Best Reads of 2013

Here are my favorite blog posts from 2013. All 198 of them. (I would have liked to organize these by subject, but didn’t have time. The main subject areas are: design, development, marketing, business, products, communities, education, creativity, and productivity.

• The Naive Optimist — How to communicate in a #NoManager company
• The Naive Optimist — How salaries, career progression and reviews work in a #NoManager company
• The Naive Optimist — How to set priorities, create budgets and do project management in a #NoManager company
• The year developers and designers collided
• The flow fallacy
• 37signals isn’t mythical, you’re not paying attention « Unicornfree with Amy Hoy: Creating And Selling Your Own Products
• The abundance of slowness
• The Designer-Developer spectrum · @mdo
• Paying Money To Save It And Doing More With Less
• How to Educate & Persuade Customers - Inside Intercom
• Ben Pieratt, Blog - Work versus Life. Greatness versus Family.
• Digital marketing agency client service: Too many cooks in the kitchen
• On Writing Interfaces Well by Jonas Downey of 37signals
• Frank Chimero × Blog × The Inferno of Independence
• Too Tired to Hustle
• If it’s important, don’t hack it. | Inside Intercom
• Success.
• Oliver Tomas | Text Proportion Utility » Blog Archive » John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity
• You Can Meet Your Heroes
• Market first, code later
• There is no place for just shitting all over other people’s work by Jason Z. of 37signals
• Photoshop is not a design tool.
• Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread?
• “We Don’t Talk About College”
• “Designers shouldn’t code” is the wrong answer to the right question
• Don’t Blame the Tool
• What’s your timezone?
• Your app makes me fat — Serious Pony
• Creative People Say No — Thoughts on creativity — Medium
• 14 lessons after five years of professional programming
• The Costs -vs- Benefits Of Community Participation - The Online Community Guide
• Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence
• On Being a Designer and a Developer: Not Quite Unicorn Rare by Diogenes Brito
• Useful Field Reports - The Online Community Guide
• Surfacing Interesting Content • stdout.heyzap
• The Little, Big Idea — Editor’s Picks — Medium
• Conversations With Your Customers | Inside Intercom
• Do Things that Don’t Scale
• Seth’s Blog: You don’t have to like new art, but it helps to understand it
• Seth’s Blog: Thinking about money
• Dissecting Great Sales Copy For Productized Consulting
• How Not to Be Alone - NYTimes.com
• Ambition can be poison by David of 37signals
• Seth’s Blog: Ping me when it’s broken
• Building Powerful Peer Groups - The Online Community Guide
• An eBook pricing model that resulted in $100,000 in sales by @ASmartBear
• Priming Group Commitment - The Online Community Guide
• Seth’s Blog: The weird tail continues
• What Product Companies Can Learn From Consulting Companies
• Quit trying to attract a crowd — Product People — Medium
• The Myth of the Myth of the Unicorn - Emesis - Quora
• Motivations For Crowdsourcing - The Online Community Guide
• Greenville Grok 2013 - Matt McManus
• Mental Buckets - The Online Community Guide
• Four Pricing Principles to Never Forget | Inside Intercom
• Sandi Metz’ rules for developers
• Seth’s Blog: The illusion of choice
• Don’t Fight Anger With Facts - The Online Community Guide
• Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction
• Seth’s Blog: It’s Thomas Midgley day
• Shipping is your Company’s Heartbeat | Inside Intercom
• Recruiting, motivating, and keeping volunteers in an online community - The Online Community Guide
• Seth’s Blog: Lead up
• Seth’s Blog: But I don’t want to do that, I want to do this
• Seth’s Blog: Getting picked (need to vs. want to)
• The Freelancer’s Guide To Recurring Revenue
• Seth’s Blog: Avoiding fear by indulging in our fear of fear
• What a stupid idea | Dustin Curtis
• Seth’s Blog: In search of resilience
• How I Learned to Become a Failure — Let’s Make Things — Medium
• Seth’s Blog: You don’t have to pander
• Rivalries, Conflicts, Grievances, And Communities - The Online Community Guide
• randomrivers — Building a Foundation for Life Without a Job
• Seth’s Blog: 100 days later
• Overcoming The ‘Too Busy To Participate’ Problem in CoPs - The Online Community Guide
• The Psychological Impact Of Interactions - The Online Community Guide
• Seth’s Blog: Conservation of energy in conversation
• A Manager’s Manifesto — The Year of the Looking Glass — Medium
• You play like you practice by Jason Fried of 37signals
• Seth’s Blog: Where are your assets?
• Stop working (so hard) — I.M.H.O. — Medium
• Seth’s Blog: Just the good parts
• Coding Horror: Why Ruby?
• Your Startup’s 10 Most Important Metrics | tomasz by Tomasz Tunguz
• The Case for Getting Married Young - Karen Swallow Prior - The Atlantic
• Seth’s Blog: Toward zero unemployment
• Learning to See | Information Architects
• Taking the leap - swombat.com on startups
• Learning JavaScript - my experience and advice | Derek Sivers
• Seth’s Blog: Us vs. us
• BBC News - Children should be allowed to get bored, expert says
• Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls | Book Of Hook
• Tupperwolf - Wealth, risk, and stuff
• Seth’s Blog: Choose your customers first
• Seth’s Blog: “You’ve got ping, but they’ve got no pong”
