iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

We’re using Cloudflare’s “IP address list” feature to whitelist access to our internal admin site. Cloudflare has done it well - each IP address gets a comment and a “created at” field. Two little things that make managing the list much better.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 29/09/2026

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

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 29/09/2026

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.”

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 29/09/2026

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.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 27/09/2026

There’s a type of Internet person - very vocal, writes or speaks with authority, speaks in absolutes, and always sounds convincing. You know some of them. Invariably, many of their “100% the way it is” pronouncements prove to be extremely wrong.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 24/09/2026

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

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 23/09/2026

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? 🤓

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 23/09/2026

Want to experience using Feature Upvote just like your players or customers would? We have an interactive demo feedback board here where you experience it firsthand. Take a look, add a fake suggestion, do some upvoting! demoboard.featureupvote.com

demoboard.featureupvote.com

User Suggestions - Demo Board

Add and vote up suggestions for Demo Board.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 22/09/2026

Trying to add a little personality into Feature Upvote’s website top nav. @punchlinecopy.com - I’m desperately hoping for your seal of approval here. 🦭🦭🦭

A screenshot of the “Resources” dropdown menu on Feature Upvote’s website.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 22/09/2026

A new Kill the HiPPO newsletter! Featuring: * A Kill the HiPPO review * On book marketing * It takes courage to delete features Check it out and subscribe. Subscribe, subscribe subscribe. Please. 🫠 killthehippo.com/posts/a-kill...

killthehippo.com

A Kill the HiPPO review; and deleting features

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 21/09/2026

A new feature in Feature Upvote no-one has asked for, but I’ve been wanting to build for years: votes can optionally slowly lose value over time. An item highly requested a year ago drops down the list. An item regularly getting votes each month rises.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 21/09/2026

A great review of my book Kill the HiPPO: ““Kill The HiPPO is not a how-to guide per se; rather, it's a collection of relatable startup stories to inspire your own feature prioritization system.“ www.linkedin.com/pulse/book-r...

linkedin.com

Book Review: Kill The HiPPO by Steve McLeod and Siew Ann Tan

RICE and ICE are the most popular feature prioritization frameworks, yet product developers often abandon them quickly. And who can blame them? Figuring out which features to build is not something yo...

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 20/09/2026

Compared to Laurie, we were spoilt for choice in New Zealand when I was a kid. We had TWO stations. The week’s viewing highpoint was the sheepdog trials on Sunday evenings. Flight of the Conchords had an inside joke about this. But it’s 100% true.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 18/09/2026

Why do our European customers keep choosing our USD plans despite us offering EUR and GBP pricing? I’ve worked it out - we last calibrated our pricing in 2022, and the USD has lost about 20% of its value against the EUR and GBP since then, making it the cheaper option.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 18/09/2026

When I first started coding in Java, I needed to down the JDK via dial-up modem. IIRC it took several hours, and came in several segments, each designed to fit on a floppy disk. I recently downloaded the newly released Java 27 in a few seconds, by clicking a button in IntelliJ.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 18/09/2026

Possibly the biggest irony in tech in that Hacker News - where people endlessly the merits of the latest JS and CSS frameworks - still uses tables for layout like we did in 2005. Even more ironic is that most HN users neither know nor care about this.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 16/09/2026

How’s your Wednesday evening? Oh really! Well good for you. Meanwhile I’m at a birthday party for THREE seven-year-olds. In a room that seems designed to amplify every cry, shout, and scream.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 15/09/2026

Surprising fact about Barcelona: it still had multiple shantytowns in the 1980’s. As in utter poverty, no running water, destroyed in every strong storm - that type of shanty town.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 15/09/2026

It’s Kill the HiPPO newsletter day! Here’s how I would have launched Kill the HiPPO - if I had known then what I’ve learned over the last few months about launching a self-published nonfiction book. killthehippo.com/posts/a-self...

killthehippo.com

A self-published book launch done right

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 14/09/2026

A marketing-heavy week ahead of me: time to gird myself for doing a bunch of tasks I don’t particularly enjoy doing.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 11/09/2026

Proud to say that I’m in the acknowledgements in this book! Congratulations (in advance) on the launch @valmullally.bsky.social

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 11/09/2026

The curse of the coding industry: coders are so black and white in their views. Tabs! No, spaces! Vim! No, Emacs! And lately, Tailwind GREAT! No, Tailwind AWFUL! It’s tiring and unhelpful. My own view about Tailwind: it’s okay - some pros, some cons, good in some situations, not good in others.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 11/09/2026

“Keep It Simple” is sometimes not that simple at all. This week I combined 3 UI components in Feature Upvote into one custom component. It required replacing 3 native HTML controls with a custom one, making things more complicated to maintain, but easier to use.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 10/09/2026

One of the fun things about preparing for SOC 2: inflation of everyone’s titles. My little team now has - amongst others - a designated Head of Infra, CISO, Head of Compliance, and Head of HR. We are all wearing multiple hats, of course.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 10/09/2026

I have been sitting on this news for a while and I’m really proud to finally share it: The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) from ZeniMax Online Studios is officially is using Feature Upvote to manage player feedback! ESO is a huge game. It’s been running for 12 years.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 09/09/2026

