adam brault Hey, i just write here.

“To go back is worse”

A year ago, thanks to a rental car, a narrow alley, and serendipity, I got some great life wisdom from an Italian man:

“To go back is worse.”

There are moments we wish never happened and moments to which we wish we could return, but regret and nostalgia can be equally destructive sirens.

Turn the other tweet

I believe arguments are generally a good thing, but Twitter is the worst possible place for them.

The Internet is full of negativity. It’s unforgiving, unforgetting, and loves drama. It seems every week or so find myself or someone else saying, “Oh, man. Did you see the dust-up last night on Twitter between @someone and @someoneelse?”

The other night, a friend and I got into a random argument on Twitter. The thread was probably 15 tweets long. 20 minutes later, we had a DM conversation and we decided to mutually delete our tweets.

From my perspective, I was just in a stressed mood and made a snarky comment that half an hour later I regretted, but in short time it had become a full-fledged and passionate debate.

Debates have their own gravity. They pull us in just as much as they pull in others. Sucked into one, I can find myself arguing with intensity and length about something I’m only casually interested in. On Twitter, arguments get personal fast—responses aren’t even to you, they’re AT you!—and the instant gratification of a solid, clever retort is high. But the consequences just aren’t worth it.

Arguments on Twitter have a depressing rhythm to them. Point! Counterpoint! Insult! Retort! Like two bucks smashing antlers in a clearing, both sides are aware they have an audience. Very little substance can actually be communicated in 140 characters, so in order to make as loud of a noise as possible, Bambi gots ta bring a gun to a horn fight.

In any argument, people tend to say things they don’t mean—or at least much stronger than they mean. At the end of a lively in-person disagreement between two people who respect each other, it’s pretty common for both sides to apologize for their intensity and perhaps throwing a bit of spittle and the occasional ad hominem. “No hard feelings,” we say.

Not so on Twitter. Even if the two original parties who raised the discussion have settled it and moved on, permalinks and screenshots just cement and extend those feelings, with onlookers mounting them like a trophy rack over their blog’s fireplace.

By the way, this is what political debates look like: pullquotes and pundits. Find the sauciest lines, stir them with our own personal bile, and dinner is served! Disqus and Google Analytics will be eating for a week!

In a public forum with easily discovered threaded history, supporters and opponents pile on, cheer on, and jeer on. It’s now an opportunity for people to choose sides, pledge allegiance, and demonstrate where their loyalties really lie. And then the controversy becomes an opportunity for conjecture. What was a rift between two people—perhaps even just a temporary and situational one—becomes a solid netsplit with begrudged nodes circling the blog post wagons around their respective positions. Now, it’s a war.

So what’s the answer? 

1. Resist the temptation to join an argument on Twitter. Nobody’s immune: we all know better, we’re all tempted, and we all fail. If you do get into it, end it and withdraw as quickly as you can. Then shut the damn thing off and go do something else.
2. Don’t pile on, pull apart. Friends don’t let friends tweet drunk with rage. If your buddy was about to get into a fight, you’d grab him and hold him back—even if he was getting baited into it by a personal attack. Why can’t we do the same on the Internet?
3. Remember nobody wins arguments on Twitter. In real life, you are far less likely to convince someone to agree with you and more prone to cement them in their position. This is even more so the case on Twitter.
4. Picture the post. If all else fails to hold you back, picture the blog post with a screenshot of that tweet at the top of someone’s blog, well after you’ve personally moved on from the argument. Even if it’s clever in context, do you want that line immortalized?

Undoubtedly, some will disagree with this and they’ll have some solid reasons for doing so: disagreements of opinion are one of the most compelling and educational things that happen on Twitter and these discussions do a great deal of good in bringing up issues and perspectives worth unpacking.

But if it starts to raise your blood pressure or heart rate, it’s probably worth setting aside or finding a way to move it a different medium.

