July 5, 2021
It is OKR season at my day job and so it is OKR season in Buttondown as well. I think I am actually making a pretty good go of it, this time around: Two...
June 14, 2021
Anyway, my goal for this week: pushing out some customer portal changes! My goal for the end of the week is to allow all premium subscribers to pause,...
June 7, 2021
This coming week, there’s something vaguely time-sensitive on the horizon! Heroku is changing how they handle DNS registration for custom domains, which...
May 31, 2021
That being said, it’s time for some dessert work! Maybe I’ll treat myself to cleaning up some of my dropdown CSS or messing around with the search bar UI,...
May 24, 2021
It turns out the trick to completing a daunting project is roughly threefold: Whine about it a bit in various public forms Ignore all outside stimuli (and by...
May 18, 2021
Sorry for the radio silence last week. A double-dosed Weeknotes this time around, as recompense, focusing on two fairly divergent workstreams — one that has...
May 4, 2021
(Fool that I am, I wrote this on Sunday and checked it off of my todo list without actually scheduling the dang thing. Apologies!) All of that is to say, I...
April 26, 2021
This coming week, though — bug fixes. For real this time: I need to ameliorate some of the incoming customer service and bug fixes are the way to go. Honest!...
April 19, 2021
I wrote last week that my Big Goal for this week was to take care of the three most noxious bugs I deal with and to, well, stay sane. Neither of these things...
April 12, 2021
On the face of it, this didn’t feel like a productive week. I did get two things of note done: I shipped the standalone checker infrastructure I mentioned. I...
April 5, 2021
Pay-what-you-want is live! There are still some fast-follows that I want to add, as alluded to in the blog post, but overall I’m satisfied with things. (In...
March 29, 2021
I got a surprising amount of work done in the past week on pay-what-you-want! This is good. This kind of feature work is not what I am particularly good at...
March 22, 2021
There are quite a few apocryphal quotes around “overnight success taking ten years”, and that’s kind of what this past week felt like: it took me I think...
March 14, 2021
Last week, I wrote: There is some bug bashing that needs to take place, but I think finally tackling multiple-newsletter creation in a less janky way than...
March 7, 2021
Last week, I mentioned that I was gearing up for a week of frustrating (and hopefully rewarding) Heroku spelunking: dusting off the proverbial (and I guess...
February 28, 2021
The coy way to phrase how this week went is that I blew my Heroku budget out of the water. I woke up on Friday morning to discover that I had been...
February 21, 2021
This has been quite the week! I’m in the final stages of a pretty fun high touch sales deal. I spent twelve hours assembling IKEA furniture in my basement. I...
September 29, 2020
Buttondown’s newest mascot. My latest of reasons for being bad at writing is the most adorable yet: Telemachus, my ten-week-old corgi puppy. He is a very...
September 8, 2020
Customer service, that old devil. I was relatively sunny and awash with optimism last week. I owe a lot of this to a new strategy I was trying out to...
September 2, 2020
Logging and monitoring misadventures. Buttondown has been slow and flaky recently. I feel pretty confident that this is due to increasing volume: the ‘odd’...
August 2, 2020
Roadmap angst. So, first, the exciting news. (Well, exciting news for me): I’m taking next week off! This, of course, means I’ll be spending more time than...
July 26, 2020
Marketing, launched! For once I was true to my word, and I launched. In no real order, some takeaways thus far: People have been very very receptive to the...
July 19, 2020
Marketing, hovering over the "merge" button. It is so tempting: And if we scroll up a bit, we see just how tempting (and scary, tbh) it is: The copy has been...
July 14, 2020
Marketing V3, almost ready. Feast upon these glorious screenshots: And here’s what the task list looks like: I can earnestly say this is the most effort I...
May 11, 2020
Apologies for the late weeknote. This has been a low-energy, high-email week, where I would look at the end of my to-do list, see "write Weeknote" alongside...
