Weeknotes vol. 1: The end beginning of an era
By Garrett,
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.
Like this? Get email updates or grab the RSS feed.
More insights:
-
Go to the actual place and see the actual thing
Somewhere in a Toyota plant in the early 1950s, a young engineer stood inside a chalk circle drawn on the factory floor. Taiichi Ohno, the architect of the Toyota Production System, had put him there with a single instruction. Watch. No clipboard, no agenda, just observe what ha…
-
Climbing the Claude ladder: from prompting to orchestrating
Most people using Claude are stuck on the first rung of a very tall ladder. They open a chat, type a question, get an answer, and move on with their day. Which is fine, but it’s a bit like buying a full workshop and only using the tape measure. I’ve spent the better part of a y…
-
The path to an agent-first web
For three decades, the web has operated on an implicit contract between the people who build websites and the people who visit them. You design pages for human eyes and organise information for human brains, monetising attention through ads, upsells, and sticky navigation patter…
-
Generative engine optimisation: separating sound practice from snake oil
A new three-letter acronym is stalking the marketing industry. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making your content visible in AI-generated answers, such as those produced by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude. The term was coined in a 20…
-
Automating your marketing 01: Paid Search Ads
Google has always wanted you to believe that running search ads is simple and not as complex as it actually is. Set a budget (a generous one!), choose some keywords, and let the machine handle the rest. To be fair, the machine has become exceptionally good at certain aspects of …