the entropy you’ll face just getting your idea to work and grow can be so high that in the end, you just need to stop.

Thinking back, I’ve made decisions that I just wouldn’t be able to now as a father. Because of one particular past failure I ended up having to sell my flat and since then we’ve been renting. Basically, doing a startup threw us off the property ladder, and once you’re off good luck with trying to get back on! One day, we’ll be able to own a place again, I’m sure, and actually that’s a motivator for getting up every day and building the business.

I think though, that having experienced pretty tough times, it makes you resilient, and yet rather than being overly cautious we have a heightened awareness of risk. To us, doing a startup, making our own way in the world, building something that helps a *lot* of people, well that doesn’t seem like too much of a risk.

The bigger risk I think could be the other way around — that if we weren’t to be following this mashed together family/home/startup life it’d be a little like giving up on a dream, and neither of us want to be the kind of person whose default mode is “shoulda coulda woulda”.

Merging home life and startup life

This Summer we’re doubling down on the idea that it’s possible to run a family-friendly tech business. By rejecting the standard way that people think about “startup” culture — “tech bros”, “what’s your elevator pitch”, “fail fast”, “go big or go home” — we’re hoping to show that there is another way. One that’s all about living and working sustainably, being present with your kids, doing meaningful work and making a positive difference to the world, whilst making money doing it.

Yesterday, we moved into a lovely new place where we’re going to live and Emily and I can be on our laptops and shooting videos. I’m literally writing this whilst taking a break from unpacking surrounded by cardboard boxes! We cancelled the rent on our separate office space, we’ve set up a little spot to work from in the basement and we’re pretty much throwing away the idea of “work/life balance” and putting it all together in one place.

I wouldn’t want to criticise those folks who have to do the late night, long commute thing, but it’s not the path we want to take — setting up at home for this makes everything more efficient. No dragging kit from A to B and forgetting that one crucial piece of kit. Not having to abort the day’s work to get back in time for school. Being able to jump on Facebook Live at a time that suits our West Coast US or Australian users. Lots of upsides, and sure, there are downsides about possibly being disconnected, but we’re working on that too by looking at organising our own events — face to face or live online.

We all have the internet now. And tools that make remote, flexible working possible. We can build businesses around what we think is important that enable us to work flexibly. And by businesses, I mean anything from a side project that brings in a little extra income to the likes of Automattic, who with Wordpress are responsible for tech that’s running about a quarter of websites.

Is family-friendly investor-unfriendly?

A big risk that remains untested though, is getting backing for this. We’ve had feedback that being married and having kids are both red flags for tech investors. Yeah, I had shook my head too.

To grow what we’re doing, we’ll obviously need investment, but we’re not going to shy away from what we care about. We’ll bake this story about family + passion + tech into how we talk about what we’re doing.

I think we can do a little do disprove the whole idea that startups and family life are somehow mutually exclusive. If everything’s on the line for us in doing this then I think that we stand a good chance of pushing through those months where it gets hard and just not giving up.

Investable businesses shouldn’t be robotic, inflexible, burn-out-inducing, and let’s face it, unfriendly to women. We can and should be doing better than that. And I think we can!

I’m hearing more and more folk that I respect talking about doing startups in a better way, whilst still building world-changing stuff. I’m an optimist, and I can feel that there’s change afoot here.

So I’ll keep writing about our progress with Makelight, and maybe it’ll inspire others that maybe their idea is a little more possible than they thought it was!

Right, I must go. I’m just walking my daughter to the swimming pool.

—

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If you’re doing something similar to us, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. What are the struggles? And if you’d like to hear when we’re approaching investors add your email and I’ll be in touch!

Introducing The Thread on Medium

2017-05-15T00:00:00Z

For the last couple of years, Makelight, the learning community that I help run has been really growing. It’s turned into a wonderfully supportive and collaborative membership.

Each month we pick a topic to focus on. A theme for us to explore that will help us grow as people and/or business-owners, understand and develop our creativity, and to achieve a little work/life balance in this busy world!

The focus for May 2017 is blogging, and we’re calling it The Thread. We’re running a series of lessons all about the writing process, how to technically set up a decent blog, and how to run one for the long term, hopefully avoiding falling into the writing doldrums. With a few Q&As and lectures thrown in too.

The Thread is now on Medium as a publication. So anyone who is part of the Makelight membership is welcome to write and submit articles that cover three main areas of interest:

Creativity, Growth, Work/Life Balance

It’s something of an experiment, and we’ll be learning as we go. For now, we have a few simple rules for anyone who’s considering writing a piece. If you’re a member, go and check out our guide on how to contribute.

If you’re a reader, well, a very warm welcome to you and I hope you enjoy what you find here. If any of this rings true, perhaps have a look at the Makelight site and see if you’d like to join us as a member. So far it’s been an inspiring, thought-provoking and positive experience for all of us, me included. Hope to see you in the group!

Ephemeralds

2016-12-28T00:00:00Z

Today I was flicking through a book on the Japanese artist Hokusai with my daughter. He’s most well known for this image, which I’m sure you’ve seen:

The Great Wave of Kanagawa

We looked through his images, talked about the beautiful way he captured the movement of water, the sense of space and depth, how perfectly he drew petals on flowers… and then we read this paragraph together:

From the age of six I was in the habit of drawing all kinds of things. Although I had produced numerous designs by my fiftieth year, none of my works done before my seventieth is really worth counting.

At the age of seventy-three I have come to understand the true form of animals, insects, and fish, and the nature of plants and trees.

Consequently, by the age of eighty I will have made more and more progress, and at ninety I will have got closer to the essence of art.

At the age of one hundred I will have reached a magnificent level and at one hundred and ten each dot and each line will be alive. I would like to ask those who outlive me to observe that I have not spoken without reason.

Hokusai kept working up until his death, aged 89. I wonder what he would have achieved if he’d continued towards his dream of getting closer to “the essence of art”!

My daughter, just ten, loves drawing, and is already making beautiful images. I’m almost forty and I’ve drawn and made a variety of things throughout my life. For her, this paragraph read as a starting point, and for me, well “none of my works done before my seventieth is really worth counting” was both saddening and encouraging.

I often think about how the things I’ve made over the years just don’t seem to stick around for very long. I’ve made websites since the early days of the Web — mostly offline now; put huge efforts into live video performances at music events —perhaps a few documented on VHS cassettes in a storage unit; made little experimental software-art curiosities — most have since stopped working; designed printed things — faded and discarded; whole companies — now just a line in a CV.

I think of all of these creations as ephemeralds, a lovely word coined by Patrick Bergel in a throwaway tweet that I’ve since latched onto. Beautiful, fleeting creations that are for a brief moment the focus of our creative efforts before they eventually evaporate.

Hokusai achieved something that very few artists will ever manage — he created one of the most recognised images in history, alongside the likes of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and the cave paintings at Chauvet. The exact opposite of an ephemerald.

This year we’ve lost many prominent creative people who are likely to achieve similar cultural permanence, and in coming years I am sure this will continue. I think we’re noticing more this year because the current two or three generations have perhaps a wider cultural pantheon than at any point in history.

I suspect that the online world will increasingly become a place for collective mourning of the creative and cultural icons we lose, and I’m sure we’ll soon have to find ways to compartmentalise their stories into a modern day equivalent of the obituary section for our own sanity. Goodness me, I feel like I need it! Opening the Twitter app in the morning can sometimes feel like opening an envelope that turns out to be an invitation to a funeral.

Today, reading about Hokusai made me pause and think a little about how we collectively measure a creative life at its end. Hokusai painted The Great Wave of Kanagawa when he was in his seventies after years and years of work creating other less-well-known images — his ephemeralds. With each one, he was honing his skill and understanding.

If you’re feeling like so far in life, very little of what you’ve made has really stuck around, perhaps take a moment to think a little on Hokusai’s message — that no matter our age, there may still be plenty of time to make our unique mark on the world, however temporary.

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Do what you love (and pay the bills)

2016-11-23T00:00:00Z

This time last year my wife, Emily and I were kicking off an experiment to answer a fairly big question:

Could we combine both of our creative energies to find a way to make a living that lines up with family life, working on what we both enjoy and are passionate about?

That experiment, to build an online learning site and a suite of useful tools for primarily creative, female entrepreneurs, Instagrammers and bloggers has changed both of our lives in a very short space of time!

We’ve learnt a lot, grown an awesome (tiny) team and gathered an inspiring, supportive community together (thank you, you wonderful people!). I’m now working with Emily full time and our only source of income is our fledgling business, Makelight. Which is extra intense, given we have four kids.

We’ve now managed to turn what started as a side project based around Emily’s passion for photography, into a bootstrapped business, turning over $300k and growing.

Whilst nobody’s retiring for a life of leisure any time soon, I thought I’d take a moment to write about these last few months.

But first, a thought about passion projects.

The problem with “Do what you love”

This isn’t another article about why you should do what you love. The phrase “Do what you love”, at its best, is a tired cliché.

At its worst, it’s a motivating call to a lifestyle to which only a privileged few can aspire. For most people, work is…work. It’s not a creative pursuit.

I worry that by continually repeating the “do what you love” phrase in motivational Instagram posts, Pinterest boards or all over the walls of coworking spaces, that we’re devaluing a perfectly valid idea.

Work is most often something you do in order to pay for other opportunities to do the things that you love.

Trying to turn the thing that you love into something that you rely on for your income, to pay the bills and to live your life, can quickly result in the Thing You Love turning into the Thing You Have To Do To Make Ends Meet.

It’s very hard to retain a love for something when you’re busy worrying about cash flow, orders getting lost in the post, credit card chargebacks, or upset customers. Sometimes, it might be best to enjoy a pursuit and leave it at that.

Not everything you enjoy doing should be the basis for a new business venture. Maybe, you can risk losing the love for something that didn’t ever need to be something that made you money.

The dream of work that you love

Yet there are a great many people who dream of being able to make a living doing what they enjoy doing. Me included!

Some seem to achieve it — I think of the artists and inventors that inspire me, and I know that the narrative of their success isn’t true, but it doesn’t deter me from trying. It shouldn’t deter you either.

We live in exciting times and there are some trends that I think could have a big impact on people finding a way to make a living doing work that we find fulfilling, rewarding and that brings us income from our creative endeavours.

I’m particularly fascinated by side projects and the opportunities we now have to reach a huge audience with a small budget. Here are some trends that I’ve looked at that convinced us to create Makelight.

Flexible work is on the rise

Because more and more people have access to decent internet connections, and we’re able to work online instead of face-to-face, work can increasingly fit around life. This has some big implications for those of us with children, and I think particularly for women, who largely take on a greater responsibility for childcare. Remote jobs that fit into the after-school-drop-off, before-school-pick-up could be a growth area. We have four kids, so we both feel this pain acutely.

