RSS Parrot

kill the metrics in your head

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2025-05-30/metrics

Published: May 31, 2025 00:11

Get in, loser, we’re doing an old-fashioned conversation-by-blog-post. Dan Sinker wrote recently about the Who Cares Era: The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care.…

manifesto for the toronto that could be

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2025-05-05/show-up

Published: May 5, 2025 21:55

Some of you know me because of a daily political newsletter project I ran in 2017-2018 centered on American politics. I am eight years older and wiser, with much more clever and original ideas, so I come to you now with a new project: a weekly political…

the values of work

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2024-11-27/values

Published: November 27, 2024 14:19

In October I gave a talk at Monktoberfest in Portland, Maine, a small and intimate tech conference with a big impact in the industry. It’s quite unlike any other conference I’ve been to, which is explicitly the point. I’d been hearing about the conference…

here we go again

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2024-11-06/again

Published: November 6, 2024 22:00

I feel objectively worse than I did in 2016. We have so much more information about how bad things are going to get now, and the fascists have had eight more years to prepare for how to roll out cruelty en masse on day one. We have so much less slack in…

modernity is stupid: a rant not about politics

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2024-11-05/modernity

Published: November 5, 2024 21:10

Omnivore is a read-later app. You know, one of those things that lets you save interesting articles you encounter throughout the day and the service will go crawl the page and download the content in a nice readable format and zap it to whatever device you…

leadership

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2022-11-11/lead

Published: November 11, 2022 19:40

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, for no reason at all connected to the news or the state of social media or the way we’ve constructed an economic sytem that allows petulant man-children to set billions of dollars on metaphorical fire…

labour of love

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2022-10-18/work

Published: October 18, 2022 10:24

The concept of “work” is a Rorschach test, an inkblot that you can project pretty much anything onto. There are definitions that speak of a meaningless Sisyphean grind inside an oppressive and cruel economic system designed to extract the maximum possible…

unoriginal

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2022-07-08/unoriginal

Published: July 8, 2022 15:45

Sometimes it feels like there’s no point to writing unless I have a competely original idea. This is an impossibly high bar to clear—there aren’t no original thoughts left, but they are exceedingly rare. Often I’ll discover while researching that the core…

a meta note

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2022-07-04/two-wolves

Published: July 4, 2022 17:57

At any given point in my life I’ve wanted to be spending more time writing. This includes the tween years in which I wrote and published fanfiction every afternoon after school, undergrad when I studiously scheduled three blog posts a week despite having…

morals in the machine

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2021-11-30/ethics

Published: November 30, 2021 11:34

The first time I took on the role of a lead engineer, a few years ago, I had a really hard time learning how to prioritize and delegate work. For much of my early career, I had simply never needed any planning skills beyond “say yes to everything and work…