September 27, 2021

I whined last week about having a fairly unstructured Q3 despite my lofty goals, and I think Q4 is going to (hopefully?) be a bit better. You can take a look at my (unpublished/unfinalized, but mostly all there) Q4 roadmap — repricing and then a whole bunch of small follow-up work.

It feels a little bit like cheating to shift my gaze from Q3 to Q4 when I've got a handful of things that aren't quite done yet. The subscriber-facing views are technically "live" now, but I need to start actually ramping up the flag and prompting folks to update.

(What are the subscriber-facing views? This is a long-awaited reversal of the single worst technical decision I made when building Buttondown, which was tieing the subscriber-facing views [public archives, subscribe pages, that sort of thing] to the same Javascript codebase as the author-facing views [writing, subscriber management, etc]. That has made it tremendously difficult to iterate on either without breaking something.)

Still, that's less "coding" work and more "emails and feature flags" work — much less scary. A friend asked me why I didn't just YOLO it and migrate everyone over, and I had to respond with the truth — Buttondown isn't quite at the scale where I can do that and be supremely confident nothing will break (people are doing weird things with their pages these days!), plus there's all the custom CSS that would break. It is a bit of a bummer not being able to unship the legacy views quite yet, but I have confidence I'll be able to do that before the end of the year.