2023 W02 Weekly Review

The biggest update this week: This weekly review!

I decided I'm going to try out doing a weekly review...and doing it in public!

Personal

• Enchanted Princess Ball. Friday night of last week (2023 W01) I took Elizabeth to an "Enchanted Princess Ball" at the Glen Eyrie
• Climbed 2 days, 20+ routes. It was a good week for climbing. I onsited (first climb, no tips) my first 5.10b that's all slopers which was exciting.
• Completed 100% of my Calisthentics exercises for the week. I'm leveling up all of my exercises next week.
• Lego Treehouse. I finished my LEGO Treehouse

Murmur

• Interviewed design candidates.
• Refined Decisionbot in private channels and group DMs. I've been working on a Slack integration called Decisionbot atMurmur Labs but we've mostly been handling public channels. Now it handles private channels
• Implemented PostHog in all of our digital products. We're using PostHog atMurmur Labs to get better insights into our Marketing site visitors (hosted with Webflow), the Murmur app and Decisionbot.

Writing

• Maybe Don't Just Cancel 75,000 Hours of Meetings. I think snapping all meetings out of existence is an approach that leads to worse problems. In this article, I explain why and propose an alternative approach.
• Published Startup Learnings, a collection I started and want to pick back up.
• Published Start with user accounts, workspaces and teams, a Startup Learnings for how to think about entities when building a digital product.
• Published Outsource What's Not Core To Your Product's Value Offering, a Startup Learnings about the importance of focusing on the value proposition of your digital product.
• List of Destructive and Non-Destructive JavaScript Array Methods. This is a very specific technical note about JavaScript.

Newsletter Update

I struggled to put hands to keyboards on the newsletter I wanted to start writing.

This public weekly review is a less scary, more gentle way for me to ease into thinking about a newsletter.

There were a few things I noticed at play:

• I was afraid of what people would think if my first issue wasn't "perfect".
• I was not excited about the idea (the craft behind how people make things).

I'm going to explore a different topic in the meantime.

New and Updated Topic Notes

• 🆕 PostHog
• 🆕 Slack API
• My Digital Tool Stack

Other Interesting Reading

Why aligned autonomy is an ongoing struggle

Aaron Dignan shared this with theMurmur Labs team. This problem of aligned autonomy is at the root of trying to get a Startup off the ground.

Autonomy, in a workplace context, is not about “I can do whatever I feel like” but rather “I feel free to act and fully engage to achieve a greater purpose.”

I think the critical misunderstanding of autonomy isn't just "free to act and fully engage to achieve a greater purpose", it's also that I have to do it within my abilities, skills and decision rights.

I hold roles within the organization and those roles inform the way I contribute in my "freedom to act".

When I learned to focus on my role to serve the purpose, it enabled me to move the needle.

Music Highlights

• Electronic: Enjoy the Silence (Depeche Mode cover) by DCCM
• Prog Rock: Ego Death by Polyphia (I can't stop listening!)
• Hip Hop: Shine On by Kristoff Krane (This song makes me want to bop my head)
• Metal/Djent: Pure Imagination by Hearing Shapes (thanks to my friend Andrew Del Prete for sharing it!)