Bill Harding
Member since November 2018
About Me

Amplenote CEO, Alloy.dev CEO, but mostly a programmer that loves the projects he gets to work on. Big into getting things done.

Desired Collaborations

Since my co-founder and I are programmers, we chronically underachieve at reaching out to prospective customers. It would be great to meet people with high Twitter follower counts or YT subscriber counts who want to thoughtfully optimize how their time is spent, and/or want to help their followers stop feeling like overwhelmed procrastinators. Amplenote can go a long way toward lifting that heavy blanket of guilt that most people feel toward their todo list.

There are lots of ways we can create financial incentives for those who get new AN users to discover us. Our "user acquisition" budget would allow us to spend $100k+/year if we met someone who had adequate reach/engagement from their followers. That said: we don't want to do marketing, and I can't bear to have anyone else report to me, so we need someone who can work their magic independent of us.

Total Notes And Tasks

8,000 notes, 6,000 tasks 😰

Productivity Tactics

1. Work on projects like Amplenote and GitClear that are intrinsically fascinating since they solve pain points in my daily life
2. Long gestation period between idea origination and accumulation of Task Score lets me dismiss most ideas before I bother to work on them
3. Envision the world in which the project is complete, and experience (in my mind's eye) how much more I like that world vs. this one
3.5. When there's only a little time to get something done, do the reddest item there is time for

Long Term Goals Completed

1. Not completed, but: my #1 long-term goal from past 14 years has been to create tools that afford leverage to users. Feels like we hit our stride on this one since launching Amplenote!
2. Created a software dev metric ("Diff Delta") to help myself calibrate the efficacy of my dev efforts
3. Completed four annual marathons before pandemic put the kabosh on that goal

World Class

According to data scraped from Github, I've been above the 99th percentile of programmer activity (commit count) since we started Alloy in 2019. More importantly, it doesn't feel like work, it feels like fun. Being CEO feels more like work, but def worth it for getting to choose such delightful coworkers.

Favorite City

Seattle or Panajachel

Favorite Quote

"Incremental peer iteration is how great things get made" --Lucian Ruscanu

How Best To Contact Me

My first name at amplenote.com

I am the boss of this here outfit, but Task Score is the boss' boss. With thousands of tasks spread between GitClear and Amplenote and two roles (CEO and Programmer), I would spend hours every day just deciding what to work on if I didn't have the boss telling me what to do.

Rich Footnotes let me communicate -- with myself and others -- in greater depth than previous. Instead of opening a bug tracker ticket and using hundreds of words to describe a prospective improvement, I can now create a single line task, paste an image or two of what I'm talking about in the Rich Footnotes, !move it to a collaborators todo list, and get on with the day.

I'm also a daily Amplecap user. I don't understand why everyone doesn't insist on having their screenshots include the URL from which screenshot was taken, time of the screenshot, and the thoughts that I had while taking the screenshot. Amplecap does all those automatically in < 10s.

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