• Document The Outputs Of Your Online Community - The Online Community Guide
• Living With Less. A Lot Less. - NYTimes.com
• Seth’s Blog: Never enough
• The medium chill | Grist
• Seth’s Blog: Macro trends don’t matter so much
• Seth’s Blog: De-escalation
• Participating In Your Own Community - The Online Community Guide
• B- environment merits B- effort by David of 37signals
• What Happens When You Get The Concept Right - The Online Community Guide
• The Jobs Are Never Coming Back | Thought Infection
• Seth’s Blog: You can’t change everything or everyone, but you can change the people who matter
• Derek Powazek - I’m Not The Product, But I Play One On The Internet
• Ted Nyman: Culture
• Programming education for kids: it’s about the literacy of debugging by Danilo Campos
• Seth’s Blog: Hooked on hacking life
• Design Process is a Myth — Design/UX — Medium
• Helping Members To Have Influence - The Online Community Guide
• Ask forgiveness, not permission - Venture Hacks
• John Resig - WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
• How to Identify the Best Design Problems - 52 Weeks of UX
• Seth’s Blog: Open, generous and connected
• Seth’s Blog: The mirror and the periscope
• Michael Shuman… there’s a local business revolution on the horizon, and we can make it happen
• A loose rant on maximization by Jason Fried of 37signals
• Seth’s Blog: Those people
• Yours vs. Mine | Dustin Curtis
• If it’s important, don’t hack it. | The Intercom Blog
• Seth’s Blog: Humanize it
• Some ideas matter, just not the ones you think
• It’s all who you know? | Derek Sivers
• Frank Chimero × Blog × All Kinds of Awesome
• How to Save College | The Awl
• What is someone going to stop doing when they start using your product? by Jason Fried of 37signals
• Seth’s Blog: Scarcity and abundance in the digital age
• The three necessary ingredients for community. Do you have them? | Alex Hillman
• Learning to Code: Lessons from Building a Rails App with Treehouse | The Art of Ass-Kicking
• The Importance of Rhythm & Rituals for Coworking Communities | Alex Hillman
• There’s Never Only One Community | Alex Hillman
• On competing visions — Brain Dump — Medium
• Seth’s Blog: Paracosms, loyalty and reality in the pursuit of creative problem solving
• America’s Baby Bust - WSJ.com
• Seth’s Blog: Watching is not doing (confronting the spectator problem)
• Designers Will Code — Design + Startups — Medium
• The Problem With Big Asks - The Online Community Guide
• SciMed: Design First, Program Second
• Seth’s Blog: Customers who break things
• Derek Powazek - What If Social Networks Just Aren’t Profitable?
• Pixels don’t care · by Kyle Neath
• Elapsed Time: Sorry Mike, Facebook could reboot and we’d mess it up again
• How to Start | Cap Watkins
• Seth’s Blog: Slow media
• Relevancy - The Online Community Guide
• Seth’s Blog: Ideal, average and outlier
• What To Listen For (and how to act on it) - The Online Community Guide
• Why you need more margin in your life | Sean Johnson :: Intentionally – Live on Purpose
• 3 rules for new founders – The Startup Toolkit Blog
• marketing_bits/how to handle pr disasters
• marketing_bits/how to write a good email subject
• Daring Fireball: The Trend Against Skeuomorphic Textures and Effects in User Interface Design
• Dangers of Turbolinks - Staal Forge
• Six Steps to Growth: What I Learned as 500 Startups’ Growth Hacker In Residence
• Seth’s Blog: Possession aggression
• marketing_bits/objections and exceptions
• Seth’s Blog: Two people you might need in your professional life
• Meaningful Conversations - The Online Community Guide
• The Online Community Lifecycle - The Online Community Guide
• Seth’s Blog: What’s it for?
• Yes, Designers and Engineers Can Play Nice | Derrick Ko
• Designer Eats Engineer — Let’s Make Things — Medium
• Getting Members Into The Community Mindset - The Online Community Guide
• Young people are screwed… Here’s how to survive
• Seth’s Blog: Four reasons your version of better might not be enough
• Seth’s Blog: The cost of neutral
• What You Should Know About Private Betas | The Intercom Blog
• Ways to Improve a Product | The Intercom Blog
• Humans need to know why by David of 37signals
• Companies that support remote workers win against those that don’t | Certain Extent
• Seth’s Blog: Who goes first?
• Flexible Foundations | Trent Walton
• Abstractions After The Fact | Journal | The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton
• Ignore details early on by Jason Fried of 37signals
• Creating A Content Calendar - The Online Community Guide
• The Pastry Box Project | 7 January 2013, Baked by Andy Budd
• Community Service - The Online Community Guide
• Seth’s Blog: Out on a limb
• Community of Action - The Online Community Guide
• The Rush To The Niches (time for lock-in) - The Online Community Guide
• Is there a reason for the friction?
• It probably looks higher from up there
• Evaluating a redesign
• The tribe or the person?
• The magic of a spec
• The trust brand
• Customer Support: Always Easy, Never Necessary
• Q&A: Tribes and the reality of worldview
• Q&A: Tribes and the reality of worldview
• Learn together
• The timing of El Greco
• Misunderstanding quality
• Part of a community…
• The Right Type of Customer Conversations
• Why we’re doing things that don’t scale

Posted January 1, 2014 at 8:48 am