Access is improving

It’s increasingly easy to have an idea for a side project, to get set up with a website that accepts payments, and to start generating some income. And increasingly, people are willing to buy online. A lot of the fear from recent years is passing, and late adopters are getting more comfortable paying online for almost anything. That’s great for people with a creative side project or small business.

Learning is changing

Not so long ago the way you’d learn about starting a business would be to take a course or two, probably face-to-face at an evening class, or on a multi-year university course. That’s changing rapidly, and there’s a growing market for people wanting to learn in a more snackable way — taking online learning classes and fitting self-improvement into their week in a more flexible way. So it’s possible to learn how to get a business idea off the ground in your own time, often for free, but you can short-cut that if you’re willing to pay a relatively small amount of money.

There’s still a knowledge gap

However, it can still be a little daunting, even taking the first step with an idea. Turning something you love doing into a business venture, however small, brings up a lot of things to consider. Branding, social media, the tech that you need, legalities, customer support, fulfilment, accounting… for every “do what you love” idea, there’s a myriad of “but you do realise you’ll need to also…” hurdles to overcome.

An experiment in doing what we love, and helping others do the same

Looking at all of those trends, the thing that jumped out for Emily and me was that we know lots about taking an idea and turning it into a business. I’ve done it a few times now in a variety of ways, and Emily built and ran a successful wedding photography micro-business before it became incompatible with family life.

So we chatted a lot about what we love doing:

Emily: photography, teaching, inspiring people, building community, the chance to be creative every day.

Me: making useful things, speaking, writing, designing, building digital products that solve people’s problems.

We also talked a lot about the idea of having a way to make a living in a way that would allow us to see our kids (we’re a family of six), possibly living anywhere in the world.

Start where you are

I’ve spent the last few years in the world of “companies that build companies” — looking at the process of studios and corporations creating startups. Not at the conceptual level, I mean by writing lots of code and designing useful things. The code equivalent of the “wax on, wax off” scene from Karate Kid (I’m showing my age).

Emily, meanwhile, had been quietly building up a sizeable social media following across Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter. She’d become known for her face-to-face photography workshops so going online seemed sensible.

So we applied all the theory that I’d been teaching and following in my work to what Emily had been doing as her passion, and set up a very simple page to offer:

An online course that helps you improve your photography to promote what you do via Instagram, Pinterest and your blog.

We set the course up in a really basic way, just using Squarespace, Mailchimp and Stripe for payments. Which was a new thing for me, because I’m used to writing code for such experiments, yet for this, I didn’t write a single line. Then we used Instagram and Facebook to promote it.

People bought the course! It wasn’t “quit your day-job” territory, but for a few months, Emily’s online courses were bringing in a decent amount of income, and it was growing.

Emily’s blog she’d been running for a while was called Makelight — a play on words: making light work of getting your business idea off the ground, and making things that you communicate through light — photographs. The name stuck, and we started thinking that this had some legs.

Gather your advisors

We’re both extremely lucky to have supportive and knowledgeable friends, yet sometimes it can be hard to ask for advice — it can feel a little needy to be constantly asking people what they think if they’ve not really offered to help.

Whenever I’m working on something brand new, I try to have a healthy balance between being excited and being a little incredulous of my own idea. Having some outside advice can be really helpful so that you don’t end up putting your life savings into a fool’s errand, or worse, not following through on something that could be an amazing business because you haven’t committed to it.

We applied to Techstars’s Startup Next “pre-accelerator” programme, not so much because we needed the advice on how to do a perfect investor pitch, but mainly to surround ourselves with people (actually several people who were already friends) who’d be willing to give us their guidance.

Their advice resoundingly was…

You don’t have to take the VC path

It’s almost taken as read that if you’re a “startup” you’re looking to follow the well-trodden equity-based fundraising path. Raise some money from friends and family in return for a small stake in the business to get the first version of your business idea out into the world. Maybe apply to one of the many “accelerators”, followed by an angel investor or a group of them backing you to get to the point where you’re making some money.

Then shoot for the stars with the pitch that you’re going to build a billion-dollar business and raise several million from a venture capital firm to aggressively scale up. Then onwards to that billion-dollar end-point, where everyone along the way wins big when there’s an exit.

It’s a high-risk game, and I’ve been through it before. With Makelight, though, our motivations weren’t about “build a billion dollar business”, but more about “help lots and lots of people make a living in a new way”. Looking at the numbers, yep, there’s a billion dollar opportunity in the markets we’re looking at, for sure. But if we didn’t get to that scale within five years, that would count as a failure. We’re confident we can make something awesome, but that didn’t feel like the right pitch to make.

With Makelight we’re interested in building something for the long-term, with a happy, supportive community being a huge part of what we’re growing every day. I’m not sure that VC funding and the inevitable exit always works out too well for businesses with that community-centric approach. Looking back at some big-name communities from recent years, there are a few biggies that didn’t quite survive the transition after selling. Flickr, Tumblr, Upcoming… there are a few that do continue to thrive, like Minecraft, but it’s something to consider when choosing your path.

We kept coming back to a question: how can you set out to build a community, but avoid potential risks to that very community as you build it?

Bootstrap as far as possible

If you self-fund as far as you can, you’ll retain optionality about your future decisions. That was our reasoning, so we decided to “bootstrap” as far as possible. No pitches to investors, no “coffees to pick your brain”, just long hours turning our little idea into something that made money so we could grow it.

That really changes what you build, and how you conduct yourself. Cash flow becomes super important, so where possible we’d announce a new course, and ask our community to pre-order it, so we could afford to live while we wrote lessons and shot videos.

I started writing code, but not “make a fancy website to impress the startup community” code. It was all about finding things that were taking us time and writing tools that automated our processes. We couldn’t hire anyone — it was Emily full-time (childcare allowing), me doing consultancy during the day to pay the bills and then writing code in the evenings into the night.

Bootstrapping is super hard. There’s no safety net of a pot of investor cash to fall back on. In our case, not even any savings to throw at it. Just what we could sell on our website and what I could bill out doing the “startup studio” work. In-flipping-tense. And it’s been that way all year.

When the centre holds

We were working all hours of the day, and a lot of our outgoings were on ads, some amazing freelancer friends who jumped in to help and various things we needed for our makeshift video and photo studio we set up.

And then we had a decision to make. The contract I was working on came to an end, and we had a choice — should I look around for another project, or do what the Hassle.com founders did (I love their story!) and go all-in?

We went all-in.

A couple of months after taking that decision we hit our first $30,000 month. Since then, Emily and I have been able to make a living solely from what was a side project just a few months before.

We now have 500k social media followers, 20k people in the community, 2k paying customers and now several hundred subscribers paying monthly as part of our new membership. We’re growing, we’re giving and getting so much love back from the community! We occasionally ask “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” And we have a Net Promoter Score that seems to be holding at 80 — I’m aware it’s not a perfect measure, but it’s motivating to hear how people are feeling.

The excitement of finding an area with so many unsolved problems

I’ve been absolutely amazed by how many opportunities there are to solve problems for the folks in our community. They’re mainly female, mainly existing or aspiring creative small-business-owners, smart, ambitious and eager to be part of a supportive community. Every day I find myself wishing for more time (and more team) so I can fix the problems they tell us about.

Our Instagram Analytics tool, Makelight Insights, works out your monthly colour palette

My background is in computer science and AI, I ran a design agency, and I’m mostly known for making lots of tiny experimental prototypes.

What’s been fascinating building Makelight so far is that I spend most of my days talking to our customers and users. In fact, offering online courses, we’re in listening mode all the time, finding problems that we could help with, then making a course to help them. And repeat.

But on top of the community and courses we offer, we’re going down the Moz.com path of building useful tools too. The AI + design + prototyping is proving super useful, and our Instagram colour analytics and hashtag research tools aren’t just there for show — they’re really helping us be useful and grow.

I’ve got a pretty long list of potentially valuable tools, and because we have a membership revenue model, we can keep making and releasing them and know that they’re helping us and the community at the same time. In particular, applying AI / Machine Vision / API-wrangling to problems that people have in our community seems like something that has huge potential.

Getting to the next level

So, we’re excited and have big plans! Yet, here’s the big question on our minds…

How to best fund your growth once you’ve proven your bootstrapped project has some legs?

Right now, it feels like we’ve got the beginnings of an awesome community, a tiny, passionate team and a business that’s growing, with some strong metrics. We can see so many areas that we can build on, but I have to be honest here, I’m feeling a little frustrated that our bootstrapping cash flow is holding us back!

Angel investment? Crowdfunding? A loan? There are so many options to consider for funding nowadays, all with positives and negatives, yet we’ve all heard how hard it is for early stage businesses to get access to funding.

We’ve spent the last little while checking and double-checking our data, writing a wiki about our plan, looking at all the options and preparing. Right now, it’s time to work out how to grow this thing!

I’m writing this because I know that a lot of people write about what they’re working on before this point (here’s what we’re planning, it’ll be great!), or after this point (here’s what we did, check it out!). Maybe we’re overlooking some of the more interesting points about startup life…

If you have thoughts to share or know of stories of people taking a similar bootstrapped, family-centric path, I’d love to hear from you.

Quietly getting on with business

2016-06-07T00:00:00Z

Our lovely new studio

For the last few months I’ve been unusually quiet online.

I’ve been keeping up my usual rate of life-observations and banter on my Twitter account, but other than that I’ve been keeping myself to myself.

“What have you been up to recently?” has become a common conversation starter from friends. I’ve been filling people in on what I’ve been doing in person, but not online, until now.

Don’t worry, I’m not doing the “stealth mode” thing. So what’s this new found quietness about? Surely if you’re working on a project, then you want to get maximum exposure and people talking about how amazing your new idea is?

Well, maybe not straight away. Maybe it’s wise to keep yourself to yourself while you’re getting something new off the ground. Maybe you actively don’t want PR, at least from the “startup scene”.

A few years ago I was working at a studio called Makeshift doing lots of small prototypes and trying to turn some of them into businesses. For the last year I’ve been doing similar in another studio. We relied on our collective “startup” network to get people to use the things we were building. We courted the Techcrunches and Nextwebs of the world, and it was a pretty good approach because we wanted to make things that appealed to that audience.

My new project is quite different and appeals to a different type of person than you’d find at startup meetups. We’re doing a community-first approach instead of “let’s try some landing pages and see what sticks”. On top of that, we’re following a very experiment-driven, lean approach. Those three factors mean we’re going about things in a slightly quieter way than I’ve done in the past.

Quiet data

Let’s say I have a website, and I want people who are of a particular inclination or from a particular demographic to visit it.

