Hi all — Unoffice Hours host here! This has been a wildly successful experiment for me. ~360 calls booked since I made that post, about 300 calls. I’ve reviewed pitch decks, given design feedback, met monks, discussed work and careers with students, and chewed the fat with like minded people who I never would have met otherwise.

Sorry you can’t find a slot! It’s already booked up for the next 60 days and I use Calendly to keep a rolling availability window. I've just opened a handful of extra times in October and November.

I highly recommend making this part of your weekly rhythm too — it’s a big part of how I find new ideas, and it helps get me out of my bubble.

If anyone's thinking of starting their own Unoffice Hours, someone started a webring with a good domain. It's semi dormant right now, but the site accepts pull requests and it would be a good place to start building community

https://unofficehours.com

I recently had an unoffice hours with Matt Webb.

I originally had a specific agenda - to get a perspective on a core project with moral considerations. In between booking and having the call the project was written off. I kept the call.

It gave me the option, as someone currently freelancing and consulting, to talk to someone in a different boat, going to a different place, on the same sea.

Impactfully he gave me some simple advice that I struggle with - paraphrased "act in the open / people will find you". I've spent a great deal of time since struggling with it - it is a loss of control when being perceived, and flies in the face of a lifetime of believing in internet anonynimity!

I have started doing office hours for my FOSS project. Every other week I will live stream to YouTube and people ask comments in the live chat, then I show how to do whatever it is they want to do. In the beginning as people are logging on I talk about what we have been doing for the last two weeks. I alternate between my mornings and my evenings so most uses can join one session no matter where they are.

Of course the first time I was worried that no one would show up. So for the first session I had a plan for what I would do if no one showed up or there were no questions. Now some people also submit questions in advance so I have a small agenda to get started with until people ask questions.

So far it's been encouraging. About 10 people join the live sessions and there are enough questions to keep the conversation going and not too many questions so I have to ignore some. But the most surprising is the recorded sessions get many more views afterwards. So it's a good way of generating content that people actually watch.

Not sure if he had this turned off beforehand or if it's because it's on the front page of HN, but there's no slots available. Not that I was personally going to book one!

I'd love to do something like this though - I've always enjoyed teaching so maybe something where I offer free calls to help newer developers with their project for an hour? Interesting idea!

Matt Webb (interconnected.org) has persistently been one of my favorite people and it would be a pleasure to sing some praises, mention some of his super interesting thoughtful projects.

A long time ago (12+ years) was Little Printer, an internet connected/social little thermal printer, with the Berg group. There's a loving open source effort maintaining the systems ? Which I haven't gotten around to installing on my own off the shelf printer). https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/

Matt's current effort is the Poem/A1 rhyming poetry AI clock. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/genmon/poem-1-the-ai-po...

A submission got popular - Product Innovation is sometimes the Supply - and mentions the excellent very old Machine Supply, a tweeting vending machine selling books and notebooks. https://www.actsnotfacts.com/made/machine-supply https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/27/distribution https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41709429

Matt's blog is extremely longstanding & excellent. His work always finds playfulness & creativity, embodies that rich interesting Splime sci-fi internet that seemed so full of open potential when I was growing up in the 90's & 00's. Thank you Matt Webb for adding so much to my life! I highly recommend adding Matt to your blogrolls, & checking out his deep & prolific archives.

Definitely a tangent, but what an amazing example of the fact that you do not need a social media company to facilitate (and often ruin) the stuff that modern connectivity allows us to experience with other people.

Instead of complaining about the status quo and going abstinent, this sort of mindset is such a good alternative.

It's interesting to imagine what a market solution would do to this.

On the one hand, the vibe is very much "show up and let's talk like friendly socialized people" and I bet that's a huge amount of the joy in it.

On the other hand, perhaps the people who _really_ want to talk to Matt should be able to? And while imperfect, paying for is an unshakeable signal that you _really_ want to.

(Note: I started this comment eight hours ago and apparently didn't submit it, so maybe someone has said the same thing in the meantime. I'm too annoyed with myself to check.)

Other people's mouses and text selection is very distracting.

I don’t know why but I find this delightful. Just popping in for a chat. Lovely.

Same here. There are no slots available for the next three months. Nice idea.

Title should have (2020)

Like a Lebanese mathematician in a heterotopia ascetics dial the Delphic node - on an as-is basis.

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