Expanding to multiple ESPs
Well, gang, thanks for letting me soft-launch surveys last week. The results are in, and I promise to play by the rules: this week, a technical deep dive and...
Trading time for visibility
Today's question comes from Benedict: Do you track events in Buttondown and how do those feed back into product development? How have you changed what you...
Long-tail SEO as Crusonia Plant
little fascinated how an indie dev cuts up a day and how you prioritize the writing with the dev work. example: when did the 'comparison' docs become a...
January's goals
I wanted to spend some time in January setting up some systems for both writing and working that would carry through the rest of the year: I succeeded (more...
Q1 planning
I took a break from the mistletoe chaos of the dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s to do two things, both portrayed below: Triage Buttondown’s roadmap...
On monorepos
I wanted to write about annual planning, and how this year is going to differ from previous ones, but I have (in true fashion) procrastinated finalizing my...
Growth, ninjas
Revue and growth I mentioned a few weeks ago that my cockroach-esque strategy of "just stay alive while competitors flame out" had led to another recent...
Django-Ninja, Ruff, Helpscout
Sorry for the week off! I spent it in Florida with my soon-to-be in-laws (it was relaxing, in the way that Florida always is) and am digging myself out of...
Two recent design mistakes
The challenge/luxury/eccentricity of working independently on a big piece of software is that you make and own all of the design decisions. There is no...
Data onboarding
“Data onboarding” is a slightly bureaucratic name for a very boring and important process — bringing data from Service A to Service B when a customer joins...
The Monday after a big merge
This is a blessed Monday — the first one since early July that I am not sitting on a bloated diff that I’m antsy to merge. I merged in the editor changes...
Second order effects / grab bag
(A long overdue weeknote. The last two weeks featured a wedding and an impromptu trip down to Florida, so I haven’t had much bandwidth — thanks for your...
Bulk actions
A very late note this week — I was babysitting my nine-month-old niece, who is very sweet and also imparted upon me a newfound respect for folks who manage...
Inverting the tech tree
I have ranted a few times about how much I like the metaphor of a technology tree as a representation of a technical product roadmap. It does a good job of...
New marketing site / beta feedback / what are roadmaps?
A rapid fire of three topics, since I’m still feeling a little bouncy from my pre-workout: I. I, somewhat unprompted, launched my new marketing site. It is…...
beta.buttondown.email
First, to lead with something like a call to action or exciting news: want to play around with the new writing interface? You can! Head over to...
A brief eulogy for Heroku
https://twitter.com/jmduke/status/1562240094668525569 This was slated to be an uneventful week for Buttondown, and in most cases it was: I was traveling for...
Summer's over / Buttondown 2.0
Hello from the skies, and sorry for not checking in too much in August. Between a very nice vacation and a not very nice stomach bug, I was not availed of...
July 25, 2022
A brief love letter to Logtail I'm keeping this somewhat brief because I want to expand my thoughts into a longer and more cogent blog post, but I finally...
July 18, 2022
I performed a bit of high-pressure grape surgery this week with exactly one production issue (a far cry less than I was worried about slash expecting) — all...
July 12, 2022
A brief excursis on working A little less about the what and more about the how — I’ve been slowly triangulating on what a really nice schedule for my day-...
July 9, 2022
Multi-factor authentication I joke often about my product prioritization heuristic for Buttondown being “work on the thing that I’m most embarrassed at not...
June 26, 2022
ProseMirror is neat! I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this week, to nobody’s surprise. Last year Buttondown swapped out a very old javascript package for...
June 20, 2022
A bit more about the new marketing site I mentioned last week that I am tooling around with a new marketing site. The reasons for this, in no particular...
June 12, 2022
I wrote a few months ago about a critique by Brian Lovin (the best thousand dollars I’ve spent on Buttondown by a country mile!) and how it was dovetailing...
The new and old billing plans, by the numbers
Now that a full month has passed, I can actually take a look at how the new pricing plan is working as compared to the old one with some level of statistical...
May 29, 2022
Zombie branches Sometimes you have zombie branches. Zombie branches are little projects that are large enough to be difficult to completely set aside a day...
May 22, 2022
May 20, 2022 Two pieces of followup from last week, to kick things off: First, repricing work is officially done. "Officially" meaning that I no longer have...
May 11, 2022
The big news I led last week’s note with a teaser, and here’s the reveal: I’m working full-time on Buttondown. Okay, “full-time” is not quite yet the case....
May 4, 2022
(Sorry for missing last week! I promise you will learn why next week. It’s a pretty good reason.) Repricing is freakin’ live If you were to sign up for a...
April 13, 2022
Repricing: it's finally happening After what feels like years of punting, the repricing work is finally going live in a non-trivial way! This week marks a...
April 6, 2022
The case of the missing scheduler, part 3 It would be lovely (albeit unsatisfying) if this was an issue that evaporated on its own, like so many transient...
March 30, 2022
The case of the missing scheduler, part 2 I was really hoping that I would have some sort of juicy insight or breakthrough to share here. I... do not. The...
March 23, 2022
March 23, 2022 The case of the crashing scheduler This week’s tricky operational issue is one that is still a little in-progress. Buttondown runs on Heroku,...
March 9, 2022
Hello after a month of chaos! I am writing for you for the first time from my new house in Richmond, Virginia. In the past 28 days since my last missive,...
February 2, 2022
Hello hello! This past week was a quiet one: I mentioned that I was headed to the cabin with some friends, and cabin time was unproductive — which is to say...
January 26, 2022
I wrote last week about three painful queries that I needed to futz with: exporting all email events, aggregating client statistics, and time-series...
January 19, 2022
Buttondown had its first planned partial outage of the year. (Of 2021, too, if my memory isn’t failing me — but, you know, new year and all that.) This was...
January 3, 2022
Welcome to the first Weeknote of 2022! I'm fairly excited about this year (as much as one can be excited about any year) — the slate of work feels fun and...
November 29, 2021
(Apologies for the off weeks for the past two weeks! Travel, et cetera.) Checker, revisited As the year winds down and I try not to alarm myself with the...
November 8, 2021
A belated note about public archives In my excitement and/or delirium last week, I forgot to mention that I managed to carve out and ship one of my six Q4...
November 1, 2021
Good on my promises. I vowed last week to push out the list view changes, and I did! They're now live. There are going to be some hiccups in making sure the...
October 25, 2021
This week was split in twain. I spent the first half in Seattle, as I tend to do, plodding away on the ListView work that I’ve spent the past two weeks...
October 18, 2021
First, I suppose, the good news: Email filtering, such as it is, is done. My goal with the item is complete! My DataTable component has expanded and I now...
October 11, 2021
I started my first piece of the Q4 roadmap yesterday. It might not look like much yet, but I am very excited about the following screenshot: Why am I...
October 4, 2021
No big news, since I spent most of this past week trying to clean up the slate for the Q3 -> Q4 transition. A smattering of updates this week, then: I got...
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...
September 20, 2021
Where have I been for the past two months, you ask? I have been active, I promise! I’ve been around! I write a lot about the “good type of busy” and the “bad...
July 26, 2021
Hello from the East Coast! I’ll be here for the next four weeks, which will be an interesting stress test on how productive I can be without my routines &...
July 19, 2021
I’m working on the hairiest part, technically speaking, of the documentation site — which is search functionality! This is slightly trendy at the moment —...