I spend money on adverts. I write lots of blog posts. I put all my energy into talking to, listening to and measuring what those people do. And I use the insights I gain from the process to send more of those people to that website, and on we go.

Through that process I’m learning. I gather insights about what people want to do. I establish what language appeals to them. What times of day or days of the week are great for reaching them, and which ones aren’t. I might even get them to buy the thing I’m selling and start getting repeat customers. Amazing!

Then, let’s say I do a bunch of PR to the tech press. A few sites write something about the business I’m building, and I get one of those Slashdot (showing my age) style traffic surges. Amazing, you might say! You just got tons of new users! Look at the uptick on your stats! Wow.

If I’m still in super-early learning mode, a surge in visitors could be a disaster for my stats unless those people are bang-on the kind of audience that I’m looking for. And the likelihood of that is very low!

On top of that, let’s say one of the ways that you’re growing your fledgling business is to have a tracking pixel on your website. Facebook, Twitter, Google, they all offer these. The idea is that once someone has visited your site who is currently signed in on one of those services, you can then send them ads, promoted posts and offers. It’s called “retargeting”. I won’t get into the ethics here — I’m nowadays in the “it’s okay as long as you act responsibly” camp (with responsibly being open to interpretation).

You’ve just thrown a load of irrelevant people at your website. Suddenly all of your “promote this post to all visitors of the website in the last 30 days” work gets really, really expensive. You get punished by the algorithms because you’re sending promoted posts to people who visited your site once because they saw you on Product Hunt and bounced. Not great.

It’s almost as bad as buying followers on Instagram and likes on Facebook. It’s a vanity metric, but it’s worse than that — you get a big number to attract other people, but in the process you’re going to be paying through the nose forever more to get any of the real people to see the content you’re sharing.

Far better to have a smaller, active set of people who like your stuff, than a ton of irrelevant, disengaged folk. That’s what I call “Quiet Data”. It’s data you’ve gathered without too much noise, that’s relatively easy to understand and to work with. Small team? You want small amounts of decent data. Bigger team? You can probably throw more time and money at the problem.

Quiet validation

So. I’ve put my head down and made the decision in my new thing that I wasn’t going to seek approval or validation from the startup scene for what I’m working on.

I have bigger things to validate than my ego here — do the people I’m building my new product and business around really want the thing that we’re offering? Is our proposed solution valuable to them? Does it help them solve their problems? And because we’re bootstrapping instead of doing the VC dance, are we charging the right amount? Are we offering sensible prices for different types of product?

To answer all of those questions we design experiments and measure behaviour. I need to know what people do, not what they say they might do because they “love your idea”. I need to know if the people who pay for what we offer actually get benefits. And all of that comes down to having clean, clear, analytics that answers clear questions.

A real bonus of being quiet is that you don’t have to promise to your network that you’re absolutely definitely going to be working on exactly this idea for the foreseeable future.

I’ve done a bunch of that in the past — making promises about an idea — when really you should be telling people that you’re investigating something and trying to validate an idea, or maybe one of many. It’s usually regretful.

Sure, there’s all that “fail fast” thinking, but seriously, the older folk in your family in all likelihood won’t have read those blog posts. They will keep looking worried when you’re telling them what you’re up to. Especially if you’re doing a startup when you have kids!

Validating things in a slightly quieter way, as a side project perhaps, removes some of that risk until you’re at least a little bit surer that what you’re going for has potential to be a good business.

A quiet pitch

I noticed something further that’s different here, in comparison to past ventures. It’s in how I respond to people asking me the “so what are you up to at the moment” question.

I tell a story that starts with an experiment. “Over Summer we did an experiment to see if…” and then “that went well, so we built some tech to make it easier for us to…”.

The story to date ends with “that went well, so I quit what I was doing and now I’m working on it full time” and then “our revenue this month is now ten times what it was five months ago”.

My story often ends without me having told the person I’m addressing exactly what the idea is! I love the idea — it’s super simple, but I’m just as interesting in sharing and discussing the way we’re doing what we do, not just the thing itself.

This isn’t the kind of pitch that you’d get points for on an accelerator programme. That’s because the pitch format is tailored to closing a round of investment. Investors want to hear a coherent, simplified story and they want to know whether or not you’re the kind of person who’s going to follow through and give them a return.

But we’re bootstrapping. So I don’t really need to pitch any investors right now. And I’m not necessarily “pitching” when I’m telling the people I meet about what I’m doing.

Do I really need to hard sell people to sign up for something when we just met? Not really – it’s pretty unlikely that they will given the percentages I see on my landing pages. We have word of mouth from happy customers, Facebook ads, landing pages… I’d rather have an interesting chat about the “how” than the “what” at that point.

A nimble approach

I’ve decided to start writing about what we’ve been up to. I’ll run the risk that some of you folk might click on a link or two and might see the occasional mis-promoted post as a result!

This isn’t a “content marketing” thing, though. I just think that there’s some useful stuff that’s emerged from the way of working that we’ve adopted and I’d be interested in connecting with other people who are taking a similar path.

I think it’s going to be much more interesting and useful for me to write about what we’re doing, what problems we’re facing and how we’re getting around them, than writing another one of those “why our startup failed” or “why I’m so grateful for being so successful and here’s how you can be too” posts.

I’ll be writing about bootstrapping. As in, funding your own growth based on — I know, crazy talk — revenues from paying customers.

I’ll be talking about applying some of the lean principles in a thoughtful way. About being pragmatic with technology. About doing the right thing at the right time. Fitting startup life into family life. Growing a community-led business in a way that’s honest and doesn’t exploit that community whilst still growing it. About reputation, creativity and inspiring other people.

But above all, the next few posts are about building a fledgling business that doesn’t really fit the “VC backed” path. Not because I disagree with that way of building businesses — far from it. Just because there are tons of great people working on ideas that just don’t fit that path.

There’s another way. A more nimble way.

If you’d like to follow along, press the follow button. Cheers. Oh, the startup I’m working on? I’ll tell you about that along the way.

Hacking happiness into the daily commute

2015-10-18T00:00:00Z

Hernán Piñera

Commuting, for those of us who must do it every day, is generally not an experience to be relished. The hours lost in a useless limbo travelling to the workplace and back, day in, day out, are not generally ones that are well-spent or enjoyable.

In the past, my family and I have moved town, in part because The Commute was getting us all down. Mainly me, because over recent years I’ve been the one doing the daily slog in and out of the city.

I’ve tried lots of things to make the experience more bearable. For a few years I’d use a 30-minute train journey to be productive on the laptop, coding a feature for the project I was working on. But after too many near-miss experiences trying to perch a laptop on my lap among the crowd of tired fellow commuters, I gave that up.

The commute was almost designed for email though, so I reverted to that for a while. Yet there’s something horribly depressing about spending your morning hunched over your phone trying to get the most out of your already-tired thumbs. Not least that these early-morning “Sent from my iPhone” missives obey the Viral Coefficient of Email — on average, every email sent begets more than one email in response.

This year I stopped trying to use the time productively to send emails on my phone. Life is too short. So what does that leave us with? Well, it’s still the phone, that awesome commute-buster, but maybe in another mode. I love a little banter on Twitter, yet I’ve noticed that there’s a general air of tiredness there nowadays and my interest quickly wanes. Games? If I find myself playing one more game of Two Dots I might just have throw the device across the carriage! Why do we do this to ourselves?

Sadly there is no escaping the fact that most of us are still a far cry from that wonderful world we were promised when the web first came along. Work from the beach! People won’t need to travel to work any more!

From my experience, we’re still a long way off from really being able to adopt a remote lifestyle, particularly when there are children involved. It’s just not the case that I could relocate my family to a beach somewhere and live The Good Life. I’m too interested in the city. In my case, London. The people, the opportunities, the challenges, the grit of it all. I just can’t give that up.

So I commute. In and out of the city. Every day. There and back. And repeat.

Hacking the commute

This Summer I decided to make a change. I’d spotted that I particularly dislike the Northern Line during the rush hour. The smell, the discomfort, the crush, the trudge, the general dehumanising feeling, the pretence of staring at the same advert for the tenth time because you’re squashed so close to someone that you can’t even get your phone out without worrying about making contact with them and it being awkward. The nagging sensation that you might be being filmed for a modern day version of Koyaanisqatsi…

I’d tried all of the usual ideas: saving interesting reads into Pocket so I had good stuff to read, I’d tried podcasts, taking a book… Nothing was making much of a dent in improving this generally quite depressing daily experience.

Until I bought a kick scooter, that is. Yes. A kick scooter. Bear with me…

A kick scooter is a magnified version of the kind of thing that you see kids riding around on — a skateboard, with a pole at the front and two handles. Maybe you tut at them sometimes. Mine has two oversized wheels and a brake. People definitely tut at that.

It’s not road-worthy (you’d end up under a bus after hitting the slightest pothole), and is just powered by you kicking yourself along like you’re riding a skateboard. Which means it’s legal for, and designed for, riding on the pavement (which confuses people).

It looks like this:

If only you could look as awesome as this guy, right? And why just guys? So many questions.

Ahem. Still with me?

Optimise for happiness

This is a strong statement, but buying this kick scooter has made me significantly happier than anything I’ve bought in years.

Disclosure — I’ve got nothing to do with the particular company that made my scooter, and I don’t have any way that I benefit from telling you this, other than maybe someone eventually tweeting me “I got one too! It’s great!”

First up, timing. Because scooting is faster than walking, it changes your daily rhythm. You get to the station or bus faster. Suddenly I have an extra ten minutes in the morning that I save based on getting to the train station.

You know what that actually means to me? It means I get to drop my children off at school in the morning and still get to work on time. It means I get to exchange a word or two with the teachers, the other parents, and I get to see my little boy go into his class, waving.

My scooter saves me those ten minutes, but my gosh are they valuable minutes.

I drop the kids off, scoot to the station, jump on the train and then fold the scooter under the seat so it doesn’t bother anyone. Phew. I have to admit that perfecting the folding action has echoes of Full Metal Jacket, but I’m aware I already look quite ridiculous so what’s a bit more…

The train ride remains as it was, unhacked, unimproved, with me trying not to make eye-contact with any of my fellow commuters and pretending to find the print ads absorbingly interesting when not staring at my phone.

My “commuting” journey ends when I arrive at the train station at London Bridge. And that’s when the real fun begins. Up until recently I’d then have had to endure The Tube to reach my final destination.

Instead, click, click, click. And kick. I’m riding on my scooter all the way to my studio up in Shoreditch.

Every day I feel this immense satisfaction. It’s like jumping on a snowboard in a room full of depressed bankers. I smile, I glide along, making sure to give everyone I pass a wide enough birth that I’m not going to bump into anyone. I time each step. I know how to pass that particular obstacle so that I don’t get surprised by someone coming the other way. I kick and kick and kick, then I swap legs by jumping from one leg to the other, and kick and kick and kick.

