Steamclock: A Series
Some lessons and moments from building Steamclock.
Feeding the Baby
On accidentally becoming a CEO.
A lot of startups with first-time founders have unclear roles. When I started my first business, Steamclock’s co-founder Nigel was far more experienced, being ten years my senior. I’d assumed he would take a more CEO-like role, but other than that I’d put little thought into our positions. We were...
Link: Steamclock’s Next Chapter
I wrote today about Nick Wilkinson taking the helm at Steamclock over on the company blog:
This year, it’s time for Nick to take the largest leadership role of all, as our Managing Director. With the support of our CTO Nigel, as well as the excellent Jenn Cooper and myself continuing on the Board, Nick’s going to keep doing what he’s been doing for some time: driving Steamclock forward, growing the culture we’ve built, and also putting his own spin on it.
This summer, I’ll share more about what I’m building next. For today, I’m feeling grateful for the team we’ve built at Steamclock, and the fact they’re still growing and iterating. ⭐
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...
Giving a Shit as a Service
A mental model for service businesses.
A few years back, my team decided to get a custom meeting room table. In our search for something great, we were referred to a small studio that does great work: East Vancouver’s Union Wood Co. The team there met with us, showed us various samples, and asked thoughtful questions...
The Teams You Worked on May Have Sucked
On who we compare ourselves to.
As we grow at Steamclock – we’re now at 14 and hiring our 15th – we’re getting more intentional about how we do things. I worry less about how to do the work, and more about how to build the team and our processes. Which is great. But it’s a...
Link: Remote Hiring at Steamclock
I’ve spent the last year trying to decide if Steamclock should go all-remote, or if we’re better off going back to all-in-office. Both options have substantial upsides! And both avoid the dreaded “hybrid” meetings with half the team in a conference room and half on Zoom.
I feel a bit silly that, after all this time, we’ve decided to do neither. For us, neither extreme is going to build us the best team, and lead to the best software.
Still, I think our approach for avoiding hybrid meetings – namely, cutting down meetings – will be great. And “Vancouver HQ or Remote” feels like the right heading on our job ads.
So if you’re one of the many thoughtful, skilled developers doing quality work in many of Canada’s beautiful out-of-the-way places, I’d love to chat! Especially if you make apps. But even if you don’t – yet.
Being More than Nice
Being nice proves insufficient.
I try to be nice to people. While being nice is relatively popular here in Canada, being nice is not necessarily popular in the business world. There’s something about business that makes some people feel like it’s a license to be a heel. “Well, that’s business, kid.” Well, that’s not...
Making a List, Bolding It Twice
One weird trick for writing readable lists.
Writing is meant for reading. Sometimes, the reading doesn’t matter that much. We might dash off a quick text, toss out a laugh line, or send a rote confirmation. Our emoji are leaves on the wind. Other times though, the reading matters a lot. Occasionally we need to write something...
Information Needed
App Review just has a few questions for you.
If you publish apps for iOS, understanding the App Store review process is part of your job. While the core guidelines are public, their enforcement relies on a large set of private rules and policies, policed by human beings. When you’re trying to release an update to your customers, the...
Navigation Should Be Boring
Apps should be interesting, but not like that.
When launching a product, especially a consumer-oriented one, you want it to be interesting. A novel, bold, or distinctive UI can make an app stand out from the crowd, be memorable, and inspire curiosity. Plus, it’s cool. Luckily, there are a lot of ways you can make an interface interesting....
Leadership Mode Activate
On taking the controls of a powerful team.
Congratulations, you’re getting promoted! You have excelled at the Thing You Do to such a degree that you’ll now be leading a whole team of people who Do That Thing. Very responsibility, much excite. Okay wait, you may say. That’s cool, but I like Doing the Thing. I’m pretty good...
The Big Deal
The danger of a client you can't afford to lose.
In the years I’ve run a consulting studio, I’ve noticed something odd about consulting studios: they often implode. Big ones, little ones, and ostensibly successful ones all seem have a weird habit of suddenly letting go half their staff. I would very much like to not lose half my staff....
The Great Bug Hunt
A crashing Xbox proves hard to debug.
A fun thing about programming is that most days, you make progress. Maybe you fix some issues, maybe you add a feature, maybe you build towards something bigger. Your code moves ever forward. Until it doesn’t. On occasion, you will hit a Bug. Not a mundane bug, some trifle you...
Caravan to Xcoders
A Meetup competitor lives and dies.
In 2013, I decided it was time to start an iOS development meet up. I’d run VanJS for many years, which was great. There was one thing about running VanJS that was not great though, and that was using Meetup.com. You see, Meetup is optimized for getting small groups assembled...
Top Banana
A general plan for generalists.
Being a generalist is great fun. There is much joy to be had in jumping between programmer and artist, project manager and product designer, bug finder and bug maker. You can also be a musician and athlete, parent and world traveller, superfan, superstar, and whatever else strikes your fancy if...
What Your Career Wants to Be
We learn Bluetooth, and it works.
This week we released Bluejay, a simple Swift framework for Bluetooth hardware communication. This was fun, but also weird. You see, we learned Bluetooth by accident. Bluejay logo, with remixes by Soroush Khanlou and Matthew Panzarino. Four years ago, a company got in touch looking for fixes to a Bluetooth...
People You Want to Work With
We assemble a team.
“Do you know Sarah? What do you think of her?” “Oh she’s super smart. She’s on my Hire List.” “What? You have a Hire List?” “Of course. You don’t have a Hire List?” You should have a Hire List. Companies are people. Families are people. Crowds are people and markets...
The Principle of Least Surprise
An iceberg looms, and we take evasive action.
