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.
Chance favours the prepared mind 🍀
Luck has changed my life more than once. Every time, it showed up because I had already built something, starting with a Last.fm widget nobody asked for.
Doing the right thing, fast
With AI, a feature that took two weeks now takes an afternoon. It’s easy to do useless things, fast. The real challenge is doing the right thing fast.
Consistency is architecture, not virtue
What kept WebTranslateIt going for 18 years wasn’t discipline or willpower. It was boring systems that did the long term for me.
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.