Then I’m over the Thames, and the bridge rises up in front of me. Suddenly I’m just gliding through the crowd with a stunning view of London in the morning light. Tower Bridge looking magnificent as always –the view that you’d wish for when you first come to live here.

Then it’s downhill. I brake and make sure I’m going slow enough not to stress anyone out. And then it’s the assault course of the London streets all the way to my destination.

It’s so mentally stimulating. Timing the people around you, timing the cars, the lights, looking at how you’ll maintain a safe speed and direction whilst factoring in so much movement around you. Occasionally I stop and walk. But the whole journey is like solving the puzzle of a city.

I never think about unsent emails when I’m scooting. Instead I use that time to think about what I’m really doing that day. The inability to pop out a phone and stare at it is a liberation. Because I see the opposite on the streets every day.

The phone zombie

I’m sure we’re all guilty of walking along, oblivious to the world, checking the phone for something that’s probably unimportant, but being so bored of the city around you that you bury yourself in social media.

I enjoy it that I dodge past these zombies every day, because it makes me feel that I am being mindful of myself, who I am and what I’m doing of a day. I feel quite sorry for them in some ways. We live in an amazing place, and using my feet to kick myself around gives me a way to explore in a way that I’ve not really been able to before.

“I wonder where this street goes?” seems to be an question that has become lost to Google Maps and the possibly overly-efficient navigation of cities that has resulted. I think it’s super interesting to take that unknown path and become more familiar with the place that I call home as a result. Les Flâneurs have had their effect on me.

And so I kick, and rest, and kick, and smoothly flow through the city. I arrive at my destination puffed out, usually elated and whoever I see first will receive a warm welcome. I’ve skipped the underground and the horrors within. High five! I notice that others arrive in a much more subdued way, and I love sparking a conversation with the first person I encounter at my studio to try to help balance things out.

I view all of this as a positivity hack. It’s remarkable how much this tiny, cheap intervention has made on my day after I arrive. Sure, there’s no telling what comes later, but starting your day with “that was fun” I’d say is something that we could all strive for.

“But you’re a grown man!”

I was chatting to a parent at school at drop-off time, and she concluded her opinion of me on my scooter with these words. That’s probably why I’m writing this piece.

I have a feeling that what I’m doing here does look ridiculous. Most days I wear jeans and a t-shirt so I generally pass unnoticed. Some days, however, I have to look smart, and the astounded looks I get from other commuters sometimes are hilarious.

There are other things that I think look more ridiculous, and not in a nice “oh gosh, isn’t Stef adorably quirky!” way.

I was scooting over London Bridge the other day and I stopped for a moment to take in my situation. There were two lanes of cars, sat there, static and pumping out pollution, mostly with one occupant each, with a steady flow of people walking alongside much faster than the cars. In particular, there was a guy sat there looking furious in his brand new Porsche.

I looked at the guy in the Porsche and for a moment I thought to myself, “I actually feel richer than you right now”. He’d spent all that money to sit there in traffic, burning fuel for no reason, and here I was embarking on a joyful scoot across the city.

BMW recently announced plans for their entire fleet to be electric cars. VW seems to be following suit after the diesel scandal. Tesla is already way ahead, and other manufacturers are jumping on the trend.

In a few years, I really think the table of “looking ridiculous” will turn. We’ll look at “I’m a grown man, I burn petrol to get to work” with scorn, and it won’t take long for the Porsche driver to start looking much more ridiculous than little old me on my £100 kick scooter.

I realised I’d been staring when he caught my eye. I scooted off smiling while he continued to be frustrated and stuck in traffic.

If you take one thing from this piece, let it be this — a tiny alteration in a part of your life, maybe one that you don’t really even think about, can have a surprisingly big effect on your happiness.

What part of your day can you change even slightly, in a way that might raise a smile or lift your mood?

If software is eating the world, who’s running the restaurant?

2015-03-16T00:00:00Z

Cooking in progress by Jaume Escofet

Prompted by an invitation from Women Shift Digital to speak on a panel at Nesta FutureFest, here are some thoughts on the subject (as a man).

Growing up in the eighties I was lucky to be part of a generation that was encouraged to be creative with new technology — consumer computers and robots were in their infancy and had just become accessible to children.

That early exposure to playing with computers sent me down the path of studying computer science, but also experimenting around applying technology in art.

I distinctly remember trying to explain to my school why I wanted to study double maths, physics and art. “Art? That doesn’t fit into the time table, sorry”. It was as if computing and art were seen as entirely separate disciplines. So I left that school and took a path that enabled me to explore both sides of my personality.

Years later, I’m now on the industrial advisory board of the school of computer science at Birmingham University, and I’ve been made aware of a worrying trend. The years that I studied, 96–99, were the high water mark for young people entering the field. Nationally (I’m in the UK), absolute numbers of people studying computer science and related disciplines has been on the decline. That seems at odds with the enormous opportunities that we’re seeing emerging around digital technology.

What’s worse still though, is that the percentage of women studying computer science has also been in steady decline.

What happened in those intervening years? Is it something to do with that decision point around art vs science that I was given? Is it down to marketing? There was certainly a huge rise in computer games, apparently squarely aimed at teenage boys, and I can imagine the effect of that being to make the software and tech industry feel less welcoming to women. We seem to have inadvertently got to a point where women are discouraged down this path.

If software is eating the world,
and the software industry is a boys’ club,
is a boys’ club eating the world?

It’s not just computer science. Much has been said about the gender imbalance in the wider “tech industry”. I attend a lot of events around Tech City (the UK’s hotspot for tech startups), and it’s remarkable how male-weighted the audiences tend to be.

There is now a prevalence of disruptive software-first companies (Uber, et al) that are altering established industries that we come into contact in our everyday life. The effect of some of these “sharing economy” startups is to disrupt the nature of work. Algorithms are replacing job functions, perhaps disproportionately affecting women. We’re seeing a rise in zero hours contracts, benefiting us as consumers, but surely not benefiting those with dependents (like me).

These trends worry me. And what’s most worrying is that we’re seeing an industry that’s primarily white, male-dominated having a huge impact on every other industry. Tech / digital / whatever you want to call it, it’s no longer an industry vertical, it’s a horizontal. Yet that horizontal has much to do to ensure that we’re all being brought along with it’s rampant disruption.

Is this by everyone?

“This is for everyone” was written large at the Olympics in 2012— those famous words by Tim Berners-Lee that launched what became the Web. I’ve written before about how we need to work on the implied question behind that — if the Web is for everyone, shouldn’t it be by everyone too?

Some would argue that it doesn’t matter who makes the software that we use. You don’t have to be a woman to write software that women use, they might say. Which is somewhat true. But there’s nuance here. I spoke on a panel at FutureFest chaired by Ghislaine Boddington, with Helen Lewis and Maggie Philbin, both of whom brought up the issue that in order to have technologies that work for all of us, we need to ensure that those who build and distribute those technologies have insights from a wide and diverse range of experiences.

It’s up to us to decide if we think this is a problem. I do. And if you agree that there’s an issue here, and like me, you’re a white man-in-tech, what kind of interventions do you take?

Pop your filter bubble

The simplest thing I’ve been doing for a couple of years now, is to do my utmost to follow a wide range of people on Twitter. Even people I disagree with or who rub me up the wrong way. The instinct is to just follow people you’ve come into contact with or whose views you agree with, but by working against that you might learn something just by listening.

We all have a filter bubble, and if you try your best to listen to a diverse range of people, you might be able to pop it somewhat.

Choose who you support

I’ve been advising, mentoring and speaking to startups for a few years now. That’s what I know about, so it makes sense. You’ll have other things that are your specialism. I just make sure that I’m not just supporting men through these activities. Just take a moment to think about who you’re supporting, making introductions for, promoting, and ensure there is diversity in those who benefit from those actions.

Enable career change

“Tech” is an all-encompassing term for a really wide variety of roles. I’m coming to the conclusion that the “learn to code” campaign, something that I really support, also comes with something of a down-side. I worry that we’re conflating “working in tech” with “being a developer”. If you look at the industry as a whole, there is a lot more going on than people writing code. It’s one aspect, but I’d like to see more discussion and promotion of the wider opportunities.

I spoke at a recent Startup Institute hackday, and found it really positive that they had a healthier mix of people than I was expecting, particularly people who were working in other industries and wanted to make a shift into “tech startup”. There’s something in enabling people to enter the industry by up-skilling and we should encourage and support projects that are working on this.

Inspire the next

People moving in to tech later in their career is one way we can make a change. The other direction is through the education system.

Children should be given the opportunity
to be creative with technology,
not to just consume it

With my local primary school, I’m working on an inspirational box of technology — robots, electronics and lesson plans to give the school pupils an opportunity to see what it’s like to be creative with technology. The observation came from conversations with Emma Mulqueeny (Rewired State) and Clare Sutcliffe (Codeclub), amongst others. Kids make a decision surprisingly early on about whether STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths) is something for them.

There’s an argument that if you can make an intervention around the ages of 8–11 to inspire and encourage children to have an interest in these areas, that we could see an uplift in girls wanting to pursue interests in that direction.

Sherry Coutu’s Founders for Schools project is aimed at using storytelling to get past some of the misconceptions about STEM careers, so I’d encourage you to sign up if you’re in the UK. Maggie Philbin’s work on TeenTech is also aimed squarely at inspiring teens about what’s possible with technology.

Such projects aren’t about trying to push everyone towards learning to code, or having a career in technology. I see it as a way to instil in children and young people, the idea that they can be confident and literate with technology. A by-product of that confidence could be a more even spread of girls and boys being part of building a more equal tech industry, and slowly making a dent in the “boys’ club” culture over the coming years.

Fix the leaky bucket

All of this is entirely pointless, however, if we’re “filling a leaky bucket”, to borrow a term I read recently. Making changes around women joining a broken industry, and not making improvements to how we all conduct ourselves in that industry, will just mean that we’ll continue to read horrendous accounts of sexism, prejudice and bad behaviour. All of which pushes people to leave the tech sector. We need to fix ourselves too.

For me, and my next venture, I’m going to really think about how to build the kind of working environment that I’d be proud of and will support and encourage a diverse range of people to collaborate. I’ve not really managed it to date, which disappoints me, but I’ll keep trying. If we all listen to and read about good practice and ensure that we’re doing our best to create good working environments, then we might be able to reverse some of the trends I’ve been talking about here.

All in all, I’m an optimist. I’m positive about the changes we’ll see over the coming years around narrowing the gender gap in tech. It’ll involve work, and to my mind it’s not just about women taking responsibility for such change, it’s down to all of us.

