Thursday mornings have become my construction site time. I start off at Junction House. I walk the site with the team. We meet and use a lot of profanities. And then I head over to One Delisle for a similar set of activities. It is one of my favorite times of the week because, as a developer, you get to see all of your work coming together in a real and physical thing.
The views can also be pretty nice. Here is photo of the downtown skyline from Junction House this morning (there was a bit of fog):

I know this goes without saying, but I think it is crucial to walk one's sites. There's no way to do this in sweatpants over Zoom. You need to see the details. You need to build relationships. And you need to problem solve with the team. It's also a great opportunity to learn -- generally and from mistakes -- and get better as a professional.
Here's the thing about development: sometimes you're flying at 10,000 feet and sometimes you're talking about how many layers of drywall are appropriate for demising walls. It's a lot of fun.
Okay, Clubhouse is pretty awesome. I participated in my first discussion room -- thanks to my friend Evgeny, who has been a vocal supporter of the platform -- and I have now seen the light. The topic was real estate and PropTech. And we hope to do it again.
It feels a bit like Twitter to me, but obviously with audio and with greater controls and visibility in terms of who can participate inside of a discussion room.
It also makes perfect sense to me that Twitter is piloting their own version of Clubhouse called Spaces. That feels like a natural extension and something that needs to happen. Perhaps some of the moderation features will also make their way into the rest of Twitter.
As many of you already know, what makes Clubhouse unique is that the communication is free-flowing and impromptu. You are able to see what topics people are talking about and then jump in and out of those audio rooms, as well as invite people to join a discussion that you may be having.
All of this makes the communication feel like you're at a party or in an open office. Over there you can see/hear that someone is talking about the "Pensky file." If that's interesting and/or relevant to you, you have the option of jumping into that conversation.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some of these features and behaviors translated over into workplace collaboration tools. I think it would be helpful to see what other discussions are taking place within a team or company.
Maybe if we made things a little more free flowing, we wouldn't need so many damn Zoom meetings.
https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1265740083447173120?s=20
Joining a Zoom (or other video) meeting is as frictionless as opening up the calendar invite and clicking the link. No need to login or do much else, except maybe fiddle with the audio for a bit. "Can you hear me now?" The benefits to this are obvious. But if you're Zoom (or another video conferencing company) there could be a slight problem: I don't really care where that link is taking me, as long as it's taking me to the meeting I was supposed to join 4 minutes ago. In other words, there aren't really any network effects. The service doesn't get any better for me as more people use it, because anybody can join the link that I send them. Benedict Evans recently made this argument, here, and he goes on to posit that video calls, like voice calls, are destined to become a commodity. All that will matter is how you package them up. Makes sense.
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