Topic
work
- Where You Work Shapes How You Work
Our levels of productivity, creativity, and inspiration have an intimate, hard-to-articulate connection to our environments. And we all have different predilections ā quiet vs. noisy, calm vs. bustling, light vs. darkā¦
- What if Government Paid Better?
In his book Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama has a section on corruption in political systems and how it impacts economic development: There are many reasons why corruption impedes economic develoā¦
- Patrick McKenzie on Working at Stripe
Great insights here to some of the workings of Stripe from Patrick. Though I've never been on that ride, the hypergrowth company (even with its flaws and stumbles) is an absolute marvel that it can be made functionalā¦
- 11:59 September 10
My friend and colleague Tim looks back on a Spatial Networks tradition on 9-11.
- The State of Distributed Work
Like most teams, we've now been fully remote and distributed since March 13th, almost 5 months exactly after moving a team of 50+ to fully remote, with no upfront plan on how to best organize ourselves. About 20 of ouā¦
- Figma and Remote Work
A thoughtful and transparent post from Figma founder Dylan Field on their plans for re-establishing a hybrid / hub / remote model for the future of their teams. In many ways, we followed our normal design process in rā¦
- Fulcrum's Report Builder
After about 6-8 months of forging, shaping, research, design, and engineering, we've launched the Fulcrum Report Builder. One of the key use cases with Fulcrum has always been using the platform to design your own datā¦
- Weekend Reading: Invading Markets, Sleep Deprivation, and the Observer Effect
šļø Commandos, Infantry, and Police Jeff Atwood on Robert X. Cringely's descriptions of three groups of people you need to "attack a market": Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see battā¦
- Hybrid WFH is Dangerous
Interesting perspective here on the effectiveness of hybrid in-office/WFH models of work, which are likely to be popular in reopening cautiously: Hybrid structures are hard to get right because, baseline working methoā¦
- Weekend Reading: The State and the Virus, Future of Work, and Stephen Wolfram's Setup
š The Individual, the State, and the Virus I agree with most of Kling's takes here on the role the state should play in the coronavirus crisis. š©š½āš» Mapping the Future of Work A nice comprehensive list of SaaS proā¦
- 2020 Ready: Field Data Collection with Fulcrum
Today we hosted a webinar in conjunction with our friends at NetHope and Team Rubicon to give an overview of Fulcrum and what we're collectively doing in disaster relief exercises. Both organizations deployed to suppoā¦
- Announcing Spatial Networks $42.5m Series A Round
Today we announced this investment from Kayne and Kennet in Spatial Networks, to help us keep scaling Fulcrum in 2020 and beyond. This effort has been one of my main missions for the better part of 2019, so it's rewarā¦
- Fall All Hands 2019
We just wrapped up our Fall āall handsā week at the office. Another good week to see everyone from out of town, and an uncommonly productive one at that. We got a good amount of planning discussion done for future proā¦
- San Juan
Weāre in San Juan this week for the NetHope Global Summit. Through our partnership with NetHope, a non-profit devoted to bringing technology to disaster relief and humanitarian projects, weāre hosting a hands-on worksā¦
- Introducing Fulcrum Views
Bryan wrote this up about the latest major release of Fulcrum, which added Views to the Editor tool. This is a cool feature that allows users doing QA and data analysis to save sets of columns and filters, akin to howā¦
- Data as a Living Asset
This is a post from the Fulcrum archives I wrote 3 years back. I like this idea and there's more to be written on the topic of how companies treat their archives of data. Especially in data-centric companies like thosā¦
- Tracking Fear: Measuring Safety Perceptions in Saskatoon
This is a cool post on a study done by a research team in the City of Saskatoon, looking at the perceptions of safety in a downtown area. They used Fulcrum to collect survey data using a safety audit developed to captā¦
- 9/11
I'm always proud of our annual tributes. It matters to keep perspective on how bad things can get, how good most of us really have it, and those first-responders, public servants, and national security forces that worā¦
- Group Training
Our SNI running club on Strava keeps expanding. We've got 12 members now and counting. Two people are committed to marathons in the fall, and two of us to half-marathons. Somewhere in reading about marathon training Iā¦
- Shipping the Right Product
This is one from the archives, originally written for the Fulcrum blog back in early 2017. I thought I'd resurface it here since I've been thinking more about continual evolution of our product process. I liked it bacā¦
- Weekend Reading: Rhythmic Breathing, Drowned Lands, and Fulcrum SSO
šš»āāļø Everything You Need to Know About Rhythmic Breathing I tried this out the other night on a run. The technique makes some intiutive sense that it'd reduce impact (or level it out side to side anyway). Surely toā¦
- On Retention
Earlier this year at SaaStr Annual, we spent 3 days with 20,000 people in the SaaS market, hearing about best practices from the best in the business, from all over the world. If I had to take away a single overarchinā¦
- Shape Up
Ryan Singer and the Basecamp team just released their new ebook on product development, called Shape Up, made available for free online. Me and some of our team here have already dug into it and are finding some interā¦