With thanks to Ghislaine Boddington, Women Shift Digital and Nesta FutureFest.

Getting back to the drawing board

2015-02-05T00:00:00Z

What‘s next after Makeshift?

I’m leaving Makeshift

The idea of Makeshift was to try out many tiny “hacks” and turn the best ones into digital products that could become businesses.

Year one was all about invention — we sketched up about fifty ideas, and did twelve prototypes.

Year two was all about choosing what to focus on and converting the best of those prototypes into businesses, shelving the ones that looked least promising.

Entering year three, we now have three products that have succeeded through this process — Wrangler, Hire My Friend and Attending. Each has a passionate CEO / product person leading it, users, growth, revenue and is a startup in its own right.

Experiment complete

We’ve now hit a natural break point. There’s no room to make new products — all of our efforts have been going into these three ideas. Whilst I’d hoped to have continued the process of constant invention long-term with Makeshift, indeed that was my ambition with this venture, for me it’s time to say “experiment complete”.

I’ve learnt so much in such a short space of time. About building multiple things in parallel, about what does and doesn’t work in the startup studio model, about focus, passion, collaboration, attention, sacrifice, hacky code, product-quality code, design, pragmatism, constraint… Gosh it feels like I’ve been through some kind of high-intensity education programme!

I joked with some friends recently that there’s probably a book in all of this. “Yes, Stef, clearly there is, so please write it!” was the response. You know, maybe I’ll start putting some thoughts down in writing.

Attending to Attending

Of the many things we’ve made, Attending is the one you’ll find me hacking away on in my spare time, because I love the kinds of things it enables.

When I get (thankfully-infrequent) bug reports they usually look like this: “Hey! Did you know that this function isn’t working quite right for some reason? I really need it fixing! Love Attending, by the way”.

The high incidence of the word “love” in feedback is a strong indicator that I should keep on improving this little product. To date, it’s basically been my side project, because my time has been directed elsewhere during the week. In particular, over the last six months I’ve been doing a handover with a brilliant CEO and bringing on a new technical lead on Hire My Friend.

The ongoing development of Attending is largely limited by what I’m able to achieve as an individual. I’m really grateful for the contributions by the members of the Makeshift team who lent a hand for some short, yet very valuable stints of work along the way. Especially the “relaunch” month where a few of us took my little hack and moulded it into the beginnings of a beautiful tool.

I quite like the simplicity that a lack of time and resources has forced on this product. I think it shows through in the design and the usability of it. Simple. No time for anything complicated. “Sorry I’ve not got round to that feature because I can only work on what’s important”. There’s probably a post I should write: The Casio keyboard approach to web development?

Attending is going to continue being my bootstrapped let’s-see-where-this-goes project and I’m confident that it will continue to be a valuable tool for people who run meetups, talks, workshops and other events that support the startup scene. I’m excited about the features I’ll be releasing this Spring!

Opening up to new opportunities

Thanks to everyone I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Makeshift, full-timers, freelancers, all our “alumni” — such a talented bunch of people. Especially to my co-founders Nick and Paul. Paul will be continuing to invest in the Makeshift model and has a plan to instigate a series of ideas with a narrower focus in one particular industry.

I love it that I’m leaving with stories of people who’ve used our products to support their own projects. I’m pleased that Pact Coffee get so much value out of Wrangler, that a humble Linkydink group turned into the wildly successful Product Hunt and that events like Happy Startup Camp started life on Attending!

I’ve written in the past about how I oscillate between “let a thousand flowers bloom” and “have laser focus on one thing” modes. Right now I’m most definitely in the flowers mode. Over this next period I’ll be feeling around for the project that will be that laser focus.

I’m chatting to a few people about what my immediate project focus will be. Nothing is decided yet, so if you have something that you think could be an interesting opportunity, ask a friend to introduce us?

Makeshift has been one of those storyful experiences that I’ll probably only understand properly in years to come. Thanks for following along with it.

I feel like I’m in the most productive part of my life yet. Whatever I do next is going to be a distillation of everything I’ve learnt about hacks, code, design, product, marketing, people, passion and purpose. Here’s to the next.

If you want to hear about my future adventures, I have an infrequent mailing list and a much more frequent Twitter account.

Let’s distribute the future

2014-11-10T00:00:00Z

What would you give a child to inspire an interest in technology?
A box full of awesome things perhaps?

When I was a child, my parents would bring home all sorts of exciting things for me to play with and do at home. That exposure at a young age to technology and creativity inspired me to do what I do today.

I distinctly remember exploring the Domesday Project on a “laser disc” connected to a BBC Micro B, messing around with one of those glass plasma globes and learning about geometry using a programmable “turtle”.

Using a simple programming language LOGO you could make the turtle draw patterns on a sheet of paper with a pen mounted inside it. It was loads of fun.

I still have all the old computers that helped me understand all of this technology stuff

Messing about with turtles got me onto programming and I later learned all about how to make computers do interesting things through tools like Hypercard. I’ve been messing about with computers ever since!

Modern-day tinkering?

Nowadays children have access to tablets and computers that are so much more powerful and are radically different to those I had when I was learning about computing. These are amazing devices and lots of people are building wonderful educational apps for screen-based learning. I’m always installing them and leaving them for my children to explore on the iPad. “I’ll just leave this here” is my usual approach.

Yet there’s recently been an explosion in another area that I think hasn’t been explored as much yet – physical computing, electronics kits, Arduinos, educational robots, Raspberry Pi-based computers, sensors, gyro-copters, and lots of other exciting things.

Could we get some of these modern physical computing kits, robotics and futuristic gadgets in front of more children and inspire them about being producers as well as consumers of technology? In a way that doesn’t necessarily involve sitting behind a screen?

An awesome box?

I’m starting a new project to answer these questions, in collaboration with my local primary school. This week we won a £50,000 ($80,000) grant from the Clore Duffield Foundation’s 50th anniversary Clore Prize to kick it off. Amazing!

We’re going to prototype an “awesome box” — a custom-built flight-case filled with inspiring, hackable, educational technology – electronics kits, video microscopes, gyrocopters, robots, sensors, and lots more. We’ll have lesson plans included, so the box could arrive one day in a school, and by the next, children could be using them in lessons. The box would be something that you’d have in your school for a term and then pass it on to another school.

The box would contain things that will give children a similar “wow, awesome!” reaction to the one I had when I was young. Things like this…

Watch a short video about the project

Video on Vimeo

We’ve got the beginnings of some simple principles for choosing what goes into the box:

Is it awesome — could you imagine a child saying “wow that’s awesome” when they see it for the first time?

Is it hackable — can you plug it into something else and change the way it behaves?

Is it educational — can you see ways to use it for teaching?

We’re co-designing the box with children, so I’m hoping they will have a hand in choosing a name for it once we’ve prototyped it.

Right now we’re gathering ideas for what to put in the box, gathering people who could help with writing lesson plans for the things it will contain, and researching the design of the custom case we’ll be making.

Distribute the future!

Once we have the prototype together we’ll be sending the box on to another school to see how they get on, then improving the design before we go to the next phase and create several boxes that travel the country going from school to school, one term at a time.

William Gibson, the prolific sci-fi author who coined the term “Cyberspace” has inspired me so much with his writing over the years. Famously he made this remark:

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.

So this project has a simple aim behind it: let’s distribute the future.

If you have an idea for something that could be in the box, want to help with writing lesson plans, would be interested in having the box in your school, or are interested in getting involved, get in touch.

Join our newsletter to hear about the project as it develops!

Monsters! Everywhere!

2014-09-29T00:00:00Z

I love drawing things. Mainly monsters.

I seem to be drawing almost every day now that I have kids, so it’s strange to think it’s only quite recently that I’ve started drawing and sketching again. I seem to remember I used to draw a lot more about ten years ago, but somehow I dropped out of the habit.

This month I gave myself a little project — to make a “Monster Menagerie” for the wall. I drew two or three monsters per day and it turned into this:

While I was doing it I noticed that the kids would be quite mesmerised by the shapes I was making, and would try to copy them. Some of them they traced on sheets of paper.

Around that time, Instagram released a new video app called Hyperlapse that lets you make sped-up videos. I made my first one of those 42 monsters, and here it is:

Video on Instagram

It’s quite hard to copy a drawing when you’ve only seen the finished thing. And I’ve noticed that the kids preferred to watch me while I am drawing something, so that they could understand the process of drawing, not just copy the end result.

My particular style has a strong, simple outline around each of the monsters, and I try not to have “draw the head, draw the body” as the process, so that you end up with a continuous outline rather than a series of shapes.

That “draw a circle, then draw another one” style is often the way you teach kids to draw something, but just like the classic “how to draw an owl” you can end up with a child saying “I don’t know how to draw that” because it’s hard to understand the steps involved from the simplified to the complex:

I noticed the other day that because the kids have been copying my process of drawing, they’re starting to be able to draw these continuous outlines now too. Check out the feet on my 5-year-old son’s Clock Monster:

Video on Vimeo

So I’ve started recording myself, and the kids, drawing using Hyperlapse to make sped-up videos.

The end results are these oddly relaxing and mesmerising videos of blank canvases steadily becoming populated by curious beasts. Here’s a 45-minute drawing squashed into just over 3 minutes:

Video on Vimeo

The setup for this is quite simple. I have an LED craft light with a flat top that I balance on some books to the left of me (I’m right handed). Because the light is flat on the top, I can use some tack to secure my phone to record the video. And because Hyperlapse only has one button — start and stop recording — it’s difficult to get it wrong! The app takes care of smoothing out the kinks if I knock the light as I draw.

For me, the inspiring thing about this was that I showed my kids this video at bed-time and they loved it so much we had to watch it several times.

And then one of the boys asked for a pencil…

I watched him draw some of the monsters from memory on a sheet of paper while he was going to bed.

Maybe there’s something in this — by recording the drawing process and repeatedly watching it with them I was teaching them how to have confidence that they can draw something when in the past they might have said “I don’t know how to draw that”.

If you’d like more like this you could join my very occasional email list. I’m @stef on Twitter.

Internet of Things, where are you?

2014-09-25T00:00:00Z

The Internet of Things (IoT) is at that crucial point on the hype cycle where lots of people outside of the tech scene are starting to take notice.

Yet despite the hype, I have a really simple question — where is it? I have a mental model of what the “Internet” is, but when Things are involved it all starts to get a bit blurry. What’s a Thing? Where is it and what is it doing?

At a data/art hack day yesterday, I thought I’d create a piece that would ask a few questions of this new shiny technology and take a stab at how we might represent them visually for us humans to understand. Starting with the “things” that are around you right now.

