I was honored to speak at AltConf back in June. I spoke about my first two years of independent life, and some of the assumptions I had about making the transition to working on my own stuff full-time. Things I assumed would be easy were really difficult, and I really struggled the first nine months or so of working for myself.
Video of the talk is up now. I hope you enjoy it.
The day I wrote about in this blog post took place eight years ago today:
It was one of those typical hospital sofas.
The rubbery, terrible green, squeak-when-you-move jobs. It was long enough for a couple of people to sit on, but too short for any normal sized person to lay down on. The cushions were made of some type of foam that probably should be reserved for things like dampening vibrations in car doors.
On that hospital sofa, on a Saturday morning, my family changed forever.
If you haven’t read that post, I’d love for you to take the time to do so. I think it may be the best thing I’ve ever written, no doubt because it came from the heart.
I remember sobbing as I published it.
Today, the little boy in those photos is eight years old. Right now, he’s at school. His little sister has gymnastics this afternoon, so he and his little brother (our youngest) will have some time with my wife this afternoon after class lets out. My money says they’ll play on the playground around the corner from the school for a bit, or maybe go pick up our dog from the vet if they’re done with her.
It’s a perfectly normal day in the Hackett household, which is the biggest blessing of all.
All of us, regardless of party, should throw ourselves into that work — the joyous work of citizenship. Not just when there’s an election, not just when our own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime.
I’ll be right there with you every step of the way.
And when the arc of progress seems slow, remember: America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We the People.’ ‘We shall overcome.’
Yes, we can.
Like a lot of people, I typically find the holidays hard to deal with. There are a lot of reasons for that — past and present — so most years, I come into the new year feeling down.
I know this about myself, as it’s been this way for a long time. This year around Thanksgiving, I had a moment, sitting in traffic and I realized what was on the horizon. While I am not fully in charge of my long-term, here-and-back-again depressive tendencies, I decided then to be more open and honest with a handful of people about how I was feeling through the holidays. I tried to make a solid attempt at being more engaged and in-the-moment as the holidays progressed.
I was afraid that all the normal stuff, coupled with things like the election, the stresses of owning and running my own business were and some on-going health stuff I’ve been dealing with would all prove too big to handle
I don’t feel awesome tonight as I type this, but miles better than I have in years past. Any time I felt overwhelmed, I repeated a simple mantra: I am blessed beyond reason. I am blessed beyond reason. I am blessed beyond reason.
Despite a cancer diagnosis seven and a half years ago, our oldest son — along with his younger brother and sister — all enjoyed their Christmases. They sang songs, opened toys and told jokes, together. Having them out of school for several weeks has been a true joy.
I’m amazingly fortunate to do what I love for a living. Building Relay FM has been harder than anything I’ve ever done, but it the most rewarding job I’ve ever had. I truly hope that when I retire, it’s from this gig.
If you’re feeling shitty or lonely or overwhelmed or anxious or down or defeated here at the end of the year, I would encourage you to find something good in your life and really think deeply about it. Even if it’s the very air we breathe, we all have something to be thankful for today. Holding on to that simple truth can work wonders.
Happy Holidays.
Last Saturday — September 17 — I noticed something as my iPhone 7 Plus was completing a restore from iCloud backup:
After picking the device up from my desk, it was clear the sounds are coming from back of the phone, possibly from the CPU. It seems to get worse if the iPhone is under load. It’s loud enough to be heard even if the iPhone is just sitting on the table. I don’t have to put it up to my ear to hear it.
In addition to the short blog post, I posted a clip of the sound to YouTube.
Before I recorded the sound coming from my new iPhone, I searched Twitter for people complaining of the issue, and hadn’t seen much. I posted the video and blog post on a Saturday morning thinking that people who were experiencing the same thing I was would be able to find it and feel a little less crazy about calling AppleCare.
What happened next was … weird.
Very quickly, several Apple news sites picked up the article. Most simply posted the video and recounted my story and left any opinions out of their posts.
Some people began tweeting they had noticed the same noise from their new phone. Others blogged that they could hear it, but only if they held their iPhone up to their ear.
Some sites reported that the sound was completely normal, and that all devices make it. While coil whine — the probable cause of the noise I heard — is something I have come across before, I’ve never heard it on the many, many iOS devices I’ve handled over the years.
Others suggested I was exaggerating or fabricating the story entirely.
This writing didn’t line up with the experience I had when I called AppleCare after publishing my post. My call was quickly escalated to a supervisor, who sent me to my local Apple Store to replace the phone. They agreed that hearing a whine or hiss from an iPhone sitting on a desk was unusual and unacceptable.
