Week 639

Matt Kirkland

Work in public. Reveal nothing.

What are these weeknotes, anyway? First and foremost, they're exercises in understanding what we do here at Brand New Box. A regular, scheduled critical look at what and how we're working, and recording that for our future, forgetful selves.

Secondly, they are 110% inspired by Matt Webb's weeknotes from BERG, a now-defunct tech studio in the UK. I (Matt Kirkland) have been a reader of these for a loooong time. I'd give you a big pitch about why they're great, but it's already been done: in 2011 Robin Sloan put together this great writeup. I absolutely encourage you to read that.

These weeknotes are an attempt to thread that needle that Robin describes: Work in Public. Reveal Nothing. Because we're a consultancy / studio / guns-for-hire, much of our work is neccessarily behind closed doors, and never gets to be shown to the public. But that doesn't mean we can't talk intelligently about what we do, and what we learn! These notes should be giving us practice to discuss that.

[ Editor's note from 2024 ] Matt here: popping in to say six years later that I quickly realized I wanted these notes to be a little more reflective, and I never found a way to write publicly about work without compromising client confidentiality or team relationships. So! I wrote hundredes of these weeknotes between 2018 and 2023, and some of them are not ready for sharing. They're safely in my archives!

But here in January 2024 I'm playing around with keeping future weeknotes suitable for the public. Let's see how that goes!