Weeknotes vol. 1: The end beginning of an era
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 like it’s 2008.
More from the blog
-
Foomers vs doomers: skilled incompetence and the AI tug of war
foom-er, noun, an ironic malapropism playing on doomerism (AGI fatalists) and FOMO (hustle bros), used to describe techno-optimists. Reflects the onomatopoeic "slowly, then all at once" nature of exponential growth: “AI go foom.”A speaker at one of the many AI conferences that have sprung up like garments on your "clothes chair" (not clean, but not dirty enough to wash) describes the miracles of agent-assisted coding. Year-long rewrites finished in a fortnight, backlogs cleared, and hard problems dissolved by brilliant prompting and clever code harnesses. The audience of true believers laps i…
-
Forward Deployed Engineers: AI’s hired guns
> The last mile of AI deployment is a real person, sitting in your office, learning your business, writing your plumbing, and making things work reliably. That will remain human for the foreseeable future.Google Trends shows a 5,000% increase in searches for "AI forward-deployed engineer" over the past five years. The curve stays flat from 2021 through mid-2024, then turns vertical. [Indeed data reported by Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-forward-deployed-engineer-career-job-openings-tech-2026-5) shows postings for the role rising from 643 in April 2025 to 5,330 a year la…
-
The sorting machine: recruitment’s race to the bottom
> The sorting machine was built to cope with a genuine problem. Where it went wrong was in mistaking efficiency for effectiveness, in assuming that the ability to process resumes fast meant the ability to evaluate candidates well. The fix is not a smarter machine but a more modest one, paired with humans who are given the time, the tools, and the structured information to do what they were always better at.If you've been involved in any part of the recruitment process, the last 18 months have been dispiriting, to say the least. Hiring became a closed loop. Employers adopted applicant tracking…
-
Weighing smoke: why GEO dashboards are mostly useless
> The promise of a tool that gives you similar search visibility to the pre-agent world is understandably seductive. But before you eagerly hand over your cash for a platform, consider whether an afternoon's work a month might be a more cost-effective alternative.I recently wrote about [the GEO chimera](https://betterthangood.xyz/blog/geo-practice-versus-snake-oil/), the cottage industry promising to optimise your brand into AI answers. My argument was that the levers being sold mostly did not exist. Another part of the industry is selling gauges rather than levers. Estimates of the spend on …
-
Another nice mess
Somewhere in your business right now, someone is assembling a picture that no single app can provide. It may be the project manager pulling hours from Harvest and budget data from the finance tool to assess whether the engagement is still viable. Maybe it's you on a Sunday, because what you need is not any one number from a system, but the pattern across three of them. The cloud gave small businesses access to the best software they had ever had, priced monthly and built for specific purposes. But twenty years of sensibly chosen apps have left the average small business with a patchwork data …