When we talk about the Internet I have a mental image of where things are, and how and why they are connected. I think of someone browsing on a laptop or a phone, and a chain of cables between them and a computer in a data centre somewhere, with data, images, stories and ideas moving around.

With IoT I find it much harder to think about the things that comprise it. Where are they? What are they? Am I near or in some of it now somehow? What does it look like and how do I know what devices are around me right now? Am I wearing one of these things? Is someone near me wearing one? And more importantly, what are all these strange new devices doing, exactly?

Looking back to the early days of the Internet, William Gibson in his book “Neuromancer” coined the term “Cyberspace” and it was quite literally a space that visualised a future internet, navigated by hackers who used it to gain entry to computer systems represented as vast monolithic three dimensional objects. Wearing a VR headset you’d be able to make sense of a system of machines and connections using familiar references to the physical world. Large things like banks represented as huge grey edifices, and tiny things like transactions between things represented as tiny, flighty shapes moving between them.

So, I thought I would revisit that idea. Could you try to visualise the Internet of things around you using a 3d approach?

A still taken from my 3d reactive IoT visualisation. Each shape is a Thing that is currently nearby.

What do you thing?

The result of my 24hr hackday is “What do you thing?” – a reactive artwork that you could place in any public space.

It scans the local area for any radio signals that a computer can understand – Wifi, Bluetooth, iBeacon and any services available via those things. Then it represents each of the things that it finds as a unique 3d form. Here’s a screencast of it running on my desk at Runway East:

Video on Vimeo

Try running it in your browser. Beware that this may cause your browser to start using a lot of memory and CPU. The web version uses fake data — to see it for real you’d need to run the OSX app that I’ve made. Get in touch if you’d like to try that out.

How an IoT device’s avatar might look.

The avatars of things

When humans are online we have “avatars” — usually a photo of ourselves, or perhaps something we find funny or interesting we want others to see when we pop up in one of their feeds.

In my visualisation I gave each of the things that I found in the nearby area a uniquely-generated three-d shape made from a distorted icosahedron. The distortion is affected by various properties that I can determine about the thing — it’s self-reported ID, signal strength, health, it’s “type” (Bluetooth, iBeacon, etc.)

I quite like the idea that machines will need to have avatars too, and wouldn’t it be appropriate that they would look quite alien, and depending on how you think about the Internet of Things, quite sinister too? That’s certainly an angle that Weavrs took with the avatars for their “bots”.

Some questions

I enjoy going to hackdays and making small one-day hacks like this. In the past, my Data Necklaces and Cryptographics pieces were all about visualising personal data, so this time I thought I’d do something about non-personal data. Each time I try to leave a few questions unanswered, and this one is no exception.

Do we want to know how many of these things are around us at any time? How do we feel when we realise so many objects are around us, scanning and sensing and transmitting? What about the fact that my device is called “Stef’s iPhone” and anyone and anything could potentially track it, and by extension, me as I move around? Is this a pleasant visualisation, or is there something sinister about these strange, abstract objects?

But the main one is — where is the Internet of Things? And the answer is you’re probably part of it right now.

Technical notes: I challenged myself to learn new things for this hack — I’d not done much 3d work before, so I had quite a steep learning curve to overcome in 24hrs. The NewAer SDK provides the ability to scan the local area for devices, so I had to pick up Xcode quite quickly! Then a Javascript bridge into a webkit window meant I could send device details into a little app that I wrote using Three.js on top of WebGL.

Thanks: 3beards for organising the hack day, Soho House for hosting, Yahoo for sponsoring and Dave Mathews for sense-checking the idea! This won first prize, so thanks to the judges for, um, judging!

If you’re interested in showing this at your event, or having me speak about such things, get in touch.

Lining things up

2014-08-26T00:00:00Z

Life often feels like it’s made of a series of chapters. Moving from one to the next you almost wish you could read the “In which our hero…” chapter title in advance, so as to avoid the inevitable mistakes. That’s not possible, but it’s at these points of transition where you get to apply what you’ve learned and hopefully gain something in the next.

I’m at one of those points right now. Some of the projects I’ve been working on are flying the nest and I’m thinking about my next. It’s at times like this that I come up against a surprisingly difficult question:

How do you decide what you should work on?

Opportunity drift

In writing this article I realise that it’s clear that I am very lucky — I have several opportunities and potential directions available to me, and many people aren’t afforded that luxury. Being mid-career, with a good network of people around me, and some sense of having had past successes mean that when an inflection point comes along, some quite niche problems come to the fore. Chiefly among them is that there are a great many opportunities available at any one time so how do you choose where to spend your time?

Instinct tells me to be open, speak to the people I trust about what my next focus should be, but also to cast the net slightly wider. Have conversations with people who are doing work in areas where I can see there is a potential project, business opportunity, or where there is clearly something interesting going on.

This is what I’ve been doing of late, akin to Peter’s fifty coffees idea. A third along the lines of “I’ve got an inkling of an idea around x — what do you think?” A third around “I’d really like to work with you in some way — but what would we do?” And another third on “I’d like some thoughts from you about my next focus. Coffee?”

The danger to avoid here is opportunity drift. By deliberately putting yourself in an open mode, you’re going to end up with several ideas from other people about what you might want to be involved in. That can be a great thing, but you may find that because something sounds kind-of interesting, and someone who you admire is telling you about the opportunity, that you will drift towards something rather than instigating an opportunity of your own.

I’ve been guilty of this many times, even in my current business. It’s very easy to allow “That sounds like a good idea” to get in the way of “I have an idea…”

What you love

“Do what you love” is the mantra for many of us who are privileged enough to do so, and it’s advice that is handed down to others — “just do the thing that you love, and money, sustainability and happiness will come”. Much has been said by way of criticism of this idea, and I’ve come to a more nuanced position on this, particularly when presented with the vast array of opportunities around.

I’m not sure that you can really say “do what you love” is the right way to approach work. Work is often not what you love. It’s often what you do to pay for the ability to live somewhere you want to, to do other things you love that aren’t income-generating and to spend time with the people you love knowing you have the basics covered.

What lines up

“Do what lines up” is more sensible for me. I’m going to spend some time thinking about the things that I am interested in, that I get excited about, that I can see a fascinating future in my being involved, that are robustly defended when asked “how does that make the world better?” and then I’m going to write a list. A list of the things that matter to me. And when I think of something that I think “that’s a great idea”, or someone approaches me with a collaboration, I’ll evaluate it against how well they line up against those areas of passion, interest and purpose.

I see too many people working on projects that just don’t seem to be solving interesting or important problems, and I’ve realised in conversation with friends that I’ve been applying my time to collaborations or other people’s projects for too long, without really considering what would totally line up with me as a person.

I suspect focussing on a more personal approach to work could mean some closed doors, but also I’d suspect that it could lead to greater clarity when choosing to invest time in a project.

A useful tool with which to divide up the set of opportunities available, therefore, is to whittle them down into the ones that fulfil this simple statement:

“I know why I should work on this — it lines up a challenging problem with something I’m passionate about and an opportunity to apply what I’m best at”

I’m @stef on Twitter. You could subscribe to my occasional email list.
Image credit: Magdalena Roeseler

The idea funnel

2014-08-19T00:00:00Z

“If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas.
Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is
which ones to throw away.”

Have many ideas. Pick the right ones. Ditch the wrong ones. Succeed. Sounds simple! That’s the theory, anyway. In practice it’s somewhat harder than that. How do you know which of your ideas is a “good” idea, and which is a “bad”? How can you dispassionately give up on ideas that you think are brilliant, yet show little sign of success?

I think of my process of idea development as something like a funnel — many ideas go into the funnel, and steadily I whittle them away based on evaluating them, doing tiny prototypes and hopefully, at the other end is a set of validated projects/products that are valuable and proven. I’ve been applying this process at Makeshift, the startup studio I co-founded.

The “If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas” quote above are the words of accomplished chemist Linus Pauling, paraphrased by his contemporary Francis Crick in a talk he gave about Pauling’s life and work. It’s commonly quoted, yet the second part, about the importance of pruning your ideas, is often overlooked. It’s really worth reading the full text of his talk on this subject to understand the nuance:

…Linus Pauling was enormously fertile in the way he developed his ideas. He was asked a few years ago, “How do you get ideas?” And he gave I think what is the correct reply. He said, “If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.”

Having the ideas is the easy part; he did not say this — I am simply interpreting here what he probably thought of as the easy part. The difficult and rather intuitive part is to know which ones to hang on to and which ones to throw away.

It is clear from what I have said that Linus Pauling was not always right in his ideas. But my belief is that, in most cases, if somebody is always right in his ideas you find that he does not have much to say. It is an expression of somebody’s fertility that he does produce quite a number of ideas, and I think Linus Pauling’s score is pretty high. I do not know what Linus would have said about it, but I certainly find in myself that, as you get older, this intuitive knowledge of which ones to discard perhaps weakens a little.

Maybe with some of his later ideas, although they were on the right lines, he perhaps might have clung to them a little too strongly. I find myself doing just the same.

This “have many ideas” approach is something I’ve been working on for some time now. It’s lead to starting several companies, doing lots of projects, and I’ve been giving a lot of thought to both the idea-having and the idea-following-through processes along the way.

This last eighteen months, I’ve deliberately tried to go for a strong idea, loosely held approach — to allow myself to be open to lots of things, and to not be too convinced that they will definitely be right. The strategy was to try out many tiny ideas at an early stage, do a series of quick prototypes, play with them, often in public, and then invest in the ones that looked the most promising as the beginnings of digital businesses.

We’re at something of an inflection point in the process now, where three “winners” have emerged from the cohort and have the potential to turn into fully-fledged “startups” in their own right. That’s Attending, Wrangler and Hire My Friend. We also have made a few lovely little things that have a fair degree of usage but aren’t clearly startup material — Linkydink, for example.

But that’s the thin end of the funnel. At the other end are all of the ideas that either didn’t make it, were discarded or I put off for another day. In this period of work I’ve started around 50 code-bases!

What does an idea funnel look like though? At its simplest, it’s a list of potential ideas. In eighteen months I started, or help start about fifty ideas. Have a scan, and below I talk about some of the things I’ve learnt.

