The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Flawless. Victory.

Every couple of days, I see the image above: “Unicorn: The Journey of a Young Wizard”. At first glance, you might think that it’s some kind of online role-playing game, and you’d be partly right. In more traditional terms, it’s Shopify’s system for tracking your accomplishments, recognizing the good work of your peers and rewarding people for their contributions above and beyond their job description. It’s the Xbox Live Achievements system, but for working life.

What you’re seeing above is the upper left-hand corner of the Unicorn page. Here’s a screen capture of the whole page as it appeared this morning, with the text blurred out so as not to give away any of our internal activities to our Esteemed Competition:

Shopify is a techie-heavy company. The vast majority of the people who work here work in some sort of software development or support capacity. Even some of our designers come from computer science backgrounds. Most of us, men and women alike, are gamers of varying degrees and have played some kind of fantasy role-playing game, whether on a computer, game console or with paper and cards (in fact, as I write this in the early evening on Tuesday, August 2nd, there’s a Magic: The Gathering card draft taking place in the boardroom).

It should therefore not be a surprise that we have an online reward system like Unicorn, which uses Dungeons and Dragons terminology. Managers are mentoring wizards, non-manager types and strange rogue agents like me are young wizards and our projects are quests and you gain experience points and consequently level up for doing things. And as with Dungeons and Dragons, where experience and rewards can be shared by a questing party, Unicorn achievements can be shared by people who team up. I can also recognize the achievements of my peers by clicking on the big “thumbs up” button on any of their achievements.

If you’re wondering what these achievements are worth:

• First, there’s that sense of accomplishment. Shopify, like many geek enclaves, is a fierce meritocracy, and many of us feel what Dan Pink likes to call intrinsic motivation to kick ass at whatever it is we do. That’s why we’re the kick-assiest ecommerce company out there!
• Okay, there’s money too. There’s no harm sweetening the pot with a little extrinsic motivation. The bigger your Unicorn achievements, the bigger a cut of the Unicorn money pool — taken from company profits — you get.

Unicorn recently got a big overhaul, so I need to redefine some of my quests, as you can see from the screenshot below:

Want to find out more about Unicorn and its origins? There’s a story in Fast Company about Unicorn, with some backstory provided by Shopify’s CEO, co-founder and still-writing-code-guy Tobi Lütke. Check it out!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

…and in case you don’t get the reference:

My first day at Shopify was three months ago today. Since I have performed in my role as Shopify’s Platform Evangelist with skill, capability and panache and without any sausage-related mishaps, I have passed the traditional three-month probationary period and now a full-fledged employee of The Little Ecommerce Startup That Could.

I’d like to congratulate my coworker and teammate David Underwood, who also passed his three-month probationary period today.

I have no idea if I’m going to just get a simple handshake or if there’s some kind of sadistic “equator-crossing” ceremony involved. There will definitely be drinks!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Here’s a sampling of what’s on high rotation on my various MP3-playing devices. Lately, they’ve been synthy…

Midnight City by M83

M83’s upcoming double album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, isn’t due out until October, but they’ve let an advance single out: Midnight City. It’s big, it’s bold and audacious enough to open with a signature squawky synth and close with…a saxophone line? I suppose if polo shirts with popped collars made a comeback, the rock sax was bound to follow. Throw some headphones on for this one — and I mean headphones, not those blasted little white earbuds — and enjoy. If you like the song, you can download it, too!

The album from which this song comes looks promising: produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen (he’s done Beck, Goldfrapp, Mars Volt and Nine Inch Nails) and featuring guitarist Brad Laner (Medicine) and vocals by Morgan Kibby (Saturdays=Youth).

Blackness by Digital Leather

I’m a happy-go-lucky guy, but many of my favourite tunes have some rather depressing lyrics. It could be that I’m a closet emo kid or that I hung out with the “perkygoth” crew at Crazy Go Nuts University (Miz Tweendom, Hard Harry and Krazy Karl, I’m lookin’ at you) or that I’ve picked up some kind of “without the shadows, you can’t know where the light is” Zen motorbike mechanic mindset along the way.

Anyhow, I love this song, which takes a lot of opposites and blends them together: acoustic guitar and synths, folky and punk sounds, a mellow start and a rockin’-out finish, happy chords and dark lyrics and a willingness to follow the line “I’ve got courage in my heart” with the Bloodhound Gang-esque “Love is a thing like cold black leather”. Whether you’re nursing a scotch in an empty hotel bar thinking “What now?”, working out or moshing in a dangerously overpacked dance floor — and I’ve done all three in the past little while — this song will make excellent background music.

(By the bye, I have no idea why that old-school surgery imagery is included with the video. Whoever uploaded it must’ve thought it was a nice match for the song.)

Forrest Gump by Digitalism (with Julian Casablancas)

If you’re going to build a song on the Holy Trinity of Rock — the I-III-IV chord progression, as in Purple Haze, Smoke on the Water (which Deep Purple lifted from Astrud Gilberto and Gil Evans) and so many other songs — you’d better bring something interesting to add to it. Digitalism do just that with this track; they start with those tried and true chords and build up to a very catchy chorus and even throw in a lovely bridge for good measure. There’s a great pop sensibility to this tune, and part of that is thanks to Julian Casablancas (lead throat and songwriter for The Strokes), who co-wrote this tune with these two German electro-poppers. This tune will stick in your head.

Because it’s green-as-fashion, not green-as-science. Take Elizabeth May’s tweet, where she’s worried about electromagnetic radiation from wifi. Too bad she sent it from her BlackBerry, which emits non-ionizing radiation at frequencies in the same ballpark (wifi is typically 2.4GHz, mobile phones are in the 1.7 – 2.1GHz range).

I see that the National Post has caught this too. When the Post and I agree, strange things are afoot!

I’ll let Batman have the final word:

Found via Certified Bullshit Technician.