About

Where this came from

VivaOcean started as a shell script that set a colleague's chat status and turned off their notifications for ninety minutes. It worked for one person, failed for a team, and failed in an interesting way: the problem was never the notifications. It was that nobody else could see the cost of interrupting.

Every version since has been an answer to that. The Shoal exists so the cost is visible. Currents exist so the cost is shared. Daylight exists so the cost is countable at the end of the week. The notification muting, the part we started with, is now the least interesting thing in the product.

What we will not build

No per-person productivity scores. No manager view that the team cannot see. No history of who was down and for how long, beyond the current day. We get asked for all three, usually by someone who means well, and the answer is a settled no rather than a roadmap item.

The reason is not principle for its own sake. A focus tool that can be used to measure people stops being used honestly within about a month, and a Shoal full of performative depth is worse than no Shoal at all.

How we are set up

Eleven people, four countries, no office. We have taken no outside money and we are not looking for any; the product is profitable at a size that would disappoint an investor and suits us. Support is answered by the people who wrote the thing you are asking about.