commit 6fcd09ae466f6a78922b213cda6803e53fadcb11
parent 677a95e661bdb183255e3c86e16c70014dc5efc8
Author: FIGBERT <figbert@figbert.com>
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2024 22:40:53 -0700
Flesh out description of Beeper
Diffstat:
4 files changed, 133 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/work/beeper.md b/content/work/beeper.md
@@ -1,26 +1,121 @@
+++
title = "Beeper"
description = "The best damn chat app on Earth"
-date = 2023-06-05
+date = 2024-09-02
+[extra]
+type = "work"
+start = 2023-06-05
+end = 2023-09-01
+++
-Finally going to write this up.
-
-## Main notes
-- How I found them
- - Golang
- - Matrix
-- Technology
- - Bridges
- - Beepy
-- Missed opportunities
- - Humane/B2B
- - Beeper Rewind
-
-## Bonus round from this year
-Talked with an a mentor of mine—an successful startup founder,
-executive, and angle investor of some reknown—who said that people
-don't want message aggregation. Separation of concerns through distinct
-apps is actually a feature. Benji insight derived from that: the
-super-app that aggregates your different messaging platforms already
-exists and is just the operating system.
+As the summer of 2023 rolled around, I found myself opening up a bunch
+of tabs in Safari to check if any cool companies I had heard of on [the
+orange site] were hiring.
+
+I remember being shocked and excited when I saw that [Beeper] had a
+listing. Their app was built on top of an open, secure, and
+decentralized protocol called Matrix. I had used Matrix through the
+[Element] app with some friends, and was aware of some of the cool
+projects that took advantage of the network. I was also aware that most
+of the code that deals with Matrix is open-source and written in Go—two
+qualities shared by [Mabel], the terminal app I had just finished
+working on. Beeper sat at the intersection of a lot of things I was and
+am still crazy about. I sat down with [Eric Migicovsky], the CEO, and
+came on as a contractor for the summer.
+
+## Tenure
+Everything I encountered at Beeper was brand new to me. I had never even
+been paid to code before, and the team was fully remote. Showing up to
+the all-hands every Monday on Zoom felt pretty surreal. I started out
+reverse engineering and documenting Snapchat to bring Beeper to the
+platform, but was quickly moved to work on our hardware venture,
+affectionately named (after Blackberry threatened legal action) Beepy.
+
+The [Beepy] was intended to showcase Beeper's flexibility. What has
+changed fundamentally about messaging since [AIM]? Not much. But Beeper,
+with its foundations on the open Matrix protocol, could take any form
+imaginable. So to set an example for developers, we brought in the big
+guns from [SQFMI] to strap a keyboard and a black-and-white LCD screen
+together to make something like a modern-day, common-noun
+[beeper][tweet]!
+
+The software I built for the device came in two parts: a [setup utility]
+and a [chat client]. The former got new Beepy users "from zero to
+messaging," taking advantage of users' main computer to gather their
+chat history and encryption details before copying all the data to the
+Beepy. The latter was based on the [gomuks] terminal app and redesigned
+for the device's smaller 1-bit display. Both of these programs were
+wonderful opportunities to leverage the skills I had just learned
+building Mabel.
+
+A huge congratulations to the whole team on your [new][acqhn]
+[home][acq]!
+
+## Reflections
+I nursed a pet project while I was at the company that I believe has
+real potential: Beeper Rewind. How many messages did you send this year?
+What was your daily average? Who was your most frequent contact? What
+platforms did you use the most? The least? Who is most active in your
+groupchats? This metadata is super fun to know, as a user, and totally
+shareable. I would love to clown on the lurkers in my friend group, and
+be able to quantify how crucial iMessage is to my daily life. Beeper is
+the only entity in our digital lives that could provide these insights,
+and generating a little viral image for your Instagram story could be
+one way to exploit that position. Hesitating on this goes against some
+of my core principles, and I should have pursued it further.
+
+Speaking of positioning, I don't think Beeper necessarily optimized its
+business to be in line with its competitive advantage. We spent a lot of
+time at the company trying to re-imagine the fundamentals of the
+messaging experience—it's probably no surprise that a lot of this
+involved AI. I think this is all well and good, but ignores the fact
+that we already had the ability to do something nobody else could, which
+is to *send messages on every platform from one place*. I think we
+should have been focusing on optimizing the mobile app to provide the
+smoothest messaging experience possible while doing this. Polish,
+polish, polish. Even beyond this, however, we should have explored the
+B2B angle. [Humane] launched their wearable with SMS messaging. How much
+would their user experience improve if the Pin could talk to your
+iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal? How much is that functionality worth?
