Hi, I'm Allen Pike. I founded Steamclock, host Fun Fact and It Shipped That Way, and am working on something new.
At least monthly, I write an article and publish it here.
Once a Month
An easy way to do more things you love.
Ten years ago, I set a goal: publish one blog post a month. It worked! A decade later, I still keep the habit of writing an article every month. Over 120 sessions I’ve slowly gotten better at writing, learned tons, and built up an archive of some of those lessons....
From Chatbot to Everything Engine
A curious design constraint signals an ambitious future.
This morning, OpenAI launched the GPT Store: a simple way to browse and distribute customized versions of ChatGPT. GPTs – awkwardly named to solidify OpenAI’s claim to the trademark “GPT” – consist of a custom ChatGPT prompt, an icon, and optionally some reference data or hookups to external APIs. In...
Splitting Services and Product
The story of a plan: take a break, and get focused.
Last year, I realized it was time to switch things up. In 2010, my co-founder Nigel and I started Steamclock. The vision was to build products for clients, and use those profits to fund our own product development. Which worked! Mostly. We’ve built a client business that’s been growing and...
You Should Have a Research Question
How to turn curiosity into a superpower.
Humans are naturally curious. We wonder about things. Seek answers. Read an unreasonable number of Wikipedia articles about the Roman Empire for no reason. Well, not for no reason. Our minds are wired to learn. However, without a bit of steering, this curiosity can get a little… time-wastey. Learning something...
Build a Deck of Heroes
A way to relate to inspiring people.
It helps to have heroes. Heroes are people whose stories inspire us. Steve Wozniak, in my mind, used curiosity and audacity to rewrite the rules of what technology can do. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pursues truth and change with clarity and tenacity. Marie Kondo systematically seeks joy and simplicity in the spaces...
The Curse of Dialup World
An acquisition gets weird.
A long time ago – at the turn of the century, as kids would call it now – my first job was at a dialup internet service provider. Officially, I was hired to be a sort of errand-boy. Instead, the role was more interesting: a front seat for one of...
Make the Thing a Link
A quick way to level up prose.
Links rock. An awesome habit when writing – for example, in a Slack message or doc – is to add a link to the thing you’re talking about. We’ve updated the Octopus Report, which you can find here. Feedback is due by Friday. Cool. Now people don’t need to hunt...
The Feedback Wizard →
We had fun this month making a little experiment called The Feedback Wizard. It’s a tool that helps you (or your reports) take a problem you’ve seen and transform it into useful feedback. It’s been well received by our early users, both for its ability to phrase feedback in an...
Do Something, So We Can Change It!
A habit for addressing two-way decisions.
Sometimes teams get stuck on a decision. My favourite trick for getting unstuck comes via Pixar’s Michael B. Johnson. In 25 years there, he helped Pixar build the production workflows they use to make and iterate their stories, and was tasked with helping teams “fail as quickly as possible.” To...
Going Way Beyond ChatGPT
Techniques for building products on LLMs today.
Modern instruction-tuned language models, or LLMs, are the latest tool in software engineers’ toolboxes. Joining classics like databases, networking, hypertext, and async web applications, we now have a new enabling technology that seems wickedly powerful, but whose best applications aren’t yet clear. ChatGPT lets you poke at those possibilities. You...
How Leaders Manage Time & Attention
Some findings on productivity.
Last month, I wanted to better understand into how leaders manage their time and attention. While this seems like a core leadership skill, a lot of the managers I know have a fractious relationship with productivity tools. Given this, I had two high-level questions: What are the popular approaches in...
Collect Stories, Not Generalizations
An approach for product interviewing.
Humans are unreliable narrators. Even the most honest interlocutors will confidently say untrue things. We recount false memories, accidentally imply speculation is fact, succumb to cognitive biases, misinterpret causal relationships, struggle with cognitive dissonance, engage in lossy paraphrasing, and kind of just say nonsense sometimes. It’s part of being human!...