In my experience, almost every startup in France is okay with a 4 day workweek (even if it's not said explicitly in their job offers). You just have to tell them about it during the recruiting process.

This idea is great. You could even argue that these scripts actually do something: they allow storing and updating the state of a process. By having these scripts run in a shell rather than in your head, the current state is stored in a machine, not in an unreliable human brain.

also they allow you to gradually script stuff as you figure it out.

That looks to be a big advantage of scripts like this, they allow the gradual automation of processes.

I realized that I've written scripts that are "executable checklists", but didn't see it as a design pattern until reading this article. Typically such a script starts out as fully manual (do this, do that next, copy here, paste there..) then I replace steps as actual code, where I can, while some steps remain manual if needed.

Great use of such checklist scripts is on-boarding collaborators or new team members in a project.

Also, as grandparent comment pointed out, they reduce cognitive load by keeping the state of a process outside the head.

This should be read in conjunction with this other great article about how to gradually automate your process: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520

This is a great article, providing even more context for why this stepwise automation is smart.

this seems like the real magic here. The author states at the start, automating all of the steps of something can be daunting. But this script can incrementally become a do everything script.

That's exactly the problem the Brave browser is trying to solve, I highly recommend checking it out: https://brave.com.

Flattr is another option: https://flattr.com

Sounds like there are too many options.

Ajit? Is that you?

This might be a chicken and egg problem: we need takes to fund the work of automating away these things. Just saying "public service is not good enough, so i don't want to pay more money to make it better" seems like a dead end.

I disagree. There should always be an effort to do more with less. This should be ingrained into our dna in business and in government.

For the past year and a half, I've been organizing the Paris Ruby Workshop with a friend of mine. It's a monthly meetup where everyone is welcome to come and pair program on small katas, and chit chat over some pizza. It's free to attend so we don't make any money out of it.

It's always fun to meet people that we might not have talked to otherwise, since a lot of attendees are beginners who come from non-engineering backgrounds. And it's also a pretty good feeling at the end of the evening when people tell you they had a good time and learned of to program a little bit better.

I also found it surprisingly easy to setup : grab a few katas from exercism.io, create a group on meetup.com and find a local startup willing to host and provide free pizza in exchange for a bit of visibility in the community, and you're good to go.

The whole "wealth management" industry is actually all about this. As long as they keep on operating as they do now, the gaming will continue.

This takes a massive amount of capital and distribution is usually through department stores that both sell and often install the machines. Getting into department stores will be an uphill battle but, that's still less hard and cheaper than trying to make an installer network across a country.

You might initially make an enthusiast market of people willing to pay for quality and install the machines themselves but, it would have to be very specialized marketing. Maybe to people who service and repair appliances initially?

The author mentions mattresses and that market is being disrupted but, other than shipping (which seems a pretty sizable problem to solve) they don't have to worry too much about installation.

Also, the network of people to service the machines after the fact. It's hard, it will take alot of money and the most likely outcome is being purchased by one of the big companies and then they do the same thing sa before and use the brand but, make the same shitty machines underneath the disrupting company's logo.

Thanks! We're working hard to make it the perfect customer conversation tool. :)

I picked the image because it feels to me like it's capturing a peaceful moment. I guess it could be interpreted differently though. For the record I consider both fast and slow messaging as things that are ok to do what all stages of your life, but they're both meant for different use cases. :)

Thanks for the enthusiasm! :D Yeah, it's definitely heavily influenced by the slow web movement. I'm hoping it can be a gateway to sending paper letters again for some users.