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.
5-star
7-star
Reason
0.5-1
1
Point for trying I guess?
1.5
2
Not great
2-2.5
3
A below average movie
3-3.5
4
Average
4
5
An above average movie
4.5
6
A great movie
5
7
A perfect movie
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.
I’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from Steve Jobs recently. One quote that’s been bouncing around my head quite a bit is this one from 1983:
“It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.”
I’m sure there were many meanings tucked away inside that simple phrase, but the story I’ve seen attributed to Andy Hertzfeld (who was at Apple in 1983) centers around resisting the bureaucratic nonsense that was increasing in the Mac group at Apple as they were growing. Don’t give up your scrappy, win-at-all-costs, counter-culture identity just to conform to “the system”.
Dutch is a 9-week old Goldendoodle, a frequent member of the “good dog” club, and lover of fetch. He’s named after our favorite coffee chain, Dutch Bros. Coffee1 and as a nod to Dutch Formula 1 driver (and defending world champion), Max Verstappen.
He’s the newest member of the family, and we love him so much!
Who’s a good boy?
Financial disclosure, I own a [small] number of shares in Dutch Bros ($BROS) ↩︎
There’s an aphorism that’s attributed to Steve Jobs that I’ve often used to spur on my own artistic endeavors:
“Real artists ship.”
Those three simple words convey a whole host of underlying meaning, and personally I find it incredibly helpful to refocus my own efforts toward the end goal: shipping my art for the world to see.
I’ve had several pet projects I’ve been working on, in some cases for multiple years, that I keep tinkering away on with no end in sight. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that – it’s good to have side projects that sharpen your craft or serve as test beds for learning – but at least one of the projects has been eating away at me, calling out for me to ship it.
So over the next little bit, I’ll put in the final touches of work needed to get it to v1.0, and ship it. Stay tuned!
A partial screenshot of <redacted> (I’ve already said too much!)
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.
