An Introduction
I guess I should say some words before we get started...
I initially registered this blog name three years ago, and then proceeded to post absolutely nothing. This time I think I’m actually going to post some stuff… probably.
For those who don’t know me, I’m a British expat living in Sunnyvale California with my wife and two sons. Career-wise, I’m a hybrid Product Manager / Software Engineer, and I’ve worked at Intel Research, Google, Quora, Facebook, and my own company Talkful.
To start with, I plan to write about the things I’ve learned while trying to design social media products that encourage better social behavior. However I expect I’ll cover other topics too.
It would be nice if this blog got some followers, but to be honest I’m mostly writing to help organize my own thoughts.
Here are a few rules I plan to hold myself to:
Make the key point up front - Sometimes it’s nice to read a long poetic essay about some topic, but sometimes it’s nice to get the key conclusion up front so you know whether you want to read the rest of it. I’m planning to write more of the latter.
Admit when I’m wrong - I’m going to make mistakes. The only way to never be wrong is to never say anything interesting. However if it turns out that something I said was wrong then I intend to both update the original post, and post a correction in my next “shorts” post.
No enemies - I don’t subscribe to the “good guys vs bad guys” view of the world. If someone has a different opinion to me, I hope I’ll give as strong an argument as I can for why they might reasonably think they are right.
Mostly avoid culture war topics - Far too much attention is payed to this topics, and there is often more progress to be made pulling the rope sideways. On the occasions where I feel I need to touch on such topics, I hope my writing will be sufficiently non-partisan that you can’t tell which party I vote for.
Moderate comments by respectfulness, but not by opinion - In the event that this blog gets comments, I will ruthlessly delete comments that I personally judge to be mean-spirited or disrespectful (towards me, or anyone else), but strongly encourage respectfully expressed disagreement.
Keep things rough - This is a blog, not a book. It’s easy to get stuck in perfection paralysis and never actually publish anything because it’s not good enough. So I’m not going to do that. If a post somehow gets a ton of attention, or commenters point out things that are dumb, then I’ll probably edit it, but otherwise what you are getting is straight out of my head.
Write roughly weekly to monthly - No more than weekly because I doubt you want to hear from me that much. No less than monthly because otherwise I’ll get out of the habit. My rate might be a little higher at the beginning because I’ve got a backlog of ideas.
Okay. Let’s see how this goes…
UPDATE: When I first registered this domain back in 2019 I’m pretty sure nobody was using the name “Messy Progress”, but since then it seems that Adrienne Smith started a podcast with the same name. If the name clash ends up being a problem then I might rename this blog - though I’d need to come up with a good name first.