- Structuring Work and Teams at Basecamp
Like many working in product, I've been a follower-slash-admirer of how Basecamp works for years. This model of working in 6-week "cycles" sounds like an attractive option for organizing a team, without falling into tā¦
- Public Health Mapping for the Pacific Islands
Our friend and colleague Kurt Menke of Bird's Eye View GIS recently conducted a workshop in Hawaii working with folks from the Pacific Islands (Samoa, Marianas, Palau, and others) to teach Fulcrum data collection andā¦
- Andy Grove on Meetings
You hear the criticism all the time around the business world about meetings being useless, a waste of time, and filling up schedules unnecessarily. A different point of view on this topic comes from Andy Grove in hisā¦
- The Second Phase: allinspections
This post is part 3 in a series about my history in product development. Check out the intro in part 1 and all about our first product, Geodexy, in part 2. Back in 2010 we decide to halt our development of Geodexy andā¦
- Discovering QGIS
This week we've had Kurt Menke in the office (of Bird's Eye View GIS) providing a guided training workshop for QGIS, the canonical open source GIS suite. #qgis workshop selfie @spatialnetworks ... a great group hard aā¦
- Weekend Reading: Data Moats, China, and Distributed Work
š° The Empty Promise of Data Moats In the era of every company trying to play in machine learning and AI technology, I thought this was a refreshing perspective on data as a defensible element of a competitive moat. Tā¦
- The Spatial Networks Shop
Our design and marketing team put together this awesome shop for company-branded gear ā some shirts, mugs, and other swag with product brands and other fun stuff (I even got my own tribute). I'll have to say that my pā¦
- Weekend Reading: Product Market Fit, Stripe's 5th Hub, and Downlink
š¦øš½āāļø How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit As pointed out in this piece from Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman, most indicators around product-market fit are lagging indicators. With his companā¦
- Weekend Reading: Gene Wolfe, Zoom, and Inside Spatial Networks
š Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art Wolfe's work, particularly his Book of the New Sun "tetralogy", is some of my favorite fiction. He just passed away a couple weeks ago, and this is a great piece on hā¦
- Smartphone Technology Aids Evacuation Process in Santa Barbara County
We've been supporting the Santa Barbara County Sheriff through Fulcrum Community this year for evacuation reporting during emergency preparation and response. It feels great to have technology that can have real-worldā¦
- Weekend Reading: Running Maps, Thinking, and Remote Work
šš»āāļø On the Go Map Found via Tom MacWright, a slick and simple tool for doing run route planning built on modern web tech. It uses basic routing APIs and distance calculation to help plan out runs, which is especiaā¦
- Spring 2019 All Hands
Today kicked off our Spring 2019 All Hands. The 59-person team makes for an exciting, hectic, energizing, and fun week! Getting us all in a single room is pretty challenging these days. This morning Tony did his semiaā¦
- Weekend Reading: T Cells, Creating Proteins, and SNI Awards
š¦ T is for T Cell After reading The Breakthrough, I've been doing more reading on immunotherapy, how it works, and what the latest science looks like. Another book in my to-read list is An Elegant Defense, a deeper sā¦
- Fulcrum's New Look
We just finished up a several-month's-long effort updating the design and branding of Fulcrum, from the logo to typefaces, to web design and all. As happens with these things, it took longer than we wanted it to whenā¦
- Entering Product Development: Geodexy
I started with the first post in this series back in January, describing my own entrance into product development and management. When I joined the company we were in the very early stages of building a data collectioā¦
- Sponsoring QGIS
We recently began a corporate sponsorship for the QGIS project, the canonical open source desktop GIS. I got back into doing some casual cartography work using QGIS back in December after a years-long hiatus of usingā¦
- Promoting GIS at Hunter College
As premier sponsors of the American Geographical Society, we try to do our part in promoting geographic literacy, education, and the future of geo sciences. {% include image-partial.html file="hunter-college.jpg" descā¦
- All Hands 2018
Spatial Networks is past 50 employees now, with a sizable remote group scattered all over the country. Even though weāve grown substantially in 2018, weāve been able to scale our processes, tools, and org chart to maiā¦
- The Missing Communication Link
Slack grew huge on the idea that it would āreplace emailā and become the digital hub for your whole company. In some organizations (like ours), it certainly has, or has at least subsumed most all internal-only communiā¦
- A Product Origin Story
Fulcrum, our SaaS product for field data collection, is coming up on its 7th birthday this year. Weāve come a long way: from a bootstrapped, barely-functional system at launch in 2011 to a platform with over 1,800 cusā¦
- Working Remotely
Great post from Tim on our recent all-hands sprint at our new office. I've seen our company transform itself from all on-site to very distributed inside of 5 years. An interesting evolution, finally clicking after somā¦
- Mapping Kabul
We've just posted a map of Kabul, Afghanistan built from spatial networks map data. I built this a couple of months back (with TileMill) for some mobile field collection project work we were doing with Fulcrum. This iā¦