Steve McLeod

“EuroBLECH” - fantastic name for a conference. I got an autoresponder today “I’m away at EuroBLECH”. Blech means “sheet metal” in Germany. Not sure if they’re leaning into how this sounds in English on purpose, or its simply an unfortunate cross-language problem. www.euroblech.com/en-gb.html

I’ve now commissioned a SOC 2 auditor. We steadily inch towards being about to add a SOC 2 badge and page to our website.

Today was the first time this semester I got my daughter to school on time without a single “come on” or “hurry up” or “we’re running late” from me. The power of the clocks going back an hour...

One of our customers, GitKraken, has done a superb job of improving the look of Feature Upvote with custom CSS. It’s much better than our default appearance. I’m tempted to ask if we use their CSS as the starting point for a brand new “v2” look for all of our boards. feedback.gitkraken.com

There’s a story featuring Yours Truly on the Semrush blog. I scored a backlink like it was 2015 - about a very 2026 problem. www.semrush.com/blog/how-fea...

This is awesome. There’s still some excellent and authentic content on YouTube. youtu.be/PpcP835mWEQ?...

“Come to an expo in Colombia. We’ll pay for your airfare, hotel, and breakfasts and lunches.” Very enticing. And more than a little suspicious.

Feature Upvote feedback boards now get their own changelog. Any customer idea you mark as “done” gets added to the changelog. (Amazing what you can achieve with a simple SQL query and a nicely design layout!)

There’s gotta be some seriously high level PR work behind getting this GTA 6 promo onto the BBC news website.

Here’s our customer story with Enshrouded, published today: “One of the interesting things François discovered was how major feature requests and seemingly simple quality-of-life improvements could attract similar levels of support.” featureupvote.com/customers/en...

SOC 2 preparation done! Bring on the audit!

After three months of preparation, I’m at the very last step of tedious paperwork before starting our first SOC 2 audit. And I’m finding myself wishing for interruptions so I have an excuse to leave this for another day.

The pox upon whichever product manager invented the “feature button that leads to an upsell” pattern. “Oh this new feature looks good, let’s try it out!” I say to myself. I click and - voila! - it’s a plan upgrade page. Again, the pox on who invented this, and also on all the people adopting it.

My friend Daniele Carmosino created the music for Among the Trolls, a survival game set in Finnish forests. The game is released today, and so is Daniele’s soundtrack for the game. It’s good background music for while you work. open.spotify.com/album/7MCHCJ...

Awesome photo today of my book, Kill the HiPPO, over on LinkedIn. Featuring real hippos, who - if they could talk - would tell us how disappointed they are with the title. www.linkedin.com/posts/siewan...

In the spirit of finding pointless tasks to do, to avoid the marketing work I need to do; I converted Feature Upvote’s docs from Help Scout to Astro Starlight, hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Very happy with the result. help.featureupvote.com

I’m done with toting around my heavy 16” MacBook Pro. My next computer will one of those MacBook Airs. Sounds like they are plenty powerful enough these days.

The joy of having a babysitter from southern Italy. I leave my child with the babysitter for a couple of hours on Sunday morning - and I come home to the smell of cookies baking in the oven.

RICE for feature prioritisation is no better than choosing randomly. You’d do better going with your gut decision than using RICE. I wrote a book about this stuff, btw! 😎

When native speakers of Spanish or Catalan make English language puns. Doesn’t quite land with me.

Is this value in the database? An AI tool, yesterday: “Fetch all the values, then iterate over them in code comparing each one.” Ah, the satisfaction of being able to say to an AI tool, “you can replace that block of code with a simple SQL query.” I’m not obsolete yet.

Great read. A golden and well-written “well that’s interesting” thread like Twitter had in its golden era.

A simple 60-second video... that shouldn’t take long to record, right? Oh, the lighting is wrong. The background is wrong. The framing is wrong. Oh, I’ve forgotten the outline. Now I’m hungry. Thirsty. Need to pee. Lost energy in my voice. Hours pass. Video not finished. Try again tomorrow.

Our oldest enterprise customer just renewed for another year. I still get a little feeling of disbelief every time this happens that my tiny company gets paid solid money to be an important part of a household name’s operations.

I haven’t announced this to our customers yet (they don’t seem to be around these parts 🫤), but... Feature Upvote now has an MCP server. help.featureupvote.com/article/94-m...

Time-proven, stable, reliable Java dependencies like Apache Commons and Bouncy Castle have new minor versions with pages and pages of fixes in their release notes. All software is buggy - even the ones we thought were solid. But bugs are being hunted down and fixed at amazing speed.

I’m investigating moving our help docs from Helpscout to Astro Starlight for reasons. So far, Astro Starlight seems like a complete, well-thought-out solution. I’m impressed.

Damn, Claude, don’t hold back the punches. It’s very true though.

In another life, where my studies, career, and family situation went down a different path, this would be the job I‘d want. Just two days ago I said to a friend, “If I didn’t enjoy being my own boss so much, I’d love for my job to be working on the internals of Java.”

Some words of wisdom from someone testing our not-yet-announced MCP server: > Feel free to break everything and rebuild better. I think agents can adapt to breaking changes much better than software can to REST API changes. It’s liberating being able to make breaking changes.

Community managers in the video games industry: A new episode of the podcast made for you! featureupvote.com/thecommunity...

How good is that at describing the pleasure of being the sole developer on a product you own? From www.m2h.nl/writing/the-...

So posting here, on LinkedIn, and on that other platform we don’t mention around here actually worked. Got a little bit of activity going today on our demo board. Or maybe it’s because I also added it to the top nav bar of our website? 🤓