Nonviolent Communication describes a communication style centered around sharing vulnerability and offering empathy. One of its biggest strengths is in how it highlights common patterns of lazy communication that exclude personal feelings or critical thinking. I also found its discussion of empathy illuminating, as it made me realize ways that I could improve my skills at listening empathetically.

Let’s be real: most developers decide what to blog about on a whim. Our blogs cover tons of topics, and there’s a good chance that the only person interested in ALL of them is, well, us. That’s just one reason it’s handy to tag and segment subscribers to your email list. Basically this means assigning tags to people based on what blog post made them decide to subscribe. You can use tags and segments to:

If you maintain an open-source project, there’s a good chance the pull requests you receive need a little bit of work before they’re ready to merge. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide for how to modify commits on a pull request when it’s coming from a fork of your repo. In this guide, we’ll assume the following: Your repo: github.com/your-username/your-repo-name Your contributor: their-username Their PR’s branch: bugfix-branch Step 1. Add their fork as a remote You can name the rew remote whatever you want to (in the example below it’s called “anything”, but I’ve been using the contributor’s username in practice):

Highlights

• Two of my blog posts reached the front page of Hacker News.
• I may have finally discovered a way to scale my keto site profitably.
• I’m putting Portfolio Rebalancer on the backburner due to lack of traction.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Conduct five customer interviews for the portfolio rebalancer

• Result: Conducted zero customer interviews.
• Grade: F

I deprioritized the portfolio rebalancer in favor of Is It Keto. I’ll explain why below.

Last week, I published a blog post describing how Stripe recorded visitor behavior on their customers’ websites. In short, Stripe’s JavaScript library collected information about URLs users visited and telemetry about their mouse movements, even when the site never displayed any Stripe payment forms. I suspected that most Stripe customers were unaware of this and argued that Stripe should disclose their data gathering practices more prominently and in greater detail.

The post generated a lively discussion on Hacker News, including several comments from Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder and CEO. In his top comment, he said: