A magic spell is an incantation that, just by being incanted, makes something happen in the physical world. You say “avada kedavra” and someone dies — that sort of thing. Did you know that’s a literal real thing in programming and it’s called a magic string? We use them in Beeminderland occasionally....

This is embarrassingly out of date, but since it’s literally about Time Bridges, that makes it all the more apropos, right? (If you’re wondering how we even dug up something this old, you might like our recent series on backlogs and freshenable collections.) The Future of Life Podcast is mostly about...

A couple weeks ago we had close to 9 hours of downtime. Some kind of meltdown in the datacenter in Newark where our servers live. A lot of websites/apps were affected, which I guess lessens the shame of it, though it’s embarrassing we’re not more robust to this kind of thing. Anyway, check out status.beeminder.com...

We keep raising the price of Beemium (currently $64/month as I write this). When we do, we grandfather existing users for a year. Most businesses warn everyone when they raise prices. It’s a classic Act Now inducement: lock in the old price before it’s too late. We don’t do that for the Beemium price...

Welcome to the Dreevpeeve of the day. I’ve actually seen “deprecate” misused so often that I was worried that, as usual, the prescriptivists would soon have to concede defeat. But so far all the dictionaries are holding firm. This is merely in the category of Common Misconception and so I’m doing my...

Welcome to the next post in our Freshening Series. Before we get to that, let’s review our related posts on clearing and preventing backlogs: Redqueening, Inbox Zero, Backlogs, and Fluid Dynamics describes Mark Forster’s Backlog Method — “isolate and redqueen” — using lots of analogies. Control Systems...

We’re thrilled and honored to welcome back to the blog the esteemed Mary Renaud, PhD. Though for now, only iPhone people can reap what Mary has sown… I’m excited to officially announce my first iOS app: Time Stream! What is Time Stream? Time Stream is a routine management app that adapts when your day...

We have a pair of blog posts from 2022 called “Backlog Freshening” and “Backlog Freshening For Humans” that we’re still very pleased with. To recap, say you have a backlog of something — tasks, emails, blog post drafts, bugs, you name it — that it’s not realistic to clear. (If you do need to clear it,...

The golden mean of Beeminder: If you never derail, dial up your bright red lines — if you’re derailing all the time, dial them down. Thanks to felixm and others in the forum for inspiring this post. The previous blog post in our series on how derailing is good-actually (see the sidebar for a review)...