We Are in This Together

Today, Jason Adams joined me and some of the other Automatticians based in the Denver area for a bur­rito. It’s a tra­di­tion we call Burrito Friday. Automatticians from a lo­cal area get to­gether for laughs, chats, and bur­ri­tos on some rare Fridays a few times a year. It’s a great way to stay con­nected in a dis­trib­uted or­ga­ni­za­tion.

Today marked the sec­ond such oc­ca­sion wherein we were joined by Jason, and just like al­ways, he brought with him an un­usual clar­ity of thought. We dis­cussed a va­ri­ety of sub­jects, but there’s one that rung es­pe­cially true to me. The im­por­tance of a mis­sion.

The Mission

Harper’s mis­sion is to en­cour­age and as­sist peo­ple with com­mu­ni­cat­ing their com­plex ideas and emo­tions. We want to lift the cog­ni­tive load that is gram­mar off the shoul­ders of writ­ers so they can feel free to ex­press them­selves. At the same time, Harper should­n’t add any ad­di­tional cog­ni­tive load. That means:

• Harper works fast. You should­n’t have to think about the gram­mar at all. That means you should­n’t have to think about the gram­mar checker ei­ther.
• Harper works pri­vately. You can trust us not to do any­thing ne­far­i­ous with your writ­ing. We won’t sell it, save it, or train on it. Your writ­ing is yours, no mat­ter what.

The Mission Is an Outcome

In my post last week, I talked about how fo­cus on the des­ti­na­tion is far more pro­duc­tive than fo­cus on the process of get­ting there. Harper’s mis­sion is the ul­ti­mate out­come. Ef­forts to­wards that achiev­ing that grand mis­sion will ul­ti­mately be more suc­cess­ful than ef­forts to­wards per­fect­ing any in­di­vid­ual step along the way.

Jason ex­pressed it quite con­cisely. So con­cisely in fact, that I won’t try to repli­cate it here.

As it turns out, many peo­ple (including ex-Gram­marly cus­tomers) be­lieve our mis­sion to be im­por­tant. Part of my job as Harper’s main­tainer is to find these peo­ple and demon­strate that we have sim­i­lar goals.

This is some­thing I ad­mit­tedly haven’t done as well as I could. I’d like to get into real con­ver­sa­tions with real peo­ple who care about the de­struc­tive busi­ness prac­tices em­ployed by Harper’s com­peti­tors.

To that end, I am ex­tend­ing some feel­ers. I’ll be reach­ing out to some pod­cast­ers and promi­nent mem­bers of the open source com­mu­nity to dis­cuss how we can make writ­ing eas­ier with­out sac­ri­fic­ing its hu­man­ity. Sim­i­larly, if this is some­thing you want to talk with me about, please reach out!