I’d like to clarify that I never claimed that the iPhone 7 Plus had some widespread or even critical flaw; I simply reported on what my device was doing.
Last weekend, the Internet didn’t care about my intentions. The video was going viral and it didn’t matter how comfortable I was about it or how fair the replies were.
As someone who reports on Apple here and on my podcast, I’m not interested in painting Apple in a good or bad light. I’m not in the business of being an Apple cheerleader, or bashing them. My job is to report and comment on my experience with their products and the ecosystem that surrounds them.
By the next day, the video and blog post were really taking off. The video was getting hundreds of thousands of views.
(As of this writing, it’s approaching 1.5 million views.)
Here are the my YouTube channel’s stats for the month that really show the impact it had:
By Saturday night and into Sunday, I felt completely overwhelmed. A 13-second video that I recorded and uploaded in just a few minutes was suddenly bigger than any other single piece of content I’d ever created.
By this point, almost every big tech site had written up the story. Popular YouTubers were making videos about it. My Twitter replies were a dumpster fire of people accusing me of trying to stir up trouble for Apple for my own personal gain. Most importantly, I felt pretty beat up by those who had rushed to the “other side” of the story.
I took Tweetbot off my phone for the weekend and turned off YouTube comment notification emails.
At this point, I briefly thought about taking the video down just to avoid any future attention. I decided not to for a pretty simple, but important, reason: I stand by the reporting.
My iPhone 7 Plus was acting in an unusual way, and I felt the need to share that. While some didn’t react very well to the story, it didn’t change the facts.
As uncomfortable as it may have been to see the story spin up into a thing, it didn’t change the situation I was in. I continued to update the post with my interactions with AppleCare, and just tried to avoid the avalanche of feedback it was getting.
On Monday, the story crossed from the tech media to the mainstream. I was contacted by Good Morning America. The NBC Nightly News did a story that my grandmother saw. I got emails from people saying they had seen the story in papers and on the news from the United Kingdom to the Netherlands and even Dubai.
Since then, things have quieted down. People who had a similar experience are having their devices replaced. My replacement phone is here and is silent. As far as I know, Apple didn’t make a comment on the story, even to me. Unlike Antennagate, Hissgate seems to have been short-lived.
I’m glad it is over. It’s not because I am afraid it damaged Apple’s brand, or my relationship with Apple. My job is to report on my experiences using its products and living in its ecosystem, and that may put me — and many others — at odds with the company from time to time.
While it was wild to see that view counter climb so high, it came with a price. Seeing the replies from people who just wanted to jab at me and reading articles that took my honest accounting of what happened and twisting it to defend Apple at my expense was hurtful.
The whole thing was just … exhausting. I’m happy it’s already out of the news cycle. I don’t regret reporting my experience, but had I known things were going to get so far out of hand, I’m not sure I would have done it.
Instead of running RSS sponsorships this month, I’m raising money in support of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as part of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Click here to learn more and donate.
In the nearly seven and a half years of being the parent of a child with cancer, I’ve heard this line a bunch from people sharing their own story of pain or grief:
It’s nothing like what you guys are going through.
I know what people mean when they say this. They suddenly remember they’re talking to someone who was told their baby had a brain tumor and feel like whatever they are saying isn’t valid in light of my situation.
For a long time, I struggled with this type of conversation. Watching someone fumble with a sudden pang of guilt — maybe mixed in pity — would make me angry. I can’t give a shit about your problem,” I would often think. Don’t you know my rock is way bigger than yours?
That response proved to be a pretty good way to damage my friendships. It took a lot of time — and therapy — to realize a simple truth:
Suffering exists on a scale.
For example, I have a friend who was telling me about his child breaking her arm on a playground. They had to rush to the hospital and have it set. It sounded truly traumatic, then he stopped himself short.
It’s nothing like what you guys are going through.
The truth I’ve come to learn is that for him, and for his family, that day on the playground was terrifying. It was the scariest moment he and his wife have had as parents. Seeing their daughter in pain and in danger was traumatic.
Just because my family’s worst day was more dramatic or more serious doesn’t mean I have the right to discount his family’s worst day. That’s taken time to learn, and it’s something I still have to think about when I talk with people.
I don’t know how my family’s story will end. I can’t tell you what the future holds, but I know the last seven and a half years have changed me. Some of it for the better; a lot of it not. Extreme situations have a way of boiling a lot of life away, leaving just the raw core. It’s hard, but it’s a chance to look at who we really are, and, hopefully, work to improve.
No matter what’s going on in your life, I encourage you to take a step back and think about empathy. It’s not a natural response — at least for me — but one I’m learning, day by day.
Instead of running RSS sponsorships this month, I’m raising money in support of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as part of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Click here to learn more and donate.