The status meeting is going well. Your demo was well received, the new feature is looking great, and you’ve been nailing your estimates. The product manager glances at her notes, and remembers one last thing. “Oh also, a lot of customers are asking for offline editing support on this screen.”...
Feedback Mountain
I get religion about 1:1s.
“Hire great people, and trust them to do good work”. I’ve always liked that idea. It feels right. Hiring great people is critical, and nobody likes to be micromanaged or criticized. So it seems simple – hire great people, and trust them to do good work. Try to stay out...
Assassinating for Fun and Profit
A new game appears.
When I was a kid, I had the itch for making games. I sketched games, I designed games, and as soon as I could, I learned BASIC so I could make games. Initially these were the type of dumb games you’d expect a kid to build. I actually released a...
Rules to Get Paid By
We get paid the nice way.
Not getting paid on time kills businesses. Slow payment is especially deadly in the consulting world, since in extreme cases it can cause a company to miss payroll. If that happens, their best people will leave. This alone makes missing payroll the worst thing that can happen to a software...
The Disclosure Indicator
Idea Guy wants an NDA signed.
Every week, I receive roughly a dozen new project inquiries. Since Steamclock works with perhaps a dozen clients in a year, I triage roughly 50 leads for every one that turns into a real project. The time I spend doing sales is neither fun nor directly producing revenue, so I’m...
Creative Destruction
Good apps die young.
Yesterday, Brent Simmons shut down Vesper. It was hard for Brent and the team at Q Branch. Endings are often sad, but ending a software product stings in a unique way. Software is deeply impermanent. While it is often built painstakingly and methodically, it is experienced ephemerally, in the moment....
Organizational Size Classes
I come to terms with growth.
The best thing about organizations is that they are made of people. However, just as more money causes more problems, so it is with people. In fact, the number of people in an organization may be the most important signal in understanding how it thinks and acts. For example, there’s...
Diagrammatically Correct
Prototypers hack, architects diagram.
Once upon a time, back when Netscape roamed the earth, software development was hard. Desktop apps shipped in cardboard boxes, web apps ran on Solaris boxes, and video games came in little plastic boxes. In this box-crazed world, making sure software was right the first time was Super Important™. Back...
Cofounding Variables
Finding a co-founder gets weird.
Finding a great technical co-founder is an incredibly difficult yet critical part of starting a business. Given that, folks often ask how I met Nigel, my co-founder at Steamclock. As it happens, we met in a relatively unusual way. You see, in high school I was a theatre kid. I...
The Worst App
Stephanie isn't the only one upset about an app.
Update 2: This story now has an epilogue. One of the various things I do at Steamclock is provide support for our apps. Our music apps don’t require much support, and much of the email we get is positive, so tending to support is generally pleasant. Or at least it...
Being Less Wrong
Estimation is hard.
Estimating software development is hard. There are a mind-boggling number of variables and tradeoffs involved - which is part of why we love software in the first place. Great software is built with experimentation, intuition, and iteration. This makes it both very satisfying to ship, and famously hard to predict....
Working Title
A junior developer wants to rule the world.
We recently interviewed a developer who was a new grad, brimming with enthusiasm. They answered our interview questions deftly, did well on our coding test, and presented a side project app that was sophisticated for somebody only six months out of university. Even better, their primary language was Swift. They...
Moving Swiftly
Steamclock bets big on Swift.
Last year, Apple revealed Swift, the future of software development on their platforms. Next Wednesday they’re expected to officially release Swift 2 as part of Xcode 7 GM. In just a year, everything has changed. We went from writing our apps in an object-oriented flavour of C, to writing almost...
Can't Stop the Music
Apple Music throws a wrench in the gears.
Five years ago, Steamclock launched our first app, WeddingDJ. The concept was simple: a foolproof music app that you can use to run a wedding. A simple interface lets you plan out your songs and playlists, and the playback screen keeps a fat finger from skipping halfway through “Here Comes...
Feeding the Baby
Running a startup turns out to be weird.
I published a more refined version of this story in 2024. Like all respectable businesses, Steamclock started in a basement. Four years ago, we outfitted Nigel’s basement with the old desks we’d imported from our corporate jobs, and some basic office chairs. Our presence was fascinating to Nigel’s kids, and...
Maximum Viable Products
We try to make the best products we can.
“Minimum Viable Product. It’s an interesting term, and I don’t… I’ve never… really thought about it before. We don’t really do Minimum Viable Products, I guess we do Maximum Viable Products.” – Cabel Sasser A Maximum Viable Product is a product that is as good as the market will bear....
Making a funky app video
Today we launched Party Monster, a beautifully simple queueing DJ app for iOS. Below is the video we produced to celebrate the occasion. People have really loved the app video, so I wanted to share what goes into making one. So we made an app. Now what? Party Monster is...
Shipping Party Monster
Four months ago, I shared visual mockups of our upcoming app called Party Monster. A few days after that, we had a working prototype. Four months later, we submitted to the App Store. What the heck took so long? Going universal Party Monster is the first app Steamclock has built...
Announcing WeddingDJ
Steam Clock Software’s first app is now live on the app store: WeddingDJ. WeddingDJ solves the tricky and dangerous issues that can come up when you run a wedding’s music using an iPod1. We help plan things out, fade everything in and out gracefully, and make sure an MC or...
Leaving Apple
I leave my dream job.
Today was my last day at Apple. Working there has been the experience of a lifetime. The people, the products, and the coffee are all wonderful. I’m going to miss laughing at rumour sites, hiding prototypes, and not needing to explain where I work. At Steve Jobs’ commencent address at...