Category: Links

Podcatch.com. A collection of podcast feeds via friends and friends-of-friends of Dave Winer. It’s a neat idea for discovering something new to listen to. There’s more background, too, on what led to building it.

Habit List. I’ve been looking for a simple app like this ever since Lift shifted toward coaching. Really clean and slimmed-down app for tracking and reminding yourself of habits to keep.

Your Two Jobs as a Manager. Set clear expectations and reduce uncertainty for your team.

How to Collect Customer Feedback That’s Actually Valuable. A look inside how the team at Intercom collects and synthesizes customer feedback.

The Technium. A fascinating interview with Kevin Kelly from last February. It’s a long read, or an hour-long video, but so worth the time. One of my favorite nuggets was, “Machines are for answers; humans are for questions.”

2014 was a good year for Basecamp support. Noah Lorang recaps what last year looked like for the Basecamp support time. Their median response time astounds me. Pretty impressive work from a relatively small team.

Documentation, Support, and Customer Success. Simon writes about how documentation is a psychological band-aid in how it calcifies habits and shifts responsibility.

Adjunct professors get poverty-level wages. Should their pay quintuple? The SEIU is organizing adjunct professors together around the future goal of $15,000 per course. Improving adjunct working conditions is long overdue. A side note worth noting is that part of the reason I went to Whitman was their expectation that tenured faculty actually teach.

Momentum. Jeff Veen’s talk from this year’s WordCamp San Francisco. Lots of good advice about what makes for a good meeting and an effective working environment. Hat tip, Sheri.

The Windows of Siracusa County. Episode 96 of Accidental Tech Podcast is worth listening to if for nothing else than the post-show chatter. John Siracusa describes what his computer monitor looks like; it involves 31 different browser windows alone. Crazy.