I’ve always had a strong sense that places are important. I’m not a particular sentimental person about some things, but my strongest memories are very often associated with specific locations.
I wrote about this five years ago on this very blog, when I trespassed in a hospital due for demolition visited an important part of my family’s history.
(Just a little warning: that post is intense. I couldn’t re-read all of it.)
I’ve thought about this part of me many times over the years.
Several years ago, my brother and I were north of the city, not far from the small, country elementary school we attended. I badgered him into letting me stop and take some pictures. He didn’t understand why I wanted to do it, but I was driving, so we did it.
When I left my job with The Salvation Army in 2013, I walked through the community center I helped design and built, taking tons of photos, trying to soak it all in while I still had an employee keycard. It took a couple of years before I could go to an event or work out up there without weird emotional tugs.
I’ve thought a lot about it over the last month or so.
Recently, my alma mater started tearing down the dorm I lived in for two years with one of my closest friends. It wasn’t a nice building, and I really only slept there, but I’ve been cutting through campus while out running errands to keep tabs on the demolition. I’ve stopped to take some pictures, and was disappointed to realize I took very few of our room while we lived there.1
Last week, my wife and I purchased her grandmother’s house, after selling our previous one. We moved our family of five into a home where my mother-in-law and her siblings grew up.
There’s a lot of history in this house, but it’s not my history. I’ve watched Merri experience some of the things that I thought were unique to me in our relationship. Several times, I’ve caught her just looking into a room or out into the yard, and I know she’s thinking about the time she spent here as a kid, or when she lived here in college.
I’m sure that with some time, I’ll feel the same way about this house as I did our previous one.
I don’t know what my point is in all of this. It’s just been on my mind, so I thought I’d share it, and encourage you to take some photos of your surroundings. One day, you may want them.
One year ago, I published this:
I’m leaving my 9-5 job to work on Relay FM, 512 Pixels and my freelance business full time.
The last 12 months have been nothing short of amazing. If you’ll forgive the introspection, I’d like to talk about what I’ve been up to for the past year.
In the fall, I attended both Release Notes and XOXO Festival. My Relay FM co-founder Myke Hurley gave the keynote address at Release Notes, and killed it. It was great to meet so many people in the indie design and development field outside of Twitter and WWDC.
XOXO was special for some very different reasons. It is part conference, part festival, and 100% awesome. XOXO was the first event I attended after going indie, and it was really great to have so many people (outside my regular circle) who make things for a living share their stories.
I’m still working on my fall schedule, but I hope that I can make both trips again this year.
I started 2016 with a renewed drive to work on 512 Pixels. I’ve been writing more, and added the YouTube channel. It’s hard to believe it, but this site is about to turn eight years old, and I finally feel like I’ve finally hit my stride with it. I’m more comfortable writing what I want to write than I ever was when I thought 512 Pixels was my ticket to self-employment. Now that it’s just part of the pie, I am enjoying a new sense of freedom here.
In April, my family and I flew to Maine, and spent a week at Camp Sunshine, a getaway for families with children who have catastrophic diseases.
The week we attended saw a wide range of diagnoses. We were the only brain tumor family,1 but we met parents of kids with Down syndrome, sickle cell disease, Wilms’ tumor and more. It was incredible to hear how many of their stories parallel ours. Families with sick kids all experience similar types of bullshit from school districts, challenges within the medical system and their own internal stresses.
The trip really opened my eyes that families like ours with pediatric cancer diagnoses aren’t alone in the things we deal with that most people will never encounter.
Camp Sunshine marked the first time since our Make-A-Wish trip in 2013 that I took more than one day off. I spent five days almost completely offline, and completely out of my work email and task manager. I came back recharged and refreshed, not realizing how overdue a break had become.
Relay FM continues to fire on all cylinders. We host a lot of shows, and I’ve spent significant time and energy behind the scenes this year getting the network to scale more efficiently on the business and technology fronts.
In just a few weeks, we will be celebrating Relay’s second birthday. We have a lot of fun stuff planned for our members, but I’m most excited about the fact that Myke will be flying to Memphis. We’ll be spending a week together hammering out some work that I think is critical to where we want to take the business.
When you work on something you love, it’s easy to lose track of time. I’ve missed family meals, lost sleep and been a bad friend, all in the name of work. Outside of a few small freelance projects, very little of what I do these days is directly billable by the hour, but there’s a lot to get done. I fear that if I stop pedaling, the whole thing will lose the momentum it has.
Of course, that’s baloney. Relay FM is a lot bigger than just me, but more importantly, having time and flexibility for family is one of the big reasons I made the jump to independent life in the first place.
