Matthew Lang

Singletrack World are testing a new British built steel hardtail, the Trillion Prime 27.5.

I wish there were bikes like this 20 years ago. The mind is willing but the body is beyond the kind of shenanigans that this bike is built for.

I've been using Slack for a few years now. I use it more for work than anything else. I am part of a number of different client teams and it's through these that we do most of the day to day communication. I have to be honest it has become something of a necessary evil to have, but it is an easy way to stay in contact with clients. For clients that have only a handful of employees then I recommend that we just stay in touch with phone calls, emails and of course whatever project management tool that works best for the client.

Benjamin Pollack's post about his issues with Slack are good points and with more people turning to apps like Slack, it's worth remembering that Slack isn't a great tool and should only be used if there is a genuine need for it other than, "Hey I need this right now!".

Perhaps the greatest argument against using Slack isn't the filtering of communications or the notifications.

It's the version of Markdown that Slack uses for it's messages. It's just not Markdown.

5. Its version of Markdown is just broken

I’m going to use up an entire heading purely to say that making *foo* be bold and _foo_ be italic is covered in Leviticus 64:128 and explicitly punishable by stoning until death.

— Why I Hate Slack and You Should Too by Benjamin Pollack

What grieves me more is that there isn't a week goes by where I don't end up sending a message formatted incorrectly because Slack has it's own version of Markdown.

Slack isn't a necessary evil but teams should consider Benjamin's points before deciding if Slack is worth using.

Give me email and a phone any day of the week.

Day One's change to subscription pricing model is taking some flak but I think it's a good move for them and ensures that it will be around for a long time to come.

Subscription pricing isn't new to apps, but it's on the rise and this is largely in part because upgrade prices alone for apps are not sustainable.

A great example of app pricing in my book is the Todoist app. While the Todoist app itself is free, they also have a premium subscription which really adds value what you get from using Todoist. It's subscription models like this that are the way forward. Paying for the software you use on a regular basis. In a lot of cases the pricing is very reasonable and I certainly wouldn't argue over paying between $20 and $50 per year for software that I value and use on a daily basis.

David Sparks rounds up the changing landscape of app pricing nicely.

The traditional model for productivity apps was the upgrade price, where developers released a new version every year or so and everyone paid a reduced fee upgrade price. I know the App Store has made improvements over the last few years but, having zero inside knowledge, I can’t help but feel we will never see upgrade pricing in the App Store. In the meantime expect more quality apps to go to the subscription model and, if they are apps you love (or even like), I’d encourage you to support them through the transition.

— Productivity Apps and Subscription Pricing by David Sparks

It seems that a lot of the things I'm reading online point towards long-form blogging again.

Gregory Brown sums up the change nicely in way I didn't think of.

Instead, I thought about how it might be nice to have a couple hundred blog posts rather than thousands of tweets. How it might be nice to build a few dozen deep relationships with people who read my stuff here, rather than hundreds of shallow relationships in 140 character bursts.

— Bye Twitter, Hello Blogging! by Gregory Brown

Deep relationships through blogging. I've already met a number of great people through my blog. It's about time I started writing here again to keep those ties going.

It's been a while since I took another stab at learning Vim. If you don't know what Vim is then all you need to know is that it's a major geek out text editor. Savvy?

Each time I've tried to learn Vim though I've started with an existing Vim configuration file. Getting up and running from a blank file just never appealed to me. The problem starting with another person's configuration though is that while everything is there that you need, there's a huge number of commands and shortcuts configured that in the beginning seems a rather daunting task to remember.

This time I've started with a blank slate so that every time I need to customise something in Vim I make the change in my configuration file to fix the problem and move on. Needless to say it's taken me a while to get the configuration file to a point where I would be happy doing client work with Vim as opposed to Sublime Text.

The surprising result though is that while I might be working a little slower than if I had been using Sublime Text, I'm actually learning more about Vim than I ever did before.

I'll report back in 3 months with an update to see if using Vim has stuck this time. I'm optimistic that it will this time, although I have been caved in the past.

Time for another quarterly delivery of Field Notes memo books. This time it's the Campfire edition.

There are three memo books in a set but the boys were quick to snag the "Night" covers of this set and lucky for them there was two of them. This is why in the picture above I'm only left with the "Dusk" and "Dawn" covers!

When I subscribed to Field Notes I wasn't really banking on the fact that my sons would be using them as much as they are are. Ethan is using the memo books for his golf and Drew is using them for drawing. I may have to bump up the order number next year!

I have never read The Art of War, but I've seen this quote enough times mentioned elsewhere (other books, games and of course the Internet) to know that it comes from Sun Tzu's book on military strategy and tactics.

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I recently spotted this quote during a gaming session on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered. In between scenes a quote from history appears on the screen.

It got me thinking about the trend towards crowdfunding for products and how transparency is often thought of as a good thing when it comes to building products.

With the recent surge of crowdfunding, you might think that you have to have an idea to tell the world first before it can be successful. It's not always been this way though.

Before Kickstarter, before crowdfunding, before the Internet successful products were built without customers knowing too much about the products until after there were launched.

I wonder if in the light of all this crowdfunding that it's time to consider working on products in a new way? Building the product under the cover of darkness, without the world knowing. Then when it's ready, deliver it to the world. Letting it fall like a thunderbolt.

We live in an age where everything we do is shareable and only a click of way from others knowing what we're doing. It not only applies to what we do in our own time, but also what we do when we're working and that include what we work on.

In some cases it's a good idea to get crowdfunding for a product. You can test the market and get the financial backing before the big push.

Perhaps we might want to consider the opposite as well. If we spent our time working on something without anyone knowing about it, could we capitalise on it and thereby surprise people's expectations?