April 15, 2019
Okay, fifteen minutes on the clock.
What is this?
Weeknotes is a concept I read about a while back that I've been meaning to try out. I don't write enough about the actual process of building Buttondown, despite many folks telling me that it's interesting.
(Plus, secondarily, I need a reason to dogfood multiple-newsletters-per-account, and this seems like a darn fine way to shoehorn myself into it.)
I dedicated April to be a month of small bits and bobs — paying down some tech debt here, solving a couple bugs there — and that's mostly already come to fruition. So many times I re-realize that my happiest form of development is the least ambition one:
- Have a bug or small feature.
- Cut an ~eighty line PR with that feature and some tests.
- Merge the PR.
- Celebrate.
But these are incremental gains, and I know I need to supplement them with something a little more... substantial. So this coming week should hopefully also have some non-trivial changes as well (DMARC verification for user's emails, moving transactional email to Postmark — neither are exciting, but they're both vital.)
I also had my first big Whammy of the month, which was shipping a change for nicer slug URLs that was completely broken (and also a sub-Whammy wherein I completely broke registration for six hours.) These feel so juvenile — like of course I could have caught them, of course I could have just done one better piece of verification, but I was lazy and overconfident and I paid the price. Nothing huge, in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly stings.
A hither-to unsolved problem for me, as well, is to balance the small day-to-day development tasks with bigger administrative things, which at least for me require much more focus and lend themselves less to context-switching (I can't just set up an AdWords pipeline at the end of the day while doing laundry.)
All of this sounds negative, which is unfair. 2019 has been great for Buttondown, and April has been too. If I can do the following three things this week, I'll be stoked:
- Launch Weeknotes in earnest. (I'm writing this right now because writing is the easy part, but I need to actually promote it a little.)
- Ship nicer slugs in archive URLs.
- Migrate my transactional volume to Postmark.
That's such an easy list! It's just step by little step.