Not only is this awesome, I recognised Elle from something... Took me a while to work out. (By “a while” I mean, of course, “a quick Google search”) It’s her in this astoundingly good cover of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fdw...

youtube.com

The Chain - Fleetwood Mac (Josh Turner Guitar Cover feat. Elle Cordova and Toni Lindgren)

YouTube video by Josh Turner Guitar

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 09/09/2026

SOC 2: the bad side Having to get each person on the Feature Upvote team to read and acknowledge our 34 different policies I created to get ready for our first SOC 2 audit. I _hated_ having to do this stuff when I was an employee. And here I am foisting it onto my team. 🤷‍♂️

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 09/09/2026

A friend has just finished writing and self-publishing her book, and has switched to marketing mode. She’s done this a few times before, and it shows - she’s doing the initial marketing much better than I did for my book - even a virtual launch party.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 08/09/2026

Google behaving worse than even Ryanair: The choice that says $0.15/month is actually $2.99/month. And the amazing $0/month plan is actually $32.99. Everyone involved surely knows this is deceptive. “But it converts better this way,” I’m sure some weaselly PM pleads.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 08/09/2026

After 11 weeks and 1 day my daughter is back at school. The relief. The quiet apartment. The desire to do nothing for a few hours.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 07/09/2026

The “yearly subscription, paid monthly” option is a “dark pattern”, right? Designed to trick tired, confused people into picking what seems like the cheap option into agreeing to pay each month for 12 months. And of course, big tech companies show NO hesitation in using this.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 07/09/2026

Another Monday morning, another list of Dependabot vulnerability alerts to triage. This is a Very Good Thing - the software we all create and use is getting a lot more secure a lot faster.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 05/09/2026

I bought CleanShot X on February 11, 2021 for US$29. Since then I’ve used it almost daily. And all updates have been free. Finally, they’ve realised this is not a good business model. There’s a chapter in my book about a company that almost went bankrupt learning the same lesson.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 05/09/2026

Possibly the best thing I’ve ever written on Bluesky (as judged by me!) and it got barely any love.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 04/09/2026

Trying to explain to my daughter that in the Noughties we were so poor we couldn’t afford emojis. We had to use letters, numbers and punctuation instead to make little figures we called emoticons. She doesn’t believe a word I’m saying.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 04/09/2026

1password: “you have some users on the old version. you need to move them to the new version.” Also 1password, “to tell you who is using the old version, you need to pay us more money to enable our ‘reports’ feature.” 🤷‍♂️ Our team is small enough, I can simply ask everybody.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 03/09/2026

I wonder how things are in 2026 in the internal IT departments of banks where I used to work 15+ years ago. Have they also been tainted with the AI hype? With their security, trust, and compliance requirements? Or are they still doing things the old school way? Anyone know?

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 03/09/2026

I’ve been running the same SaaS product for 9 years. It’s a long time - way longer than my need for novelty normally allows. That led me get distracted with other things: writing a book, coaching. I’m now going back to focusing on just the one thing.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 02/09/2026

A 24-week streak of posting to our company socials (and our posts are much better than they used to be, too). Not coincidentally, Julia, our Content Marketing Manager, has been working with us for 24 weeks 😀 (Likewise, our newsletters have become more regular and better.)

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 02/09/2026

My little 9-year old SaaS has lifetime uptime of 99.98% - and creeping higher every year. In 9 years., we‘ve had 3 or 4 scheduled downtime windows for maintenance, each time for an hour max, for the rare db work that was just too complex to do in a zero-downtime way.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 01/09/2026

A new Kill the HiPPO newsletter. In which I share my story of fighting against Spanish culture - by actually trying to get things done during August. Spanish culture - of course - won the fight. killthehippo.com/posts/your-p...

killthehippo.com

Your product delivery plan versus reality

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 31/08/2026

A game in early access with 3,000,000 people on their Steam wishlist started using Feature Upvote on the weekend. So far, it has been gone flawlessly.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 31/08/2026

We are entering week 11 of the 11-week long summer school holidays. I’m on the home stretch. The end is in sight!

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 30/08/2026

I just discovered a podcast I was on as a guest was not just audio, but also has a video version! See me talking about Kill the HiPPO on Rogue Startups. youtu.be/1l-okSN6wfI?...

youtu.be

RS360: Kill the Hippo

YouTube video by Rogue Startups

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 30/08/2026

To check if my wireless keyboard is connected, I press the shift key a couple of times. If the caps lock light turns on and off, I’m connected. No real input goes into whatever app has the focus. Anyways, here’s a whole essay about people subconsciouly using such tricks. danluu.com/bug-blind/

danluu.com

Bug blindness

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 29/08/2026

Heard in a YouTube video: “I’m not going to tell you that until later because I want to boost viewer retention rate.” I admire the honesty, even while blatantly manipulating me.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 29/08/2026

Running a software business means accepting that using a daily cron job to restart a flaky service is a sensible decision. Back when I was an employee, I’d HATE accepting that solution.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 29/08/2026

I messed up with my Gamescom logistics, so ended up with a spare day in Cologne before the main event started. I minimise time away from family when I travel for work, but having a spare day between travelling and “eventing” turned out to be a really good way to hit the event with good energy.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 27/08/2026

This is cool. A game controller that resembles an old school arcade machine and holds your iPad. (Seen today at Gamescom)

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