iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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

It’s very important to keep this is mind when reading or hearing utterly convincing pronouncements. I write this as a reminder to myself.

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.

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 · 24/09/2026

Oh we’ve had it for years! But for some dumb reason, we took away all the links that led to it a couple of years ago!!! 🤡🤡🤡 It’s now back in our website’s top nav where it belongs. Noted on the darker template.

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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I find it so hard to know what exactly to focus on. In your situation I’d be flipflopping almost daily between users, accounts, and any other metric

Whaaaaaaat?! You should be running a PR company!

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A seal of bemusement instead of a seal of approval? Works for me!

demoboard.featureupvote.com

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

User Suggestions - Demo Board

Add and vote up suggestions for Demo Board.

Tell me more! What did you switch from and what did you switch to? And how does fit into your “only do marketing” schedule? 😁

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So happy! I also would have been content with this. thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

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.

A Kill the HiPPO review; and deleting features

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

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How did you find it after so many years? I have found a few really old Feature Upvote bugs lately when I’ve been doing AI-powered code reviews. I’m a bit stunned and humbled by them too.

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It fits well with my mantra of “delete old backlog items”. It’s hard to convince some people to delete backlog items, but it’s easy to make items fade away to the bottom of a long list ordered by votes.

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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.

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

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

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.

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

A beautiful movie. I watched it a ton of times with my kid when she was 3 or 4.

You look a bit different than usual in this photo, Val! 😀

So next week I’m going to adjust our pricing. And when I do this I’m thinking about reducing our USD pricing by about 20%. Goes against the “charge more” mantra but I’ve done plenty of that over the years. Something for me to dwell on first, though.

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.

Java 27 SDK macOS download: 188 MB Java 1.1.8 SDK windows 95 download: 15.5 MB ~10x bigger Not as bad as I expected!

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.

Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 17/09/2026

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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Hmm, that sounds considerably worse!

Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 17/09/2026

Well that‘s a coincidence! The same esteemed publication has also shortlisted me, albeit in a different category.

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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

The last of Barcelona’s shantytowns were finally removed, with residents rehouse in decent housing, in time for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992.

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 · 13/09/2026

That time of life is so hard. Wasn’t so long ago for us, and I still remember how we (the parents) had to live our lives permanently sleep-deprived for some years. So, you have my empathy.

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Steve McLeod @steveofmcleod.com · 12/09/2026

It’s an amazing name! So memorable too.

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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

It’s easy to find some Tailwind usage to mock - e.g. when the class attribute spans two lines of cryptic abbreviations. But it’s so pleasant when I can increase the spacing between two elements by simply adding “mr-2” to a div’s class attribute.