Retirement Day 6 Jun 2025, 8:20 pm

I wrote in my love letter to my colleagues at Audible that retirement is coming up — and now it’s here. Today’s the day!

I’ve attended my last meetings. I’ve said my goodbyes. My laptop’s ready to ship back to Audible HQ.

* * *

I started working in 1984, while in high school, busing tables part time at Schaefers Canal House in Chesapeake City, MD.

And I stopped working this day in 2025, almost 41 years later, as a senior engineer (which is surprisingly a lot like busing tables — lots of cleanup and setting the table just right for the customers to have a great time).

Along the way I worked on, among other apps, Userland Frontier, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Glassboard, Vesper, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, and Audible.

* * *

My immediate plan — Exhale! Breathe. Enjoy a steak. Watch WWDC from the comfort of home next week. Get back to work on NetNewsWire.

🌲

Retirement and NetNewsWire 24 May 2025, 8:29 pm

To answer some questions people have asked me about my impending retirement…

What does it mean for NetNewsWire?

Good things! I’m not retiring from writing apps — which means I’ll have a lot more time for working on NetNewsWire.

It’s been 15 years since the last time I could work on NetNewsWire during weekdays (as opposed to just nights and weekends), and I’m super-psyched for this.

Will you work on any other apps?

Yes. I have several ideas for other apps I’d like to work on, and have made a little progress on one of them.

They will all be free and open source. I have no plans to create apps for money. (I’ll be retired — not working for money anymore is the point.)

Will you be taking a big trip right after retiring?

Every time this comes up, I joke that the first thing I’ll be doing is sleeping. Forty years of work is a long time, and I’ve earned a long nap.

We do have some travel plans, but no big trips yet. We will. There’s so much of the world we want to see!

My actual first week of retirement will be taken up by WWDC. I won’t be there — I’ll be at home watching the videos like most everyone else. Only this time I won’t have to think about how the changes will affect things at work.

Do you have any other hobbies or plans? Are you getting into woodworking? Pizza-making?

Yes to other hobbies and plans, though probably not woodworking or pizza (but never say never — those are pretty tempting ideas!).

Making apps is important to me — contributing to the public stack is how I can best use my abilities to make the world better — but it’s also not the only thing.

I have more ideas than time, which is a good problem to have, and once I have some space to think and feel I’ll be able to start picking and get to work.

Will you be blogging more?

I hope so!

The hard part is, after 25 years, finding things to say that I haven’t already said. Maybe I’ll just decide it’s okay to repeat myself in new ways. 🐥

My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers 23 May 2025, 8:48 pm

Before I went to work for Audible (five years ago now — time flies!) I had a bias about engineers that worked for large corporations. I assumed that they weren’t as good as indies and engineers at small companies, or else they’d actually be indies or work at small shops like Omni.

Obviously I knew there had to be exceptions, particularly at Apple, or else we wouldn’t have had great things like AppKit and UIKit and everything else we’ve built on over these years. But the bias persisted.

* * *

Before Audible, the largest company I’d ever worked at (Newsgator) had just over 100 people. When I worked at Omni it had roughly half that number.

I’ve spent half my career working at even smaller companies, with just me and Sheila (Ranchero Software) or at places with three people (Q Branch) or like six people (UserLand Software).

And of course I was arrogant enough to think that I was better — much better — than any corporate engineer. While a corporate engineer might own some small part of an app or framework — or just a single button, as the (lame) joke went back in the day — I was shipping entire apps on my own or with a very small team. Popular, valuable, newsworthy apps that people loved.

And I wasn’t the only one: think of Flying Meat, Rogue Amoeba, Bare Bones, Red Sweater, The Iconfactory and many more.

* * *

And so I learned very quickly when I started at Audible that I was very wrong. I was impressed, and grew more impressed as time went on, by my fellow engineers’ rigor, talent, professionalism, care, and, especially, ability to work with other people toward common goals.

While I’m the die-hard introvert who just wants to go into a room and sit in front of a Mac and write some code and get things done, I learned that my co-workers — even if they, like me, kinda just wanted to sit and write code — were great at app development as a team sport. I was impressed with how they wanted to grow and did grow — always leveling-up their individual skills and their ability to work on a team and across teams.

And what a team it was! It’s not a new observation, but the indies I mentioned above, and the ones I didn’t, tend to be white men born in the United States — the people who could most afford to fail, in other words, because for them (for me, absolutely) there’s always another opportunity.

My team didn’t look like that — it was quite a contrast with my previous experience. Many more women, people of color, people born outside the United States. (But note that there’s always more progress to be made!)

The engineers on my team could write apps as well, if not better in many cases, than the indies I know. And the ones who aren’t quite there yet — well, just give them a little more time. They’ve all given me reason to believe in them.

I regret my bias about engineers working in corporate environments, and I’m so glad I learned the truth almost from day one on starting at Audible.

* * *

For a couple years I did a lot of hiring — a lot of interviews — at Audible. And I noticed something: there was a strong correlation between being hirable and having worked with other people.

The folks who’d worked largely by themselves, or on just one small team, weren’t as good candidates as the folks who’d worked with more people. This, of course, went against my original bias that indies are the best engineers — but by then I knew that a candidate who’d worked with lots of other people had been exposed to more code, more dilemmas, more challenges (technical and human), and they were not just more ready to work on a larger team but more knowledgeable. Even their individual skills were greater.

Advice time: if you’re a newer engineer, find ways to work with other people. Not just because you’re more likely to get hired at a place like Audible — but because, no matter where you want to work, you’ll be better at it.

You can’t just sit alone in front of your computer all day and write code and expect to be a great engineer.

Lesson learned!

* * *

With retirement imminent — this is my last job, and June 6 is my last day (maybe I’ve buried the lede here) — I want to thank my team publicly for how they’ve made me a better engineer and, more importantly, a better person. From the bottom of my heart.

I learned more from them than I could ever have taught; I got the better part of this deal.

Thank you, team! So much. ❤️

Seattle Xcoders Presentation Meetings Return 16 Mar 2025, 7:45 pm

Thanks to the enterprising and tireless Xcoders organizers (not me — I’m just the PR guy), we’re finally returning to presentation meetings. At long last!

Thursday, April 3. Read all about it on the Xcoders blog.

Harris for President 31 Oct 2024, 9:04 pm

Donald Trump is a gross villain and a traitor to our country. He’s a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and head of a criminal organization; he works with criminals and he pardons criminals; he’s a narcissist and violent insurrectionist, racist and misogynist; he’s the master of lies and corruption and self-serving.

He plans to rule as a fascist dictator, and this time has the backing to do so, for the benefit of him and his ultra-wealthy friends. Not for you.

For everybody else, the various enemies within — everybody who isn’t a straight white male who goes along with the program — there will be concentration camps, deportation, prison, and rumors and threats of each. There will be more deaths in hospital parking lots.

I have voted for Kamala Harris. I ask you to vote for her too.

I happen to think Harris would be very good, possibly even great, as president. But it hardly matters!

Voting for her is how we stop this. And we have to stop this.