Honey — an elegant publishing platform for the rest of us. All of the Makeshift articles are written using this.
Flounder — a way to build your startup or project’s Twitter audience
Help Me Write — exposing your drafts to your audience to get their input on what you should write
Hear There — a headphones-on listening experience about memory
Lando — landing page management for your site
Teh Guardian — find the mistakes inserted into Guardian articles
Story Jar — inspiration for a story to make up with your kids
Selfie — aggregated images tagged #selfie
Stef — my personal site that aggregates lots of things via APIs
Deck Roulette — random talk generator I used for my Do Lectures talk
Linkydink — link sharing and daily email digests for small teams
Do a course — distance learning with a cohort of people
East Dulwich Forum ++ — a proxy that improves UI for a legacy forum
Conversatives — swaps words around on conservatives.com (!)
Sketching with Code — my writing about my hacky process
DM a URL — a way to share links now that Twitter bans them in DMs
Educe — a plug-in for Segment.io that captures events in a Postgres
Emily Quinton — an elegant little site for Emily with full screen video
Heber Parents — a one-day site for the parents and friends of a school
Follolo — analysing networks of followers on Twitter
Periscope — a tiny sinatra app for running SQL that became Wrangler
Makeshift website — the site itself is an interesting project
Rumbleroll —Jase Coop’s idea for quiet RSS aggregation
Buildgrabber — take and store screengrabs of websites over time
Shhare.io — credential-sharing for small teams
Cryptographics — a visual language for hiding information in a graphic
Savemates — rotating savings and credit associations for small groups
Tickle — a proxy for the Twitter API that uses all of your users’ credentials to maximise your API calls per hour
Sunday Post — a collaborative writing project, spawned Attending
Screenlight — instagrams of people lit only by their devices
Nub — an attempt to create a good Rails starting point for hacks
Pogoid — datamapper for Active Record. Didn’t work!
Floral Friday — an Instagram competition site with a gallery
Rolo — making lists of people more useful
Link Scientists — trying to get reporters to link to research
Dealhacker — something about dealflow for seed investors
Hugbase — a mashup of Datahug and Crunchbase
Bitsy — paid pages for things you can download
Tentoring — ten minute mentoring
Gothub — find a github username based on an email address
Richerlist — enrich a list of email addresses with other metadata
Makelight — a brand and blog for Emily on Squarespace
Silicon Throwabout — frisbee in the park using Attending
Work in Progress — an event series about work-in-progress projects

Phew! That’s certainly quite a lot of “new”, and as far as Linus Pauling’s suggestion about having lots of of ideas goes, I think I took it to heart!

It feels true that without having gone so wide with a set of potential ideas we wouldn’t have arrived at three good ideas in the end. But I’ve observed a few things that I think will influence me in the future with this process:

Scratchy products

Most of the ideas related to my own particular, personal observations on what I needed or what I saw was missing in the world. I can’t really see any other way to “have lots of ideas”. You can’t imagine what other people will want as well as you can imagine what you might want.

Similarly with the team — the ideas that each of us brought into the studio were often “scraching your own itch”, and as such, the things that seemed to work were scratchy products. When we weren’t scratching an itch, the idea didn’t seem to stick.

Passion is a filter

It’s fine to scratch your own itch, but are you really passionate about an idea? Because it strikes me that if you’re really trying to start something that turns into a business, when you’ve got opportunity to the left and right in a stack of other competing ideas, you’re going to have to be able to summon a serious level of passion for an idea to follow it through. Many of the ideas at the fat end of the funnel didn’t get much further because that passion wasn’t there — either for me or for others in the room.

It’s good to play with lots of ideas, and not everything that goes into the wide end of your idea funnel should be utterly change-the-world-I-have-to-make-this-happen-at-all-costs, yet at some point in that funnel from idea to product someone will have to be personally convicted of the idea and want to fight for it. The percentage of ideas that got picked off because of lack of passion is probably quite high.

Breathing room

Many people looking at the Makeshift model have asked me “how long do you give an idea before you know it’s working?”

I wish I had a good answer. At one of our “work in progress” events we were demoing one of our ideas we were working on, and Blaine from Poetica was in the room. He made a strong point about the project — it needed more breathing room before we could decide to kill it or keep it.

If you don’t give an idea long enough to gain traction, to work out what it is, to really go deep on it, you’re limiting yourself to working on very much surface-level problems, to finding solutions that are at best local minima.

Yet, the pressure of having too many simultaneous ideas going through our “idea funnel” meant that we had to kill ideas quickly to give ourselves resources to work on the right problem. I guess this is why we have ended up with quite sensible products coming out of the process — there wasn’t any way that we could have produced very out-there ideas because those kinds of things tend to take a long time to go from experimental project to wide adoption.

This breathing room problem in the funnel is an area that I’ve not solved. Certainly looking at other studios that work similarly, I see that they often go for a serial process rather than doing multiple things in parallel. I think both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.

Hacks on hacks

Something that I was keen on in all of this was to share code between many of the ideas. Again, this is good and bad. It means that the class of problem that you can solve in your funnel has to fit into a certain mould — in our case websites / web-apps. It was helpful to have that constraint to allow for code re-use and for hacks to build on the work of other hacks. Yet also it narrowed our problem space to not include various areas that I’m passionate about.

It’s worth ensuring that you have some diversity in your funnel — trying out different technology could give you something surprising like what happened with Flipboard. They were working on their product just before the iPad arrived, and decided to jump on a new technology to take advantage of it. If they’d made the same decision as we did, that everything had to be web-first they wouldn’t have had the amazing success that they achieved after the iPad launch.

Finding the right numbers

For each of our hacks that got through to “let’s make it” stage, we established a few key numbers that we could monitor weekly. It wasn’t very vigorous, but by paying attention to what the key measure you’re going for on an idea is, you can really come to a conclusion as to whether it’s a good or a bad idea.

If you don’t decide what you’re looking for as your “keep or kill” signal up front, you’re probably going to waste some time and resources building the wrong thing. For example, I made a little thing called Flounder in my spare time. It’s a way to build an audience for your startup or project.

The key number I was looking for there is “is the follow-back rate better than what I get from Twitter ads?” I wrote a little SQL report that ran every week and I got a number back. Somewhere between 9 and 15 percent for Flounder versus the 1 percent I was getting with Twitter ads. So my answer was “yes” and I could quantify it. Having that number to hand really helps you decide if you should follow through on an idea or not.

Killing your darlings

The hardest part of the funnel approach to developing products though, is the meeting where you sit down with all of this information — your scratchy product idea, the hack you’ve made to validate it, your numbers, the fact you’re passionate about it, and you have to battle it out with the other equally validated, interesting, passion-backed projects from your team.

The skill I had to really develop, and I’m still not there, is to accept that sometimes what you may think is a great idea just has to be killed or “put on the back-burner” because as a team you only have so much time, money and energy at your disposal.

It’s the ability to kill your darlings that will enable you and your team to make something significant. Otherwise everyone would end up on their own working on their own passion project. Something has to give, and getting comfortable with killing or shelving good ideas is the hardest part of moving from the wide end of the funnel to the other.

It can be painful to swallow your pride and kill something you think is a sure-fire winner. That pain doesn’t go away, but hopefully, if you’re lucky, you’ll look back and say “gosh — if I’d not killed that I’d never have this”.

Which ones to throw away?

I’ll return to the quote that was the starting point to this piece: “If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.”

So many people seem to focus on that early part and stop before “Most of them…” when they mention these words— just have lots of ideas! It will all work out fine! Clearly that’s missing the nuance, and the process of stopping working on the things that might be bad ideas to focus effort on the good ones, is why Linus Pauling was such a good scientist and was able to make such significant progress in his field.

It’s this funnel concept that I think has been so helpful to me over the last few years. When you start thinking of your experiments, sketches, conversations, suggestions as items that are going into a funnel of your own making, it becomes much less stressful when someone says “oh not another idea! We haven’t got time to do the last bunch!” It’s not the point — the funnel should always be filling up, and if you’re lucky enough to find a way to develop one or two of your ideas into fully-fledged projects, features or work-streams you’re winning.

If you’re like me, and have lots of ideas on the go, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about your funnel, how you allow yourself to have hard limits around assessing the viability of your ideas, and developing a way to talk about how “that idea didn’t work out”, without worrying that people will think less of you as a result.

As is the way with my hack, play, learn approach, I’m going to take what I’ve learnt from this period of making and put it back into how I do my hacks. I think the main thing is that you can’t entirely flip from “come up with loads of ideas” to “no more new ideas, we just build on what we’ve got”. That’s not how I work, and the funnel should always be filling up — possibly with ideas that build on what you have, but also possibly not. Having now got to the point where we have a few successes coming out of the thin end of the funnel, my focus is back on the wide end — what am I passionate about, what itches do I want to scratch, which ideas that I’ve got on the shelf do I want to push forward?

I’ll leave you with the hardest learning from this period for me, and it’s something that I’m struggling with but that I continue to aim for:

Get comfortable with killing the bad ideas and you’ll free yourself to focus on the good ones more quickly.

I’m @stef on Twitter. If you enjoyed this, subscribe to my occasional email list.
Image credits: Ian Muttoo, Staircase at the Art Gallery of Ontario; Crocus8, Paper rainbow; Abby Lanes, Pool Bokeh Texture.

Drawing to think

2014-06-01T00:00:00Z

I attended a workshop event yesterday, and I’d brought along sharpies of multiple colours and some sheets of paper. I thought I’d need them to help me have conversations with the people who were going to be there.

What actually happened was that I started drawing. Monsters. I do this a lot.

It’s something I’ve been doing for a couple of years now, and at first I was a little concerned that it might come across as me being rude or distracted.

The thing is, if I’m drawing while a conversation is going on around me, I find that I’m able to listen deeper to what people are saying, to be the “plant”, and then pipe up with interesting observations and thoughts.

Getting past that “oh I’m being very rude by drawing something instead of being serious” seems to help others around me to realise that you don’t have to obey the rules in the conversation, that perhaps a little levity is permitted!

It’s only yesterday that I realised that it’s quite unusual! So I thought I’d snatch a moment to make this observation and put it down in writing.

I’m drawing to think. The act of drawing and being playful in otherwise sensible situations might seem a bit risky and strange, but perhaps it’s something that I use in those situations to help me and others get the best out of a meeting.

If you do similar, do let me know. And if you don’t, could I suggest buying a pack of multi-colour sharpies and leaving them in the middle of the meeting room next time you gather the team together? It could be interesting…

Teh Guardian FTW!!!1!

2014-06-01T00:00:00Z

I’ve made a little hack called TehGuardian.com — it inserts random grammar and punctuation mistakes into TheGuardian.com. Can you spot the mistakes?

You may remember that in 2013 The Guardian rebranded online as The Guardian. No, I thought it was a bit odd too. Something to do with guardian.co.uk changing to theguardian.com

Now, if you saw that happening, what would your immediate reaction be?

Of course. Same here. I went to my usual domain registrar site, and whacked in thegrauniad.com but obviously they’d thought of that.

