Hatching Inside Medium

Airing our issues

Since the first days of Medium, we’ve had an internal version of the site at a different domain, accessible only within our internal company network. For inexplicable reasons, it was first at slowth.com. At this time, it was used more for testing/staging purposes than actual publishing. In fact, the database was dumped on more than one occasion.

It then moved to cupstep.com, and it evolved into our main platform for internal documentation and idea sharing. I couldn’t stand the name “Cupstep,” even as an internal brand, so I set out to find another name and domain to move it to. I settled on hatch.dm, because it was where we hatched new features, as well as new ideas.

Today, many of our 70-or-so employees publishes to hatch.dm on a regular basis (14 posts today from 10 different people). I’ve personally published 289 posts (versus 42 on Medium). Everyone reads it. It’s core to the company. And I’m constantly impressed by what people share about our work. I often think: “Wow, this is a great post, I wish more people could see it.”

In fact, the other day I wrote this on hatch:

what if a lot of our hatch posts were public?
I’ve said this before, and now I’m saying it again: I think a lot of the posts we write to each other could be made public, with little modification, and it might be good. The reason it might be good is hard to argue. I’m not picturing polishing them up and turning them into public-worthy posts. I just mean publishing them, as is. I find the idea of a company being transparent to the outside like this intriguing.

That idea got a very enthusiastic response (20 recommends!). And, thus, “Inside Medium” was born. In this collection, we plan to regularly publish, pretty much (but not always entirely) unedited posts that originate on Hatch for our eyes only. Our goal is to share more of how we think and what’s happening with Medium. It won’t always make sense. It won’t always be pretty or flattering (or grammatically correct). We don’t expect it to be incredibly popular.

But we think some people might find this experiment in transparency interesting. And, shit, we’re writing this stuff anyway.