leobakerhytch

Regrettably, we humans just don’t have a good sense of scale.

And a fourth time on a per-article basis if you, as an individual, non-academic taxpayer, would like you read the very research your taxes have funded.

When you say historic buildings, I suppose (hope) you don’t mean listed ones, since they’d be breaking the law? Regardless, it’s a crying shame what people have ripped out of even very ordinary Victorian and Edwardian houses. Decorative mouldings, cast iron fireplaces, original doors, geometric tiling.

Even though the full-size filter would surely work with a phone camera, if you could scale it down to a form factor that clips onto the phone, I can see this selling like hot cakes. Might be one of the rare cases where influencer marketing is really effective too. Is it feasible to grind the glass at a physical scale to make that work?

All in all, very cool product, and congrats on making a living from it!

Absolutely. I think that’s why it’s so vital to combine both qualitative and quantitative data.

I doubt there are too many people in tech making this mistake, but without numbers there’s a good chance you fall prey to people’s inaccurate perceptions or explanations for their own behavior.

On the other hand, without those first-hand accounts, it’s all too easy to tell a mistaken story about your numbers. In particular, your users’ sentiment towards their time spent in your app is a guess, unless they tell you.

I think timescale is another crucial dimension to evaluating time-in-app, and whether it’s a positive indicator for your business.

For instance, driving up engagement has doubtless been good for Facebook’s financials in the short- to medium-term. Arguably though, that relentless focus has led to the present political climate where they’re fighting off regulation. Whether that’s an existential threat is yet to be seen (one can only hope), but it certainly casts the metric in a different light.

As you say, it comes down to the fact that there is no silver bullet metric; there’s no substitute for thinking about and dissecting the data you collect.

That’s what qualitative data is for. At the very least, talking to customers and reading their feedback. Preferably followed by organizing that data somehow, and using it to better understand the quantitative data you have.

It’s fair comment, though, that undifferentiated ‘engagement’ is rarely a good metric.

Rather than building dedicated integrations (which can always come later), a relatively quick win that’s tool-agnostic would be to implement webhooks.

I’ve used Typeform’s webhook feature a number of times to good effect, whereby you receive one POST request to whatever endpoint you specify upon each form submission. This may have changed, but when I last used it that was the only way of getting your data out of their system, which was admittedly frustrating. A lot better than nothing though.

Used it for all kinds of things: quizzes hooked up to a loyalty program, to award the user points for all correct answers; satisfaction surveys after ordering a product; writing and photography competitions (again hooked up to the loyalty program); an in-depth annual user survey; etc.

To add to that list: abstract syntax trees.

It would take a pretty monumental effort to build, but I think a huge step forward could be made with a VCS that has knowledge of code structure, and the relationships between source files.

Large scale refactoring is such a fragile affair with git. Conceptually though, it should be possible to cleanly and concisely represent such operations as renaming functions, reordering arguments, widening type parameters, etc.

Stability of the programming language in question is of course highly desirable, if you were to build such a system. The pace of change of Go would be much more conducive to success than that of JavaScript (or TypeScript).

I realized in the last year or two that I was never really bad with names, I just didn’t give myself the chance to be good with them. For someone I’ve just met, it takes a little effort to use their name at least once or twice soon after I learn it, and it’s much more likely to stick.

I’m also much stricter with going through the slight awkwardness if I didn’t catch the name first time (even asking to spell it out to be 100% sure). Then afterwards, I’ll write down the name in Notes with something memorable about the person, and where I met them. 99% of the time, I never look at this again. Just like that, name remembered.

Then, I’ll manage not to use a person’s name next time I see them, even when I know it. Oops.