…the frontend product is what brings your revenue stream in, but your backend operations quality is what keeps your costs down as you grow. If your backend costs get out of control because of technical debt then you won’t make a profit, or someone who can keep them down will just copy you and wipe you out with less.

Zed Shaw, “Products For People Who Make Products For People”

Spoken Like a Robot

The very first sentence of a different blogpost, somewhere else on the web, which I’m sure is a great blogpost but I’m not going to bother linking to it because I hate this sentence, is this:

Reflect7 decided to diversify it’s B2C platforms by allocating resources towards the Android Market…

That’s a fancy way of saying “We decided to build an app for Android”, all gussied up in soulless marketing wank speak.

I hate that shit. Makes me tune out immediately when I read it. In my head I insert the words that should been used instead of all those noncommittal buzz-statements, and I get annoyed.

My mental picture of the person who wrote it, who I’m sure is quite lovely in real life, is most unflattering: I assume they are of a low IQ, have internalized quite a bit of self-doubt and loathing, having something of an inferiority complex, and probably wet the bed. But in reality they’ve likely just spent far too much time fine-tuning PowerPoint slides for their VC pitches.

I implore you: when writing a blog don’t write like that. Write like a real person, with a functioning soul* and a real personality. Leave that kind of writing to the dead, the vapid, the marketrons.

(*metaphorically speaking)