A confession, a podcast, a trip, and a bunch of Unstream updates

I let work (not necessarily just day job, but also side projects) consume me, and that meant I wasn’t writing. Because writing is thinking, I started feeling myself constantly running and not stopping to think so much about where I was running to. I confess that this has not been great for my marriage and probably my mental state.

But I’m on vacation right now and so I have time to step back and check myself. I have a large list of things I want to write about (and think through) again, which feels great. I also have a fifth album in my head, ready to start recording, which feels even better. And I’m really working to better show up at home!

What have I been doing in the meantime? Certainly not making music or writing here.

Outside of day job I’ve been throwing a lot of energy into Unstream, which has come a long way since I first announced it. In the last 3 months I’ve added:

• A process for claiming artist pages and a whole backend for verified artists
• The “indie artist index”
• A Firefox extension
• Awareness and promo for Bandcamp Fridays
• A bunch of guides to help inform non-musicians about the messy details around streaming
• Tons of little fixes and refinements
• SOON: an iOS app (it’s in beta if you want to try it out, contact me!)

I also removed the yearly subscription thing. It’s now just a free (donations welcome) service. No personal data collection, no ads, just free. It’s more important to me that this gets more people supporting more artists than me taking a cut.

I also did a podcast for the first time in a while! This was sort of to promote Unstream, but also to connect it to my music journey as well as some of the Buffer values that inspired a few of my decisions in the apps. Check it out.

It’s been so fun (dare I say addictive) to build, that I’d kind of put aside both music and writing to just build. I’m now feeling the exhaustion and mental pain of that.

The other thing that consumed me was my work at Buffer, which has been somewhat of an exciting blur but also hasn’t been the primary source of this feeling. My job is great because it’s engrossing (keeping social media human with tools is fun), challenging (keeping social media human with tools is hard), yet not too stressful (we consider the work a marathon rather than a sprint and take care of ourselves accordingly), and I have the best teammates (see previous point). But it has been a busy stretch! This work culminated in our annual all-team retreat, my third with the company.

I somewhat impulsively wrote a reflection about how the retreat felt on LinkedIn, and it felt quite right so I’m inclined to just repeat myself here:

Our ability to connect as humans is vital. It makes life worth living and work worth doing. Without it, we might as well be hamsters on separate wheels.

Now you might say: you work for a remote company! Of course you crave connection with colleagues! Plenty of offices offer this. That’s not what I’m talking about at all. I’m talking about proper human connection. Knowing someone at the level of their soul.

Sure, I’m driving distance from only 4 of my teammates and even more are on the other side of the world. But each year we come together and not just to work. To connect as a team of humans.

We sure do work – a few of us got from big hairy idea to functional prototype in about 2 hours, as one of many examples – but we also shared meals, some of which lasted hours, talked deep about very hard things in life, wandered a city together, laughed hysterically together, cried together, sang our lungs off at karaoke together, screamed into the void while touching grass, celebrated our achievements together, got quite real about our challenges while all in the same room. All of the above happened last week.

AI was a frequent topic this year, and my takeaway continues to be this: while it can speed things up – and we’re oddly well positioned to really take advantage of that at Buffer – it cannot (and must not) replace any of the human stuff. If it does, we’re done for.

These people are wonderful. I feel like I’ve known most of them for decades. I’m so proud and grateful to be part of this team.

And with that, back to work. But not in the same way – I want to invest less of my time staring at screens outside of what’s necessary for maintaining a living, and more of my time making things with my kid and music with my hands and soul.