Years ago, my friend Dave introduced me to a different way to rate movies: a seven-point scale using whole numbers only (no half stars). He goes into detail breaking down exactly why he advocates for it on his blog.

I recently updated my personal site to use the seven-point scale for my movie ratings, and part of the challenge was mapping Letterboxd ratings to a representative number on the seven point scale. So I briefly wanted to note down how I reasoned about the mapping and what I settled on.

I have found that I’m a little on the generous side when it comes to rating movies on a 5-star scale, so I wanted to lower the curve and have a bit more variation at the top of the scale. While 4/5 doesn’t say the same thing about a movie as 5/7, it feels right.

A couple weeks ago Airbnb announced a new remote work program for their employees, and with that CEO Brian Chesky briefly touched upon their plan to have two major releases each year:

The backbone of how we operate will continue to be our single company calendar with our multi-year roadmap. It’s centered around two major product releases each year—a May release and a November release. Even though not everyone directly works on these product releases, we’re organizing our entire calendar around them to maintain company-wide alignment.

The first of these major product releases is now rolling out, and although many on Twitter are panning it as a letdown after Chesky teased that this announcement would include “the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade”, I think the bigger story is that Airbnb is switching up the typical fortnightly “bug fixes and updates” release notes with a strategy to make a bigger splash twice a year.

I appreciate their different approach.