Weeknotes vol. 4: Coding like it’s the 80s (with stickers)

By Garrett, : Weeknotes

A hand holding a fountain pen drawing squiggles on a sheet of paper, on a yellow background

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 ensuring the data is ready to be processed in an easy yet useful way later isn’t an easy task. And as I get deeper into processing thoughts into useful things, the decisions to ensure simplicity are getting harder and harder. It’s a puzzle but it’s a fun puzzle, and this week was very puzzly.

(I guess that’s why most software gets so bloated.)

On the design front Phil got to a good place with the marketing website and I’m ready to launch it yesterday. It captures Braindrop perfectly.

For the first time in 18 years my work day is spent worry-free with no other responsibility other than build this little software company at my pace and how I want. On one hand, this is a scenario that I wouldn’t have ever imaged given the road it took to get here, and on the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt to manufacture some urgency! As I write these weekly notes I’m realizing that the pace could be turned up a few notches.

Next week will see some hard deadlines added to the calendar.

Oh, and I ordered a limited supply of coasters from Sticker Mule! If you want to spice up your desk, join our email list and I’ll be sending to the first 100 subscribers.

coaster mockup
A mockup of the ‘Better than good’ and ‘Braindrop’ coasters.

More from the blog

  • A thick rope fraying and snapping apart mid-air as if losing a tug of war, with a teal arrow pointing one way and a small rocket flying the other, on a yellow background.

    Foomers vs doomers: skilled incompetence and the AI tug of war

    By Iain, : AI, Process, Hot takes

    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…

  • A businessman in a suit descends by a red-and-white parachute while typing on a laptop mid-air, drifting toward a small office building, on a pink background.

    Forward Deployed Engineers: AI’s hired guns

    By Iain, : AI, Strategy, Hot takes

    > 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…

  • A vintage mechanical sorting machine, cream cards each stamped with a person icon feeding in at the top and a chain of them spilling into a discard pile at the front, with an accepted and a rejected card icon to the side, on a green background.

    The sorting machine: recruitment’s race to the bottom

    By Iain, : AI, Hot takes

    > 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…

  • A brass balance scale weighing a plume of smoke in one pan against a solid iron weight in the other, on a blue background

    Weighing smoke: why GEO dashboards are mostly useless

    By Iain, : Strategy, Process, Hot takes

    > 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 …

  • A black bowler hat overflowing with a tangle of cables, plugs, and power strips, surrounded by floating app cards, on an orange background

    Another nice mess

    By Iain, : Strategy, AI

    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 …

All blog posts