Betterment

“A complex system can fail in an infinite number of ways.” -“Systemantics” by John Gall   Incidents are stressful but inevitable. Even services designed for availability will eventually encounter a failure. Engineers naturally find it daunting to defend their systems against the “infinite number of ways” things can go wrong.  Our team found ourselves in…

Orchestras are difficult. One reason is that we’re really good at noticing when they’re out of tune. Just a tiny bit off changes our perception of the sound. The other reason is that if…

Marketing as we know it happened because of machines. Machines made factories dramatically more efficient, which meant that producers could no longer easily sell everything they made. When you go f…

It’s Christmas Eve and the Holiday Season is in full swing. Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, all the good stuff. All of these traditions are very old, of

Automation How would you like to have notes automatically …

Capacitive touch buttons are a great way to turn just about any (non-conductive) surface into a button, but people generally dislike the lack of tactile feedback.  [KontinuumLab] apparently agreed …

Well, maybe not. In 2024, worldwide gift card sales will pass a trillion dollars for the first time. It’s a good grift. Surveys show that the buyer spends about 21% less per gift than they do…

Last year I was the 27th of four hundred and freaking eight people to write about their default apps, and I though it would be fun to turn this into a tradition and revisit the list to see if anything has changed since last year. ✨ next to each change from

Our old friend, Rory Sutherland has a piece of advice: “Be good at two things.” A Marine who knows how to fight is good. A Marine who knows how to fight

Explore the complexities of Chinese names and their Hanyu Pinyin transliteration, which can create ambiguity, even for native speakers.

The best way to complain is to make things better. Complaining can be a form of intimacy. It’s a useful way to explain our behavior. And best of all, it gives us a way to communicate as we wo…

Modern marketing culture is designed to amplify our desires. To turn faint wants into desperate needs. As a result, we’re intimately familiar with what we want. And we strive to get it. The p…

In most competitive markets, when an organization offers a new benefit, others will quickly move to match it. This means that it’s hard to justify the hard work of creating something better, …

Great companies and teams often get stale and then fade away. Here’s what we hear as it happens: “I’m way too important to listen to customers. Send them to the call center.&#8221…

Forms are a convenient way for bureaucracies to collect information. They’re convenient because they offload the work to the patient/customer/taxpayer. The shift in labor led to an explosion …

Asymmetrical information creates real problems. And fixing the flow of useful proxies benefits both sides. Cigarette companies knew a great deal about the addictions they were causing and the illne…

A generation ago, the Generals ruled. General Motors, General Foods, General Mills, General Dynamics… they were big, and they had a lot to lose. As a result, people trusted them to show up an…

If it happened to us, our memory of it is a story, our record of it with us at the center. Even if it’s on video, even if other people were there, our narrative and the context and the play b…

Lousy tools are dangerous. They endanger our safety (physical or emotional) and undermine our work. Lousy tools are pretty easy to avoid, because they reveal themselves whenever we use them. Great …

Want to be better with money? Here are ten books + the one-minute summary of what you need to know.

Jason Rodriguez is a slightly jaded—but ultimately hopeful—tech worker. Working at GitHub.

Jason Rodriguez is a slightly jaded—but ultimately hopeful—tech worker. Working at GitHub.

Plenty of people have been talking about the rifts between liberals and conservatives and between men and women. But there’s a fault line out there that is just as divisive and may be responsible for more relational estrangement than any other — despite the fact that it remains almost entirely unrecognized and understood: The division […]

Humans are well overdue for a technological revolution – not a profit-driven one like we’re having now, a human-centric one. Sci-fi is wonderful for having your brain run wild. Over the…

A candid post about some of the things that kept me, my employees, and our company from achieving our full potential.

What if there was one piece of fitness equipment that was affordable, didn’t take up much space, could get you both strong and flexible, and was fun to use? While that might sound too good to be true, my guest, Pat Flynn, would say you can find all those benefits in the old-school kettlebell. Pat, […]

Mark Twain noted that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Around 500 BC, Rome got rid of its kings and became a Republic. Ditching