Jonas Downey is the design lead at Basecamp. In this interview we discuss the ethics of designing and building constraints into your product that change human behavior.

Jonas Downey is the design lead at Basecamp. In this interview we discuss the ethics of designing and building constraints into your product that change human behavior.

We are not well adapted to focus and filter information. For the majority of human history, the information available was virtually all relevant. But now, we have an overload of information. Our first reaction is to believe we need to know it all to succeed... But we immediately run into a problem: there's vastly more than we can ever handle. So we resort to silly brain tricks to convince ourselves and others that we either know it all, or that most information isn't important. We can do better.

In this episode, we continue series of episodes about how COVID has and will continue to affect our lives and jobs as software engineers. We'll talk about where we will work, and how COVID has changed the question all together.

In this episode, we kick off a series of episodes about how COVID has and will continue to affect our lives and jobs as software engineers.

Much of our lives are determined by our internal voices. These voices tell us a story that is hard to imagine differently. But it's an important skill to consider an alternate story.

Every episode has its downside. In this episode we talk about a mental model called the "Strategy Tax", and how it applies beyond business strategy.

We underestimate the knowledge we have. (Interestingly, we also *over*-estimate the knowledge we have, just a different type of knowledge.) We also underestimate the knowledge we don't have. We overestimate the downside to failure, and we underestimate the downside to inaction. We are afraid of failure, but perhaps we should be more afraid of inaction.

Our first Friday Refill! Ignore motivation. Remove obstacles. Motivation is not your fuel. You already have enough motivation. Don’t add more. Focus on removing the small distractions, things that will add resistance. Tilt the scales.

Discrete and continuous data are all around us. In today's episode, we talk about a specific model of thinking that combines discrete and continuous. We'll also talk a little bit about non-linear curves and how they fit into this model.

In today's episode, we talk about how much of our behavior is shaped by the invisible assumptions we make about our constraints, abilities, and context.

Why do we believe we are right, even when it's easy to see we're wrong? There are psychological reasons, and there are basic biological and even logical reasons why believing you are right is easier than questioning yourself.

Portfolios benefit from diversity and risk management. You can think about your skills in the same way. But skills are more than just a portfolio. They also require an integrated approach; one skill modifies another. Learning to stack your skills will make your learning and growth much higher leverage.

Today, we talk about options. A few thoughts we consider: Are options always good? How often do we think about *all* of our options? Is there a way to trend towards having only good options? And, most importantly, how can we strike the right balance between time invested and optimal choice?

You want to measure what matters. But your measurements might change what matters. Understanding that anything that is measured might modify behaviors, it's important to then understand what should be targeted. How can we incentivize the right actions that produce the side effects we want, rather than incentivizing direct manipulation of those side effects?

Your actions speak louder than words. You already know that. But have you asked yourself what your actions are saying about who you are?

It's hard to construct with deconstruction in mind. It's difficult to imagine designing for final shutdown. In this episode, we talk about the importance of transformation and change, and the ultimate reality of everything: it all ends, at some point. If we want to build better software and lead better lives, we should build with open eyes about the end. Today, we also celebrate the shutdown of Spec.fm, the podcast network Developer Tea has been a part of for over 5 years!

Our conscious thinking is optimized to remove as much as possible. The more we can accomplish without hard thinking, the easier it is on our brains. As a side effect, much of the reality of our lives becomes invisible to us.

Becoming enlightened may not mean rising above everything. Instead, maybe it means zooming in.

Exceptions are, by definition, unusual. An exception is something we wouldn't expect - out of the norm. Yet, we often craft much of our behavior around an abundance of perceived exceptions. In this episode, we talk about how this is a problem in code and in life, and a way to look at things differently.