April 27, 2020
First: hello from my new iPad keyboard. I’ll spare you the requisite bloviating about yet another piece of Apple hardware, but I quite like this one, and it...
April 20, 2020
I spent this weekend refactoring how Buttondown handles archival imports! First, what are archival imports?: if you bring your newsletter over from Mailchimp...
April 13, 2019
Reckless spending. Buttondown has a new Twitter handle, which also marks my first (and, if I were to bet on it, last) foray into social media account...
April 6, 2020
A short update this week, which perhaps belies the amount of work I got done last week; I think I managed to check off a roadmap item every day for the past...
March 30, 2020
Roads, being mapped. I have spent all of two weeks with a public roadmap. Some notes thus far: I’m at least a little bit incentivized to make things clean...
March 15, 2020
A new workspace. I'm writing from Seattle, which you may potentially know as "the COVID-19 epicenter of the United States." I promise this will be the last...
March 8, 2020
Mic check. Sorry for the, uh, [checks calendar] three month interruption in weekly Buttondown coverage. I wrote some of this on Twitter, but it has been a...
November 27. 2019
I am back from San Francisco! It was filled with Philz and, as always when I am removed from Seattle for too long, a deep sense of longing. Instead, this...
November 19, 2019
Project Honeypot I integrated a new scimitar into my weapons rack of anti-spam measure: Project Honeypot, which is a crowdsourced database of malicious IP...
November 11, 2019
2020. I am doing something that I have never done before with Buttondown, which is, uh, planning. This is all very uncharted and exciting. Here is what my...
November 3, 2019
Marketing! Some people go out on Friday evenings; I was one of them once, letting off some steam after a long week with a coterie of cocktails and the...
October 27, 2019
Marketing misadventures What have I been doing in October (besides neglecting to update this newsletter?) Well, marketing things. Or things that, if I squint...
September 16, 2019
Hello after a few weeks away! I spent two weeks in Japan, which was a trip of two fronts: A facsimile of a working vacation. (I spent the first week in...
August 20, 2019
Sorry for the hiatus last week. I bought a house. And moved into the house. This was delightful, and stressful, and I learned that I own entirely too many...
August 6, 2019
Cancelling Project Eyeglass. I wrote a couple weeks ago about Project Eyeglass, my attempt to build out an administrative metrics dashboard for Buttondown....
July 29, 2019
I built what I like to call a dessert feature on Friday — Instagram embedding. This is strictly not mission critical; I think I have had a grand total of one...
July 22, 2019
I’m in the process of working out a two new business models for two new customers. Neither may come to pass, but they’re both fairly interesting in their own...
July 16, 2019
I have not worked on Buttondown very much the past two weeks, which has frankly been a bummer. I like working on Buttondown, and not being able to fit it...
July 1, 2019
Welcome to July! I’m happy to be back in Seattle after a brief sojourn in San Francisco (as promised/warned, very little got done besides reading Lanny and...
June 24, 2019
Hello from San Francisco! I’m here for three days for work, which will likely mean a surplus of Philz and staring idly at the Bay in lieu of ~actual work~...
June 17, 2019
Sorry for the lack of missive last week! It was particularly hectic — my day job was a little more chaotic than usual, my bike was tragicly stolen, and the...
June 4, 2019
Panoply! I wrote last week that my singular mission was to work on Panoply (multiple newsletter support) and get it to a dogfood-ready stage. Lo and behold:...
May 28. 2019
"Blogging". I have written before about the urge to redesign a blog. It is a powerful thing to do, because it easy to convince yourself that easy technical...
May 19, 2019
Outage. I had a rough whoopsie last week: Buttondown @buttondownemail Ugh, pushed a change that broke login. Fix is going live right now. May 16, 2019, 1:34...
May 13, 2019
Money, part two. I wrote last week about some basic cost-cutting measures: If this works (the main risk is that there’s some large gap in how I’m doing email...