bruno st john😼

busy killing chat at the workplace - startup person, big computer fan, flourishing

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

this week in @reintersect:

- desktop app controls should actually be intuitive now
- our emoji picker now longer tries to load the universe

https://t.co/bSEr5kUt21

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

one thing i love about startup life, especially around SF, is how editable the world starts to feel. you say something that would sound insane in most rooms and they start helping you figure out what would need to be true.

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

every sufficiently complex product discovers that `loading: boolean` is a lie

there's loading because nothing is here yet, loading more while data is on screen, a 404, an error

collapsing those into one boolean changes how users perceive your product. you get spinners when you should get skeletons, blank states where partial data would help

these small distinctions are the difference between "this app is thinking" and "what the hell"

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

most productivity tools try to make an hour faster. but the best engineer you know already lost 6 hours to meetings and slack.

why optimise the 1 hour when you can unlock the 6

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

this week in @reintersect:

- we finally shipped the desktop app you've all been asking for.
- search, notifications, and the composer have gotten a whole lot more reliable.

https://t.co/mcgSTZTtus

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

startup life is deranged but i really love the good version of it. people helping people win. also doing it with your cofounder/bestie makes the whole thing significantly less insane.

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

most work has a messy middle. too big for a group chat, too early for a doc, too human to become a ticket. i think that's how people figure out what matters.

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

i have this awkward belief that the future has less software in it. which is inconvenient because i am building software.

but when startups take themselves seriously they subscribe to slack, notion, linear, figma, chatgpt... isn't needing 10+ apps just to coordinate a little crazy?

software should absorb coordination, not create new coordination rituals around itself.

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

this week in @reintersect:

- you asked, we listened. we rebuilt our composer for phones, it should be much nicer now.
- we tightened up notifications.

https://t.co/ceDWeUvrmJ

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

early stage startups get weird around 10 people.

everyone used to know everything, now they don't. people start asking where things are. some people become information plumbing. process appears and everyone pretends this is just growing up.

sometimes this is just the moment you stop being a startup.

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

what if people don't hate work, they hate the machinery around work.

the pings, the follow-ups, the status docs, the meetings that exist because slack threads can't tell you what's actually important.

people like making things. they hate operating the machine around making things.

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

fable 5/mythos one shotting this tiptap jsx thing i was thinking about for ages has GOT to be the craziest thing this week

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

i've been heads down building for a while, which was probably healthy for everyone involved. @reintersect is still early, weird, and hard to explain without sounding a little bit insane.

what we’re building, what we’re learning, why work feels so broken, why software keeps making humans do computer jobs, and whatever else crawls out of my brain while trying to make this thing exist.

but it's all becoming real enough that i'm rly excited to start sharing more of it. i promise to resist becoming a linkedin poaster for as long as my little soul can manage.

anyways, hello internet.

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

@arian_ghashghai @brycent excel naming scheme. series AA

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

the post-delegation company will be the first type of organization that doesn’t infantilise adults into “just doing my job”

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

interesting thing i’ve learnt: small, high conviction claims really matter much more than a humongous vision

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

@contextconor what if one is shorter than that

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

@PhilipHanDesign @ChatGPTapp @linear i've had this with pnpm installs!

[bruno st john😼 @brunostjohn]

@adilmania @SlackHQ yes. https://t.co/2OK8Esv9yC