Log

The site is live and the project notes are here.

Currently working through the actual deployment of the product to live production and staging environments instead of just local development. There have been a lot of decisions about when to build versus when to use services. For the most part, I've decided to use existing SaaS/PaaS services since the free tiers are often sufficient for the current state, and every layer except the product itself is already a commodity. One might think this would be the easiest part (how hard could it be to set up a Railway or Neon?), but it's proven to be pretty brutal for two reasons:

1. There is a lot of infrastructure required to get Syscribe to actually work as a product; I think I'm at 10 distinct services for infrastructure between web hosting, worker management, data persistence, etc.

2. Getting all of that infrastructure to work together is an education in credential management and surgical code changes.

All this has me thinking that there's another business opportunity here: something less all-inclusive than Replit or Bolt, but more comprehensive than the one-business-per-service experience that I'm using. This may be worth exploring after Syscribe.

I read a lot of science fiction and horror, but this twist was excellent — strongly foreshadowed and yet a complete surprise. And I am not just saying that because I'm an Expanse diehard (though, admittedly, I am).

Part geology book, part memoir that talks about one of my favorite meta themes: how we can learn about something from something (seemingly) entirely unrelated. In this case, Bjornerud uses geology as a complex metaphor for the trials and triumphs of life, and how deep study allows us to build connections that we could never otherwise construct.

We're about to launch an entirely new product to serve a market segment that is currently not served at all. Like any new product launch, the desire to "build until it's perfect" is a siren's call that has to be ignored for all the right reasons. Especially since, when building product, you know all the gaps, all the things you'd like to see, all the experiences you'd like a user to have.

This is probably the single biggest challenge I experience when making things: not the desire to get it right (since we'll do that in the long run, correctly), but the desire to be perfect out of the gate.

But we have to have the discipline to build, test, learn, and iterate.

Regardless of your opinion of him as a person, there is no denying that Craig Jones is changing the sport of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I find the approach compelling: "Here's how you've been taught to do the sport. Here are better ways to achieve the same goals that had not been considered because they weren't part of the teaching lineage." I love the idea of looking at the current paradigm with all its own internal structures, rules, and tribal expectations, and dismantling those expectations to achieve goals in a brand new way. It's a pattern I am drawn to — in BJJ, in product, in how I want to build Syscribe. Inherited structures aren't the same as good structures.

I raced the Craters Classic in Taupo and it was almost certainly the worst race of my life. I didn't focus enough on recovery since I was planning on training through the race and was over confident based on my win at the Volcanic Epic a couple of weeks prior. On paper, this should have been an excellent course for me: 50km, a reasonable amount of punchy climbing, lots of technical work. But it just didn't work out on race day. The lesson — which I already knew, but apparently needed to learn again: way more sleep the week before a race.