Welcome to No Sevens!

This has been a long time coming.

If you’ve had the misfortune of listening to me rant and rave about some new piece of technology or a new paradigm shift hurtling towards us, you’ll know exactly what to expect. I’ve had a love of writing for as long as I can remember, and there’s no feeling more satisfying than communicating a profound or complex idea using an intriguing turn of phrase.

That being said, I never pursued writing as a career, per se. I never seriously entertained the idea of becoming a novelist, a journalist, or anything of the sort. My biggest fear was turning my love of writing into something that I had to do rather than something I loved to do. I'm perfectly happy in my current career, in fact. So what is this website?

No Sevens, a name that I will explain shortly, is the culmination of many years of stop-start efforts to publish my musings around technology online. It’s not something I have to do, but it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. Once upon a time, I started a blog on Medium doing roughly the same thing, and even carved out a decent bit of web traffic for myself. I was a student at the time, and one of my first pieces was a review of the iPad Pro from a student’s point of view. For whatever reason, traffic on that piece exploded and I got 500k pageviews inside of a few weeks. After that, midterms came along, my free time dwindled, and as I was only writing longer essays at the time, it became really difficult to start back up again.

In the interim years, I’ve started countless free trials for Squarespace, Wordpress, and the like with the intention of starting a separate website where my writing could live. But again, if I wanted to really dedicate myself to publishing a bunch of essays every month, I told myself I didn’t have time and the free trials inevitably expired.

What if I wasn’t forcing myself to publish a bunch of essays every month? I asked myself that question a little while ago. With all the moxie of a New Year’s Resolution in tow, I decided that not everything needs to be as long as War and Peace to warrant publishing online. If you’ve ever read Daring Fireball, you know what I’m getting at. Perhaps, given the state of “microblogging” online (X, Threads, Mastodon, etc), this is a good opportunity for me to create a home for my own “tweets,” if we’re still calling them that.

So, No Sevens is two things:

• A place for those longer, more expansive essays on some of today’s meatier topics, &
• A new home for smaller, bite-sized thoughts or commentary on something I’ve seen online (à la Daring Fireball).

But what about the name of the site, No Sevens? What’s that all about?

I’m so glad you asked. There’s an episode from 2019 of my favourite podcast, the Vergecast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, at about 1:01:30), where they describe an inside joke where you imagine a world where nothing gets a 7 out of 10. You have to give it a higher or lower score (whole numbers only). This forces people to make a judgement call on whether something is good or not and removes some of the stereotypical Canadian politeness from the equation.

I use this a lot when I ask people to rate a movie they’ve just seen out of 10. If they give me a 7, I tell them all about the World of No Sevens, and then they typically revise their score to a 6, because that’s usually what a 7 converts to when probed under cross-examination. I’m a lot of fun at parties.

So that’s what I decided to call my new website! All of my posts on this site will have a score at the bottom out of 10, and my pledge to you, the reader, is that none of these scores will ever be a 7.

For this opening monologue, I guess the score should really be reflective of the site as it currently exists, although I’m sure people will also have some thoughts about my writing style. The site is definitely still in beta. I'm using Ghost.io since I thought it could be cool to deliver some of my longer essays in email form directly to your inbox, so sign up if that’s your cup of tea! Any emails you receive will be strictly for the longer essays, and there won’t be more than 1-2 per month, because everyone deserves a little more breathing room in their inbox to start off a new year.

3/10 - I’ve got a lot of work to do, but it’s a promising start!