So I typed in “tehguardian.com”, “teh” being the proper way to spell “the” on the internet, and gosh. Would you look at that? Somehow nobody had thought to buy it. And I use one of those one-click domain registrars. And I was feeling mischevious. And…

Well, it sat there in my list of domains until I was at Hack The Space this weekend. It was an “art hack” in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern. Quite the environment in which to hold a hack day! Check it out:

I’d come with one idea, but after some aborted conversations about it I was feeling a little bit blocked and uninspired. And it was coming up to midnight.

Sometimes, the best way to unblock yourself is to have a second canvas. A bit of time spent doing something entirely unrelated can release creative energy in your "main thing" (more on that in a separate post).

So I did a “comedy hack”. I was telling Pascal Auberson and Bill Thompson, two of the other hackers about the fact that I owned the domain, and there were about seven of the Guardian team in the room, and well, wouldn’t it be really funny to demo something on-stage that was a hack on their site?

And we riffed about what it could be, and somehow we found ourselves laughing about how it would be wonderful to take the piss out of the reputation that the Guardian, probably unfairly nowadays, has for typos in published articles.

By inserting our own mistakes into the Guardian’s articles.

A couple of hours of scrappy hacking later (between 1 and 3am, I must add) I’d coded and deployed my little comedy hack:

TehGuardian.com

It’s the Guardian website as we know and love. But every single article page has up to five grammatical errors introduced into it.

So if you make the mistake of typing in “teh” instead of “the” when you try to reach the Guardian, you’ll also receive a slightly glitchy version back.

It’s quite subtle. Probably my subtlest hack yet.

Every article that you read via tehguardian.com is exactly the same as an article on theguardian.com except that I have introduced incorrect Oxford commas, instances of “s’s” where it should be “s’”, swapped “they’re” for “their” and a handful of other grammar-pedant-traps.

Here’s an example:

Original. Hacked. Irritating, huh? And that's about it!

So why do this?

It’s great for winding up Guardian authors

You can now message anyone who’s written for the Guardian and wind them up by asking if they really did mean to use an Oxford comma. And are they aware that it should be “s’”, not “s’s”, and surely they know the difference between “its” and “it’s”… Then wait for the inevitable “d’oh!” moment when they realise they’ve been had.

It’s great for winding up pedants

Use it as spurious support for your own grammatical inadequacies. What do you mean Mr or Mrs random online pedant? I most certainly do know how to use an apostrophe correctly - look, even the Guardian do it like this nowadays!

It’s silly

This is a very silly thing to do and will probably get me in a wee bit of trouble. But a hack day without a comedyhack isn't really a hack day. I enjoyed that when I was talking to Bill Thompson about this he told me that back in the day, one of the early versions of the Guardian site ran from a SPARCstation sat on his desk!

It could be educational

Helen Jeffrey from the London Review of Books took one look at this and said, "You know, this could be a valuable educational tool! You could use it to train proof-readers".

I nodded and pointed out that of course I’d meant it to be a valuable educational tool all along. Absolutely I did. Honest.

It’s a good idea though — maybe I could gamify this slightly so that you have to click on the mistakes to score points? A leaderboard of pedants?

It could be serious

But the serious point I’d like people to take from this hack is the following.

The browser manufacturers are trying to hide our URL bar from us. Sure, that could be fine in a lot of cases. But when you’re looking at a page, and you’re not quite sure if you’re looking at the real thing, even if it looks like the real thing, you can always look up and check it out.

If we keep going down that path I do worry about that missing context and the ability to check the validity of what you're reading or seeing.

Sure, this is just a few stray pieces of punctuation, but I could just as easily have inserted anything else into these pages and served them to the user.

What next?

I’m hoping the Guardian folk have a good sense of humour. And I’ve already put a “Do not index” rule in the robots.txt so it’s not going to cause any SEO trouble. But hey, I’m aware that companies often have to do the “brand protection” thing. I’ll see… but for now, it’s just a cute little hack that raised a few smiles at the Tate Modern’s first ever hack day.

Here’s Ken Lim, who was at the event with me and responsible for moving from guardian.co.uk to theguardian.com. Oops! He took it in good humour though!

How it works

Here’s a quick technical overview if you’re interested. Code is on Github.

Every request coming in to my tehguardian.com site, grab the corresponding url from theguardian.com. Swap out all instances of “theguardian”, “the guardian”, “The Guardian” for their equivalent “teh” versions (so all internal links work and you can navigate as usual).

Parse the page with Ruby’s Nokogiri library.

Scan the page for the main content area, and if it is present, scan inside it for “defacement candidates”. This is a recursive function that looks for any piece of text containing “and”, “‘s”, “s’” or “they’re”.

Then, generate a random “seed” for the URL. This is so that we can consistently deface the page for visitors - so the mistakes will always be the same mistakes on each page view of an article.

Sort the “defacement candidates” using a random function based on that seed. Then pick the first five.

Then for each of those five elements, deface them by either swapping an “and” for “, and” (introducing an Oxford comma), replacing “‘s” for just “s”, replacing “s’” for either “s’s” or “s”, or perhaps “they’re” for “their” or “there”.

Then tell Nokogiri to render out as HTML and serve it up!

There’s some caching in their with Memcache too so that it can handle a fair load for a free Heroku instance.

That’s it! If you have a comment or suggestion, let me know on Twitter — I’m @stef.

Are you building a hack, a product, or a hackquaduct?

2014-05-01T00:00:00Z

When we started Makeshift, one of my main motivations for going for our particular business model was to build on the hacking process I’d been developing for a few years. It goes like this:

The hack-to-product process

Notice a problem that isn’t being solved

Check for gaps - are you missing something obvious?

Think of the simplest thing you could make to demonstrate the idea

Hack it together in a day or two (the time constraint is important here)

Test it out with people who might have a similar problem or be interested in the hack

Profit?

I’m sure you can see the problem. What happens after the hack?

If, like me before I started Makeshift, you’re by yourself and have other things that you’re working on to bring in the money, the likelihood of one of your hacks turning into something profitable is next to zero.

After the hack

Following through after you’ve made a little hack is tough. At first you’re optimising for the joy of making, but quite quickly that can turn into maintenance, bug fixing, and the worst thing — the brutal cold shoulder of the internet. There’s only so many tweets you can send, and people are busy.

To turn a hack into a ‘product’ requires a ton of effort and, ahem, marketing. Far more likely, your hack will wither on the vine; it may continue to grow slowly but not really bring in serious revenue.

Before Makeshift I had the hacking part down and I teamed up with Nick and Paul pretty much because of one question: “How can you turn a hack into a product?"

This past first year we’ve done lots of hacks, in fact about a dozen. And through that process of trying an idea, evaluating it and making mistakes and learning, I’ve spotted a few things.

The ‘hackquaduct’

So you put out a hack and get some really good feedback.

From here, it’s tempting to attempt to chip away at it until it magically turns into a great piece of software, or indeed a business.

The trouble is, you can end up with something that’s too big to be a hack and not quite a product. It’s a hackquaduct.

A hack isn’t an MVP

With a hack I’m not trying to be “viable” in any way - hacks don’t make money. Hacks are exploratory. They’re the bit before you work out the full requirements for the thing you might make.

Don't have a big launch for your hack

If you market something that’s not ready you’ll end up with tons of “it’s broken” messages and have stressed-out weekends fixing stuff instead of learning. Not fun. And fun should be a thing you hang on to.

Hack the right thing

You can tie yourself in knots building the wrong pieces if you’re not careful. At hack days I always see people messing around with user authentication on their laptop and not getting their hacks actually onto the internet! Priorities…

Test just the right amount

Your hack doesn’t need to be amazing production code. It does need to not fall over and break.

A hack is not the place for Test Driven Development

That’s not because I don’t believe the rhetoric. I’ve done TDD. But because it’s generally slower for me, it fails the ‘make it really quickly’ test that a hack has to have. Plus, if you’re going to throw it away at some point, as long as the hack roughly works for the main flows that people will go through, you’re probably wasting time.

Don’t make too many changes after you release it

I make this mistake all the time. The hack is out there, people are playing with it and like what it does, but it would be lots better if it had x, y and z too.

If you immediately follow through with too many of these iterations, what you’ve actually got is some badly written, rushed software that will become unmaintainable. You’ll hire people, add them to the ‘project’ (you’d stop calling it a hack at some point) and you’ll end up with some difficult conversations about code quality, refactoring and being production-ready.

I’ve learnt to keep the list of amazing features in ‘feature land’ - a fantastical place where one day I might venture.

Hacks are conversation starters

Don’t be tempted to say about your hack, “Here’s my amazing new company. It’s going to be huge”; you run the risk of disappointing or really irritating people.

If you’re following the hack-first process, you’re aiming for conversations with people, not trying to impress them with the scale of your ambition. This means...

Kill it!

One way or another your hack will die. It might not work, so you turn it off. It might keep tinkering along, so you leave it online but do nothing to it, which is killing it through lack of attention.

The best ‘kill it’ result though, is if it works.

Wrangler is a good example here. It was a tiny little Sinatra hack that I made for Paul to run some SQL in a browser. It quickly got to the point where it needed to evolve and have more features. So we killed it, took what we’d learnt from it and Tanja built it again from scratch, properly, using test-driven methods.

The code quality is high, the app is much more maintainable and it’s had the benefit of the ‘hack, play, learn’ loop by someone on our team as the main user.

If you don’t kill it though, and keep chipping away, well, you’ve heard the horror stories of companies saying ‘no new features’ and spending a year refactoring their app. Far better to have a reset early on once you know you want to turn a hack into a product.

The Hack/Product inflection point is the thing you’re trying to find with a hack. Nowadays I’m constantly thinking, “Is this a hack or a wannabe product? Do we stop and do it properly? Do we follow through or is it a no?”

Paying attention to my own behaviour and what’s going on with a hack is my latest obsession.

For now though I’m firmly sticking to this being a tiny hack until such point as people tell me “you know, every startup could use this, have you thought about…?"

Perhaps I'll take a journey to Featureland if it happens enough.

Image credit Rick and Brenda Beerhorst.

Watch: Encourage your kids to code even if you can’t yourself

2014-05-01T00:00:00Z

This weekend I gave a lightning talk at Kidcrafters, a one day event run for and by parents with short talks and workshops all about bringing up a generation inspired to be creative.

Here’s my 7 minute talk about my approach to encouraging my kids to be creative with technology, and some things that other parents can do, mostly without having any coding skills.

An awesome team forming

2014-04-01T00:00:00Z

This fortnight we’ve had two new starters at Makeshift.

Ollie Glass

Ollie is something of a generalist, with a background in AI, a wide interest in software for the web, the process of making digital products and experience of crunching data.

Dan Williams

Dan is a well-regarded software developer who’s spent the last few years at Pervasive Media Studio doing interesting work with web, mobile and physical computing applications.

Welcome to the team, guys!