micro

For a platform that has multiple billions of active uses per day which is an absolutely staggering metric of any kind, Zucky seems surely very happy that he has 70 million signups in one day, and that too on backbone of an app that already had billion users. I am sure publicly all great but surely Zucky must think these are not really great numbers? Of course lots of time but meh, signups are barely an indicator of… *anything*.

Another summer swim A meet done and dusted. As tiring as they are they are infinitely more fun than regular swim meets of the year.

British Airways cancelled dad’s flights for tomorrow evening. Glad they told us 18 hours before – with British Airways I wouldn’t have been surprised if they cancelled the flight after everyone boarded and they decided well fuck it, not gonna fly!

So wait, Twitter lays off 2/3rd of its workforce, Meta hires some of them and builds Threads and now Musk is angry Meta hired Twitter’s engineers? How can the world tolerate this complete buffoon is beyond me.

Can I actually change my subdomain name on micro – i changed my username, but not sure if I can change my subdomain name also from settings? [@help](https://micro.blog/help)

Excellent hot morning in progress. This July is delivering on its promise of being hot and sweltering. 6 months of this and 6 months of spring / fall are acceptable to me.

One advantage of so many trees on my property and surrounding is that nights such as tonight it’s a literal firefly festival. Just beautiful. Now if only my neighbors shut off their backyard and front yard lights!

Yeah threads is too much at this time for me. Gonna wait it out until it simmers and settles. This whole notion of feeding Facebook even more data than I already do is 🤮

I spend a decent amount of time thinking about *what makes a good product* (after all, I am a product manager!). The answer to this is obviously very subjective to the person, but my take is that a good product is not necessarily the most polished or feature rich product out there, but its the one that makes you achieve something quickly, and then gets out of the way. You dont think about it. You don’t need it. You don’t keep wondering if you missed something by not using it enough. But you know thats the product you use if you want to do something specific.

I dont claim to have launched products that are used by billions of people, and frankly at this point in career I am not sure I want to either. I dont find joy in solving for scale, which is very weird coming from me who works at a place where everything is in fact about *scale*. My problem with *scale* it biases everything. At a scale of 100s of millions of users you can make a good faith argument to build a feature just because, and you will find enough people to give you *data* to validate that decision. But just because you can, even with data backing it, doesn’t mean you *should* in fact build it.

Building truly great products is not about saying no all the time, but really deciding when is it *just enough* to *not* build any more. That simplicity of imagination is what let Jobs/Ive build the first unibody MacBook Pro. I do not think Apple has built a more perfect device in its history. Everything about that product/device was just perfect, inside and out. I’ve watched the intro video to its design countless times marveling at how it just got everything right all at once. Everything else that has followed that design has only made it either more complicated, less featurefull and everything in between, but nothing has come close to the perfection of that particular product. And then, just like everyone else, Apple fell victim to *scale*.

Anyhow, I am glad I am right now working on product that is not the most shiny object in town, but I know that when its out, it will be enough to get the people we are looking achieve the things we want them to achieve – it has no pretty Ux, no snazzy features, nothing to drive engagement – but it will work. And sooner or later in 3 years the product is going to be a feature ridden gunk anyway, so I am going to savor its release when it happens!

The kind of security checks we had to go through just to do the east wing tour of the White House just a few weeks back makes it all the more hilarious and interesting that a packet of cocaine made it through on the west side. And the person who left it may never be found it seems – that seems like a big load of BS to me. Sure they can, they don’t want to. They want to hurt it asap so it doesn’t come off like it was Hunter’s lol, which I have to say as a kid is such a fucking burden on his parents. I applaud Bidens for standing up for him repeatedly over and over again and they must love him a lot, but that kid is such a fucking liability.