I’m not saying I’ve completely blown it in this regard. I see more of my kids and wife than I ever did when I had a 9-5, but I’m working to make this more intentional. Very rarely do I schedule family time during the work week in advance, and that’s something I am working on changing.
So, what does Year Two of self-employment hold? I’m sure it’ll be more Relay, new projects, several more old Macs and some new adventures.
I’m ready.
My brother’s non-profit Operation Broken Silence has worked in Sudan and South Sudan for many years. They just spent two weeks in Yida, a refugee camp that has swelled to hold 70,000 who have fled the genocidal acts of Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir. The purpose of the trip was to film a documentary about life in the camp, in the shadow of the unspeakable crime of genocide at the hands of the Sudanese government.
Here’s The Memphis Flyer’s Chris McCoy writing about the trip:
“Yida is sort of a microcosm of what’s wrong with Sudan right now,” [Mark] Hackett says. “No schools, people who don’t have jobs, people displaced by the conflict. We wanted to go to Yida to get eyewitness interviews about what’s happening. But it’s also where most of our classrooms are. In Yida alone, it’s estimated that there are 20,000 to 25,000 kids. We’ve only put 700 of those kids back into a classroom.”
The teachers Operation Broken Silence supports are all local. “Before the war started, there were about 200 schools in the Nuba Mountains. Now there are fewer than 100, and none of them are functioning anywhere close to capacity. The schools that were destroyed, almost all of the teachers escaped, alongside the kids. They’re the only ones who understand the cultural context, and they understand what these kids have been through, because they’ve been through it, too. They’re better than any teacher we could bring in.”
I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but I could not be prouder of Mark and the work he and his team are doing. In a world where people are jumping up and down about headphone jacks, it’s good to be reminded that there is some serious shit in the world, and that people are busying trying to make it right.
During WWDC last week, I took a drive down to Apple’s campus with CGP Grey, Federico Viticci and Myke Hurley. Ticci needed to pick up an iPad for his iOS 10 review and everyone wanted to get a photo in front of 1 Infinite Loop before Campus 2 opens.
Once we were in front of the sign, we asked two Chinese men who were there as well to take the photo you see above. They didn’t speak much English, but they were willing to help us out, taking several photos of our field trip.
I offered to take their photo to return the favor. When the older man handed me his iPhone 6, I couldn’t help but notice it was set in Chinese. While that in and of itself isn’t remarkable, it’s the first time I’ve used an iOS device set in any language other than English. I snapped a few photos of them, smiling under the flags just as we had. They reviewed the photos, thanking me for giving them a hand.
Our entire interaction took place in just a couple of minutes, but it’s really stuck with me. It’s easy to think about the community surrounding Apple being our favorite group of writers and podcasters, but it’s far bigger than that. I don’t know if those guys were attending WWDC, or lived in the area and were just checking Apple’s campus out, but clearly they were excited to be there. Had we been able to communicate any more deeply, I’m sure we could have compared thoughts on the keynote and shared our hopes for Apple’s platforms in the future. We probably aren’t all that different when it comes to our interests and obsessions. That’s pretty cool, and I enjoyed the reminder that all around the world, people are nerdy about the same things.
For many women (and families) Mother’s Day is a heartbreaking occasion. For others, it’s a day of joy. In our household, I think it’s a mix of both.
That photo is from the weekend our son Josiah was diagnosed with brain cancer. That Sunday, he was baptized in his hospital bed. So many people from our lives showed up, the crowd spilled out into the hallway, with people lining up to visit.
It was Mother’s Day 2009.
This Mother’s Day, Josiah is still with us and is doing very well. He still has cancer, but has been off chemotherapy for several years. A check-up MRI is scheduled for this week, but assuming there’s no growth, then he’ll be back to being a first-grader and playing with his younger brother and sister.
Through it all, I’m reminded daily how amazingly strong and caring my wife Merri is. She’s the best partner I could ask for in life, and my children are incredibly blessed to call her Mama.
That doesn’t mean today is easy. The anniversary of Josiah’s story beginning is always hard.
Pain and joy are often intermingled in life, but in those moments, there’s potential for grace. I hope you all can experience that today as we have.
Earlier this year, a friend (and former coworker) of mine named Zac jumped off the ledge into his dream of opening a men’s boutique:
If you told me on January 1, 2015 that my year would consist of opening a store, running a brand, going to NYC, and going into debt I would have made a bet—and ended up going more in debt. If you told me that on December 31, 2015 that it would all be over, I would think you were the ghost of Christmas future that doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
His post is all about what he’s learned (and lost) through the experience. Although Zac and I’s companies are very different, there’s a lot in this post that resonates with me, and will for anyone doing their own thing.