Mathias Meyer's Blog, page 4
September 16, 2014
You Can't Replicate Culture
Listening to the “This American Life” episode on the GM/Toyota NUMMI plant recently, one particular part struck me as interesting when it comes to culture.
Culture is something that everyone would love to be able to easily replicate. Companies like Etsy, Netflix and others are forging ahead with openness, open source and empowering employees when it comes to their production systems.
NUMMI was an attempt to bring Toyota’s principles in building cars to General Motors, the automotive giant that...
June 25, 2014
How to be Great at Customer Support
When we set out to build Travis CI into a product and a
business, I had one thing on my agenda that I wanted us to be good at, and
that's customer support.
Offering an infrastructure product, we knew upfront that customers are going to
have problems setting up their projects, and we knew that there'd be the
occasional hard problem to solve.
Customer support turned into our number one priority to get right, and here's
how we approached it.
Below are the simple hacks we've learned and a...
June 24, 2014
The Power of Saying No (To Sugar)
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been avoiding sugar. Not just avoiding
eating spoon-fulls of crystal sugar, but avoiding food and drink that contains
sugar.
I've thinking about reducing my sugar intake for a while now. There's been
enough change in how science sees the sources of weight
gain
to be convincing.
But regardless, I found myself eating pie on the weekend, grab a sweet snack
regularly (the perils of working from home) or regularly get a cookie or cheese
cake at the coffee sho...
June 23, 2014
Being Busy, Distractions and Just One More Retweet
Thanks to the internet and the wild things our mobile devices can now do, we can
connect with people anywhere, heck, even on the toilet, what used to be a
sanctuary of quiet contemplation.
We love the distractions and the small kicks we're getting when something new
happens, when someone likes our photo, when someone favorites a tweet or
mentions us on Twitter.
We're prone to these distractions, to being busy, to just waiting for another
email to come in. I am myself. It's been incredibl...
June 22, 2014
Planning Your Week
Our household recently picked up an interesting habit, one where people tell me
they couldn't do it, or they just don't work that way.
Every weekend, we sit down and plan our dinner meals for the entire week.
That's it, that's the whole habit. Seems straight-forward, doesn't it? It's so
incredibly dull, even very German.
Five weekdays, two weekend days. Sit down, thumb through cookbooks, find some
recipes to cook, make a shopping list, and off you go.
As a family, we mostly c...
June 21, 2014
Only The Simplest Tools
Over the past couple of years, there's been a curious trend in the world of
coffee. While espresso is still a thing of expensive machinery to get the most
out of the bean, filter coffee has taken an interesting turn towards simplicity.
...in coffee
When I started getting into coffee, I witnessed the most remarkable thing, the
Clover coffee maker. An extremely well designed machine, costing about $11.000.
It's a thing of beauty and it makes a pretty incredible cup of coffee.
But then Starbuck...
June 19, 2014
What Adopting Blameless Post-Mortems Has Taught Me About Culture
A couple of years ago, I was introduced to the idea and practice of post-mortems
through a talk by John Allspaw. I do owe him a lot,
he's an inspiration.
Back then he talked about post-mortems as a company-internal means to triage
what lead to and happened during an outage or production incident.
A post-mortem is a meeting where all stakeholders can and should be present, and
where people should bring together their view of the situation and the facts
that were found during and after the inciden...
June 18, 2014
Fake Everything Until You Make It
For the first 15 months of Travis CI's existence as a
paid product, customer support went a little like this:
New email from customer.
Open a console on Heroku to fetch the relevant data.
Respond to email.
Repeat upon next email.
We didn't have any support tools, if you can imagine that. Nothing that gave us
quick access to the data we needed to look into and solve a customer's issue.
But you know what?
It was okay. It was okay to fake it until we had the time to sit down and make
it.
We could've...
June 12, 2014
Implement Routines to Foster Habits
I've been trying to implement daily habits over the past couple of months.
Writing, push-ups, taking a walk, writing a diary. Those are my key habits that
I want to practice every day.
Initially, I committed myself to writing before noon, while never checking my
email until later in the day as well. As my days started getting slightly more
chaotic, I lost track of writing, and it'd slip.
The further into the day my writing would slip, the more stressed out I would be
about it. At the same ti...
June 1, 2014
Focus Starts With Saying No
Every product out there is riddled by a thousand customers' requests for a
thousand features. Every single one of them has an idea on what would make your
product better, what would make it more suitable for their purpose, for their
daily work.
As a business, even as an open source project, it's too easy to get swamped by
feature requests. But even worse, it's too easy to fall into the trap of feeling
the need to implement all of them, or at least as many as humanly possible.
After all,...
