0.0 Context Setting

Wednesday, August 5, 2026 in Portland, Oregon. Today, the city briefly had the worst polluted air out of all the cities in the world! This jackpot is going great.

0.1 Events: How People Work, Live! ... with Dylan Wilbanks

This Friday 7 August it’s episode 5 of How People Work, Live! ... with Dylan Wilbanks! Who’s Dylan?

Well! Dylan Wilbanks is a longtime product design leader in the enterprise software world at companies like Apptio, HP, and Cisco. Through his consultancy Dillcorp he helps organizations large and small solve their user experience and content design problems through research and empathy. Dylan has been a mentor and confidante to design leaders at all levels of their career. His hobbies include volunteering for a freeform community radio station as a DJ and coordinator.

I’ve known Dylan for a long time and I’m super excited for our chat. We’ve had a good run on previous episodes talking about what it takes for teams to run well, and all of the hidden work of managing relationships, figuring out who to influence, and then combining it all with making sure you’re understood. That’s before you even get into any of the why-of-it in the first place.

So! Register to come along to the show! It’s at 9am Pacific this Friday.

Don’t know what you’re getting in for? You should take a look at previous episodes with Russell Davies, Pavel Samsonov, Erika Hall, and Matt Jukes.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 It Was Supposed To Be Different

I remembered the other day that I worked on launching Nike’s Fuelband in 2012¹. A friend in a groupchat posted an article that must have been written during the launch campaign, titled “BAND OF INSIDERS: How a rubberized fitness tracker became the A-list’s chicest accessory”, and... I don’t know if the article actually pays off on answering that question.

I used to be into all the quantified self stuff. I’ve written about it enough on here, so I’m due a go-around.

Meanwhile, Victoria Song covers wearables at The Verge, and I love their coverage. They recently wrote about what they track in a day², which is worth a read (briefly [sic], right now, the list includes: an Apple Watch Ultra 3, Fitbit Air, Garmin Cirqua (wrists), Oura Ring, Withings BodyScan 2, Body Smart, and Body Fit, a Twin Health scale, a Dexcom G7 continuous glucose monitor, an Eight Sleep Pod 4 Ultra, and a Polar H10 during workouts).

At peak, I think my tracking included blood glucose, weight, and activity using whatever activity tracker I had at the time, sometimes a fitbit, sometimes a Fuelband, sometimes an Apple Watch, or even at one stage Nike Running+ sensors for going on runs.

I started doing this when I was diagnosed prediabetic; at this point I’ve been type 2 for at least 10 years.

At the earliest times, I wasn’t worried about where any of this data was going. I probably started in the very very late 2000s, and ended up writing about it in Domus back in 2012³ and again in 2019 in MIT Technology Review⁴.

Fitbit was a startup -- now acquired by Google and essentially dead as a brand now, its software officially rolled into Google Health as of earlier this year. Nike was, well, Nike. The glucose monitors I used at the time were from legacy established medical device manufacturers -- it was novel to be able to export the data as a patient or consumer at all; Withings’ data was synced over wifi to their services.

But the quantified self was definitely a thing before I started. I remember Microsoft Research Cambridge doing research on lifelogging at around the same time⁵.

Look, I’ll say we were naive and excited back then. Like the MSR abstract says, “we” as technologists had just about started moving on from technology demonstrators to things that you could imagine hitting the consumer market in a few years. The tech demonstrators would be along the lines of: can we even stick a camera on a person and take a picture every few minutes and store it and then sync it to an archive? (a small enough camera, enough on-device storage, quality good enough to be useful) Can we regularly capture and store location data at a useful resolution for a particular purpose? The abstract talks about the potential of “help[ing] us look back at the past in new ways, or to reconstruct what we did in our lives, even if we don’t recall exact details”.

User-led, right? To help you remember, to help you reconstruct. The commercial use of such data would, I imagine at the time, remain outside the scope of the study but should definitely be considered should this technology move forward to commercialization -- is a phrase I can imagine might be in a paper of that time. What did they find?

Our results show that visual cues promote detailed memories (akin to recollection). In contrast locational information supports inferential processes – allowing participants to reconstruct habits in their behaviour.⁵

(an aside: Song in her article mentions digital twins and Twin Health, a medtech startup that claims to be reversing type-2 diabetes, “curing” seven in 10 type-2 patients[^twin])

I’ll cut to the short of it. This was different when I knew where the data was going. It was different when it would stay on my phone, or it was limited in scope. It was different in 2012, when the commercial-data-surveillance complex was nascent. It is different now. Isn’t it?

I remain skeptical. What made a difference at the time with my quantified self was not just the observation of trends, but the attention and the mindfulness. At one point, the discipline of pricking a finger to get an a1c reading -- which hurts! a physical sensation -- really did make it easier for me to slow down and be intentional about whether I really did want to eat that thing, or eat some other thing, or whether there was some other reason I “felt” hungry. From what I read of Twin’s app, it requires you to log your food. Food logging, a manual intentional act that at some point even included writing it down meant you had a much higher chance of slowing down and considering. So sure, I get that Twin is tailoring the feedback to make it more relevant: next time, eat this. After this meal, go for a walk, and so on. It’s as much my beat-myself-up mental makeup that makes me think: oh, I should be able to do this. I guess the point I’m making here is that I remain unconvinced about the actual utility of the data in Twin’s prompting, if that’s all it’s doing. Would a simple prompt of “go for a walk” do just as well without knowing the patient’s weight or a1c right then, or what they ate? My gut [sic] says it wouldn’t make much of an appreciable difference between the two, not when compared to a baseline of not doing anything at all.

But hey, you get data, and isn’t a decision backed with data, a personalized one, a better decision or recommendation?

One of our younger kids wanted an activity tracker. I got, I think, the wrong one. I did a bunch of research and there are shitty basic no-name Chinese watches flooding Amazon, we tried them, they couldn’t even reliably keep track of time. So it came down to Fitbit or Garmin. Honestly, I think I was tired and not thinking straight when I went for the Fitbit. I didn’t remember the Google acquisition, not until I went to set up the device and I needed a Google account.

It was supposed to be different. The data was supposed to stay with me. With a phone, at least, it could stay on device -- you want portable data? It’s in your pocket! How more portable can you get? You want to access it anywhere? It’s still in your pocket!

1.2 Reading Material

Hey, here’s a list of books written by Hallway Track guests. You might find some of them interesting. I mean I certainly did.

• Kill It with Fire by Marianne Belloti, on managing aging computer systems
• Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, by Mar Hicks
• Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, by Clive Thompson
• Ruined by Design, by Mike Monteiro
• Seacritters! The Hunt for the Jigamaree, by Lucy Bellwood
• How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World, by Deb Chachra
• Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World, by Georgina Voss
• Cory Doctorow has written a lot of books
• Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, by Brian Merchant
• Wrong Way, by Joanne McNeil
• Infinite Detail, by Tim Maughan
• You Deserve a Tech Union, by Ethan Marcotte
• Not all Fun and Games: Videogame Labour, Project-based Workplaces, and the New Citizenship at Work, co-authored by Johanna Weststar

That’s all for this episode. How are you doing? (Send me a note! I love notes. Even if the sole literal content of the note is “hi”)

Best,

Dan