At least that’s the advice I’m going to give myself here. :)

Real tears over a real friend last night. And this morning.

We’ve had to say goodbye to someone on our team five times in the past year. Five.

At this point in 2011, we’d never had anyone leave our team. But I recently started using TwitShift to follow my own tweets from a year ago, so I’m soon to see the outer ripples of our first loss come into my twitter stream, with four more to follow. Each painful in their own unique snowflake way. Each wound still fresh.

Sure, coming and going is part of business. But I’m not a business guy. Yes, I’ve learned a lot about it and run a (usually!) profitable one for four years now, but at the end of the day, I set out to build a life I enjoyed and a team I loved to work with and learn from more than a profitable business.

When I was five, I started a club and named it The Weirdo Snakes Club. (Which is what my mom secretly calls &yet.) Today, some of my closest friends are people who were in that first club—and this one.

As I’ve often said, I once asked my father what the best lesson he’s learned about business and he said, “It’s about people.” 

If &yet had an origins story, it might be found in that conversation. A radioactive entrepreneurial bite combined with that advice produced……!  This!

This great and beautiful mess of loss and profit, disaster and adventure, fear and boldness, pain and joy.

A mess I wouldn’t trade anything for.

An announcement not involving going to a castle, but in my personal opinion (and this is my personal blog), an announcement that is cooler and more exciting

As a guy who lives for change and is embarrassingly addicted to novelty, I’m a pretty nostalgic guy.

For those of us who have used email for most of our lives, the nostalgia box is pretty deep.

I have one pulled up right now.

This particular email is from one of my best friends and closest advisors before I knew he’d become that. It doesn’t read quite like I’d expect that to.

I was, at the time, just 5 months into The &yet Adventure, a naive and lonely freelancer, sub-leasing a 10x10 office from Nathan Fritz’s company, Bridged Analytics—the office also simultaneously containing Nathan Fritz and Michael Garvin, the three of us and our multiple-monitor setups economically packed like cyborg sardines. (Of course, this was a full year before Nathan would actually become a member of the &yet team.)

The email simply reads:

  Fix your captcha so the value isn't actually
  hidden in the form. (put it in the session
  and check the post) Friend of the fritz.. -Adam

And that was my first introduction to Adam Baldwin.

The next was him walking into the office while I had my headphones on and scaring me so bad I physically leapt from my chair at his tap on my shoulder. (I’m a sorta jumpy guy when focused.)

But back to that first introduction.

Clearly, the capchta had a pretty humorous problem which I wasn’t aware of, but now I’m getting a fairly humbling email from some dude who I’ve never met about it? Hadn’t ever experienced that.

Adam Baldwin has this habit of passively assessing the security of every site he visits. In fact, he has dozens of scripts and tools he’s written to help him do this while he browses. Heck, the man has *job systems* spinning for this purpose.

As this, I’ve come to learn, *this* is totally Adam Baldwin.

This is Adam Baldwin, too: aka evilpacket, who in addition to poking holes in my capchta, uncovered Basecamp vulnerabilities that encouraged 37Signals to change their policies for handling reported vulnerabilities, found huge holes in Sprint/Verizon MiFi (that made for one of the most hilarious stories I’ve been a part of), published vulnerabilities *twice* to root Rackspace, shared research to uberhackers at DEFCON, and has on-and-off advised the likes of GitHub, AirBNB, and LastPass on security.

This a guy who out here in the middle of nowhere built a badass security consulting business while gradually advising this web designer into somehow building a 15 person software team full of people The Valley would love to get their hands on.

And now, somehow, this:

I get the privilege of announcing that Adam Baldwin will be joining our team at &yet as CSO—a double title: Chief of Software Operations and Chief Security Officer.

Adam will be adding his security consultancy, alongside &yet’s other consulting services, but will also be overseeing our team’s software processes, something he has informed, shaped, and helped externally verify since, I think, before most of our team was born.

Um, this?

This is awesome.