Weeknotes vol. 1: The end beginning of an era

By Garrett, 07 Mar 2025

This 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 good website and branding, which we finally launched on Monday. Speaking of Monday, it was also the 11 year anniversary of Good Work, the web development company I started in 2014.

Phil had the idea of a thumbs up logo and a table of judges holding up ‘11’ signs, and Leon really nailed the delivery. There’s nothing more better than good than having 4 opposable thumbs.

I wrote a blog post, which I haven’t done in a while and am excited to get back into.

Half way through the week we landed on a name and design direction for the app we’ve been prototyping away at for the last few months. It’s a productivity tool for web, iOS and Mac born out of my own daily frustrations. The name fits perfectly—simple yet distinctive. More soon.

I did some housekeeping by securing social media accounts, buying domain names, etc. I set up accounts for both Better than good and our first app on Mastodon, Bluesky, X and Instagram. Maybe it’s my OCD talking, but cross referencing the two things on each corresponding account, using a consistent voice, was more of a task than I had imagined.

I found qbyt.

On the code front, I got stuck on an issue with the Stripe integration for the entire week. I’ve been tackling the harder development challenges while design is being worked through—namely user authentication and billing. While integrating Stripe to manage plans, subscriptions, and payment methods, I couldn’t get credit cards to attach to users (a Stripe requirement for subscriptions). I checked, checked, and checked some more, and everything seemed right. Turns out I just needed to add window. to a single spot in my app/javascript/application.js file and we were back in business.

Phew, I feel a lot better about this week having written this all out.

Until next time.