All blog posts
-
Fall back
What creative studios and dev shops need to do to stay relevant in the AI era without becoming commoditized slop. What’s covered: Your people are your moat · Easy to do, hard to be the best · Quality and simplicity · Never look to others · Don’t ignore the future · What I woul…
-
On getting paid faster
These five cashflow levers are arguably the quickest, easiest wins when optimizing your service business. Frequency of online payment deposits Update your online payment system to deposit into your bank account daily instead of weekly. Or whatever the quickest interval availab…
-
Reading between the lines
There’s a lot to learn in a professional services business between the day you open your doors and the day you sell or retire or whatever it is you do next. And there are a million different angles you can take to improve the future based on the past. Here is a line graph of my…
-
The stuff between
Simply put, your service business in its most raw form look something like this: Stuff → Lead; Lead → stuff → Signed contract; Signed contract → stuff → Start; Start → stuff → Complete; Complete → stuff → Aftercare. And there’s a level of automation and organizatio…
-
Zero busy work
AI has given us a lot of things. When used incorrectly, your brain turns to mush. When used correctly, it frees you to be original, strategic and creative. Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is the idea of zero busy work. This isn’t just about productivity, but abo…
-
Weeknotes vol. 16: Where have all the weeknotes gone?
I’ve been called out more times than not over the last few months about breaking my weeknotes streak. After selling Good Work my master plan has always been to turn work into a mix of: create interesting things, consulting for others doing interesting things, and acquire pre-ex…
-
Principles and systems to optimize your service business
One of the greatest challenges in starting and owning a service business is the shift from doing the work to building the business that does the work, and then optimizing that business to be better than everyone else doing similar work. In December of last year I sold the web d…
-
Weeknotes vol. 15: Professional admin dashboard maker and Mac app polisher
It was another short summer week but I was able to get quite a bit done. I spent the entirety of Monday turning my garage into a work of art, but Tuesday through Thursday was all about Braindrop. Until this week the production database has been a bit of a black hole and I neede…
-
Weeknotes vol. 14: More pool, less computer
There was a lot of play this week and not a lot of work, but I still got some stuff done. #summer There are a few ultra early beta testers for Braindrop, and, thanks to Matt, our test suite grew a little bit. We’re up to 42 tests (14 model, 13 controller, 3 jobs and 12 service …
-
Weeknotes vol. 13: May the thirtieth be with you
This week I reached the part of making stuff where all of the sudden you don’t have much to do. Aside from spending a few more days in polish-town, shipping is upon us for Braindrop for Mac beta. Here, have yourself another teaser: A screenshot of the Braindrop welcome s…
-
Weeknotes vol. 12: Teaser site, settings screens and new ideas
I got sucked in by the last week of school activities, so not a lot to report other than end-of-year parties and swimming and grilling and swimming. We launched a teaser website for Braindrop on Tuesday so that people can sign-up to become beta testers once we’re ready. It’s Ph…
-
Weeknotes vol. 11: “Basically done.”
Another week! Lets see what happened, shall we? Phil and I started the week with a Braindrop strategy meeting to revisit the scope of work and what comes in what phase, etc. Braindrop for Mac is ‘basically done’, and if you make stuff on the computer then you know what that me…
-
Weeknotes vol. 10: Back in the CSSaddle
This week I got to jump into CSS again (not just prototype stuff but production stuff). Which for me is kind of like eating a cheeseburger. My focus the last 6 months has been in Rails development, though my speciality is front-end (as in the original definition of front-end). …
-
Weeknotes vol. 9: Micro-apps and nursery rhymes on Rails
I skipped this week due to dad duties, and Phil’s off traveling the world, but there was still some activity worth noting. A couple of weeks ago I talked to Christoph about a simple journaling idea I sketched out back in 2017 which will be our first of many micro-apps to releas…
-
Weeknotes vol. 8: Active Storage and shipping baby no. 6
I had two (big) tasks this week (which as per usual I’m writing after the fact): Get file uploads integrated into the app with Active Storage Bring my beautiful wife to the hospital on Friday to ship baby no. 6 I’ll stick to the nerdy stuff for this post though. There’s…
-
Weeknotes vol 7: Here ye here ye, Braindrop hath reached 100 commits
Another week down the hatch. As I said last week, we made big progress on the Web/Mac app design, and I wanted to get the prototype updated as soon as possible so that we could interact with the design decisions and make future desisions from there. So, I spent most of the week…
-
Weeknotes vol. 6: Web and hybrid and native, oh my!
(It’s Tuesday but I’m pretending it’s last Friday.) I’ve gone back and forth on Native v.s. Web v.s. Hybrid v.s. Native v.s. ∞ quite a bit. There are pros and cons to all of the options, but, for the initial launch, I have officially landed on the following: Web app (Rails,…
-
Weeknotes vol. 5: A month of cool stuff, a listicle
As of yesterday I’m officially a month into this new venture. I remember when Good Work grew to the size that we were getting more done in a month than I did in the first year, which is a good light at the end of the tunnel that the effort done in the last month at Better Than …
-
Weeknotes vol. 4: Coding like it’s the 80s (with stickers)
This week saw major progress with both the web based application and the marketing website. Granted, I did find the Code Like It’s the 80s playlist by JetBrains on Spotify which has been quite the productivity booster. Making thought capturing as simple as it can be while ensur…
-
Weeknotes vol. 3: 404, Chunk not found
It was a short week at Better Than Good HQ but we packed in as much as we could. We moved both design and development down the field a bit, which sometimes is all you can ask for! Delegated types v.s. single table inheritance I started noticing quite a bit of overlap in Braind…
-
The road to Braindrop
I spent the majority of 2024 considering my next chapter. Alongside the team at Good Work I’d spent the previous 10 years starting, running and optimizing the company into a well oiled machine. For the last few years, it simply ‘just worked’. There’s a lot of chatter about how…
-
Weeknotes vol. 2: In the rabbit holes we find marketing goals
I remember when I started seeing weeknotes pop up and thought they were silly, but the accountability alone is worth it. This week I found myself writing out big things I needed to do (not saying that I did them) for the sheer fact that I had to put them on the internet in five …
-
Weeknotes vol. 1: The
endbeginning of an eraThis was a big week and a good one to start doing weeknotes. I moved into a cozy new office that’s much closer to the house than the one I had downtown. It came with a standing desk, too, so I’m all tech’d up and ready to go. Phil and Leon had been working on the Better Than G…
-
Hello, world!
It’s been a while since I sat behind the wheel of a fresh new website. The last first blog post I wrote was in 2014 shortly after starting Good Work, the web development agency that I started and ran for over 10 years. Before that was Erskine Design and before that was a web de…
