Writing about async standups and self-hosting
On async standups, self-hosting, and what building the alternative actually involves.
Four posts so far. They get written when something is concrete enough to be worth a stranger's time: a decision with a number behind it, a cost that turned out to be real, or a comparison that is easier to make in long form than in a table. Nothing here is on a schedule, which is why there are four of them and not forty.
The posts
Why I built Morgenruf in a Tim Hortons in Kitchener
A Saturday at a Tim Hortons in Kitchener, a monthly SaaS bill, and one line on it: $2.50 per person per month for a bot that DMs three questions and pastes the answers into a channel. The post works through how small the core loop really is, what the weekend produced, and which features went in afterwards because they cost nothing once the foundation existed: mood tracking, webhooks, CSV export and an MCP server.
Read the post →The 12.5 hour standup: taking a team of ten async in Slack
The arithmetic first: a quarter hour a day is 75 minutes a week per person, and 12.5 hours a week for a team of ten, most of it spent listening. Then what replaces it. A scheduled DM, short written answers, one summary in a channel, and the five steps to get there. It ends on the per-seat maths, which is where the case for async stops being about meetings.
Read the post →30 async standup questions, by team
Thirty questions to ask in an async standup, in four sets: engineering teams, remote and async teams, managers and leads, and cross-functional groups. Each set says what it is for and when to swap it in, because the three default questions stop working once people answer them on autopilot.
Read the post →Geekbot and Morgenruf, compared honestly
A feature table, then the section that matters: where Geekbot wins. Zero operations, a Slack App Directory listing your IT admin already knows how to approve, years of edge cases, and a funded team behind it. After that, the parts self-hosting wins, and a straight answer on who should choose which. If you only read one of these before switching, read this one.
Read the post →What gets written here, and what does not
The subjects are the ones this project keeps running into: async standups and whether they actually replace the meeting, what self-hosting a small Slack app costs in money and in evenings, and the parts of building an alternative to per-seat software that turned out harder than expected. Where a post compares Morgenruf with something people pay for, it says where the paid tool wins, for the same reason the comparison pages do: a page that claims the competitor is bad at everything convinces nobody.
What you will not find is a list of the ten best standup bots of the year, a post written to hold a keyword, or an announcement dressed as an essay. Releases go in the changelog, and how each part of the app behaves is documented on the standups, coffee chats, kudos and celebrations pages rather than being rewritten here.
New posts are announced in GitHub discussions, which is also where to say that one of them is wrong.