+I'll give you a hint: a lot, and we were the only people who could
+provide it. I don't think we ever considered this.
+
+Lastly, on a technical note, the concept that underpins Beeper's ability
+to send messages across platforms—Matrix's [bridges]—is really cool. It
+is perhaps worth pondering where else it could be applied: bots that
+*observe* and *replicate* behavior across networks, to maximally
+leverage your efforts. Adversarial interoperability! [Vincent Cloutier]
+is doing fun things in this space over on the fediverse. Summarized in a
+sentence that sounds straight out of [Matt Webb]'s school of thought:
+What happens when we ignore the borders between spaces and connect them
+anyway?
+
+## Surprise update a year later
+In the summer of 2024, I sat down to talk with a mentor of mine—a
+successful startup founder, executive, and angle investor of some
+renown—who presented me with the bluntly phrased perspective that people
+simply don't want message aggregation. Rather, he believes, distinct
+messaging apps are actually a feature: they give you [separation of
+concerns]. Having sat on this for a little while longer, it occurs to me
+that the super-app that aggregates your different messaging platforms
+may already exist, and it's your operating system.
+
+[the orange site]: https://news.ycombinator.com
+[Beeper]: https://www.beeper.com
+[Element]: https://element.io
+[Mabel]: @/projects/mabel/index.md
+[Eric Migicovsky]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Migicovsky
+[Beepy]: https://beepy.sqfmi.com
+[AIM]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_%28software%29
+[SQFMI]: https://sqfmi.com
+[tweet]: https://x.com/ericmigi/status/1649179643763920896
+[setup utility]: https://github.com/beeper/beepycli
+[chat client]: https://github.com/beeper/gomuks/tree/beepberry
+[gomuks]: https://github.com/tulir/gomuks
+[acqhn]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39980268
+[acq]: https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-joining-automattic/
+[Humane]: https://humane.com
+[bridges]: https://spec.matrix.org/v1.11/application-service-api/
+[Vincent Cloutier]: https://r.town/@vincent
+[Matt Webb]: https://interconnected.org/home/
+[separation of concerns]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns
diff --git a/content/work/envelope.md b/content/work/envelope.md
@@ -1,7 +1,11 @@
+++
title = "Envelope"
description = "The banking platform with built-in budgeting"
-date = 2024-06-17
+date = 2024-09-03
+[extra]
+type = "work"
+start = 2024-06-17
+end = 2024-09-06
+++
So much swag.
diff --git a/templates/article.html b/templates/article.html
@@ -11,11 +11,14 @@
{% endif %}
<small>
{% if page.extra is containing("book") %}
- <i>{{ page.extra.book }}</i> by {{ page.extra.author }}. <br/>
- Finished on {{ page.extra.finished | date(format="%B %d, %Y") }}. <br/>
- Rating: {{ page.extra.rating }} <br/>
+ <i>{{ page.extra.book }}</i> by {{ page.extra.author }}. <br/>
+ Finished on {{ page.extra.finished | date(format="%B %d, %Y") }}. <br/>
+ Rating: {{ page.extra.rating }} <br/>
+ {% elif page.extra.type and page.extra.type == "work" %}
+ Began: {{ page.extra.start | date(format="%d %b %Y") }} <br/>
+ Concluded: {{ page.extra.end | date(format="%d %b %Y") }}
{% else %}
- Published on <time datetime="{{ page.date }}">{{ page.date | date(format="%B %d, %Y") }}</time>
+ Published on <time datetime="{{ page.date }}">{{ page.date | date(format="%B %d, %Y") }}</time>
{% endif %}
</small>
{% endblock header %}
diff --git a/templates/section.html b/templates/section.html
@@ -39,6 +39,11 @@
{% else %}
{% if page.summary %}
<div class="summary">{{ page.summary | safe }}</div>
+ {% elif page.extra.type and page.extra.type == "work" %}
+ <p class="summary">
+ {{ page.description }} <br/>
+ {{ page.extra.start | date(format="%d %b %Y") }} - {{ page.extra.end | date(format="%d %b %Y") }}
+ </p>
{% else %}
<p class="summary">{{ page.description }}</p>
{% endif %}
