Writing
Notes from the
build.
Occasional write-ups of the work behind our products: upgrades, migrations and the things that only show up once software has been running for a decade.
My forties crisis
Why I’m spending my forties building software for fruit importers, and why I think AI is a bigger shift than the internet.
Distill: a shared inbox that writes a wiki
What I know about a customer is scattered across emails, chats and screenshots. Distill is the internal tool I built to read them and keep the notes I never would.
Why I’m building an AI SRE for a one-person company
I’ve been the entire on-call rotation since 2008. I’m building an AI agent to take some of that work off my plate.
2024–2026: Starting again
Writing a specification against everything the first eighteen years cost, building a second company on the one channel that cannot be outbid, and the honest accounting of what actually decided the old defeat.
2012–2024: When the money arrived
What happened when the money arrived: paying Google for the right to be found by people already searching for my own product, competing against balance sheets instead of products, and the year I stopped fighting for growth.
2007–2012: Building it
The first of three pieces about eighteen years of WebTranslateIt — what it taught me about products, markets, and why I built my second company as the structural opposite of my first.
Upgrading WebTranslateIt from Rails 3.2 to Rails 7
How a team of two took a large Rails app from Rails 3.2 and Ruby 2.7 to Rails 7 and Ruby 3.1 in four months.