Customer Support for Side Projects
I have been running a bunch of reasonably successful 1 side projects for a couple years now. Here is a (unfortunately, very much truncated) list of support emails I have received:
- Why don’t you have more Fernet cocktails?
- Why doesn’t this tool integrate with LinkedIn?
- Why isn’t my email sending?
I used to be very bad at providing any level of support, for a number of reasons:
- I got anxious receiving email.
- I got anxious sending email.
- I got anxious at the thought of writing something that might upset someone.
- I got anxious at the thought of doing work that wasn’t exciting or germaine to what I was currently focused on.
But I’m much better at it now! In fact, with my largest product, Buttondown, I am so good at support that a non-trivial number of people have been upsold purely on my response time.
It’s not just a good way to aid in the growth of your side project, it’s a very transferable skill — it improves your ability to communicate effectively, react quickly, and empathize with customers. All of these are great things!
Generators are dope
(This is also readable as a gist, if you prefer.)
I love generators. They’re one of my favorite features in Python, and criminally underrated. (Or underused? Either way.)
Enthusiasm
Here’s a sentiment with which I strongly agree: I say this occasionally to normalize it: I’ve never put code on GitHub I’ve never done coding in my spare time for fun, side project, or portfolio I’ve had a successful career as a developer If you have done those things— great! Maybe I will too one day. But it isn’t necessary. — Stephanie Hurlburt 🔜 GDC (@sehurlburt) March 3, 2018
Migrating from moment to date-fns
I got a lot of positive feedback from my recent article on how I cut my webpack bundle size in half, and a common refrain was how folks found themselves in the same position as I did in terms of deciding to migrate off of moment.js.
A handful of folks suggested date-fns as an alternative. date-fns has a relatively clumsy name but offered excatly what I was looking for:
- Modularity and tree-shaking compatability.
- Use of native dates
- TypeScript support
So I decided to take the plunge and try migrating: the surface area of my use of moment wasn’t that large, so I hoped it would be relatively painless.
(Spoiler alert: it was.)
A month with the AirPods
I bought them, you see, despite my better instincts.
I already had BlueTooth earphones that worked (albeit not well).
I already had a pair of Bose over-the-ears that are perfect for day-to-day work and for noisy situations, like planes and crowded coffeeshops.
And my army of EarPods (or, perhaps, EarPods knockoffs — I purchased five of them for like $50, with the understanding that I’d lose or break a pair every month or so) was still fine, though its ranks were slowly dwindling.
But I’d been seeing more and more AirPods in the wild, and decided to get a pair.
How I cut my Webpack bundle size in half
In the fall, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of front-end performance.
When I initially built out Buttondown, I was focused on two aspects above all else:
- It being built quickly.
- It working reasonably well.
Notably excluded from that list is performance. Buttondown isn’t a slow app, but it is a heavy one: the bundle size while developing is measured in megabytes, and there’s a non-trivial loading time for first-time users.
Now that the core feature base has stabilized and nothing is particularly in an “on fire” state, I wanted to turn my eye towards maintenance work, and a big piece of that was seeing what I could do to shrink that bundle.
Not The Keynote You're Looking For
I hate to be in the position of defending Apple evangelists, but there have been a lot of weird takes about the Apple leaks the past few days. Here’s one:
I keep getting tweets patiently explaining that revealing the details of an Apple event ahead of time is exactly like spoiling Star Wars
— Andrew Cunningham (@AndrewWrites) September 10, 2017
Which I guess is a compliment for Apple’s PR team - people view an extended ad for a $1,000 phone the same way they view commercial art
— Andrew Cunningham (@AndrewWrites) September 10, 2017
I think the comparison between Star Wars and Apple products is particularly apt because, well, Star Wars isn’t “commercial art”: it’s a meticulously managed piece of intellectual property. It isn’t a singular artistic vision: its the culmination of hundreds of stakeholders, producers, focus testers, and marketers. So much so that the director of a Star Wars movie just got replaced, like a poorly-performing engineering manager:
Turning 25
This week, I turned 25.
I spent my birthday doing the thing I want to spend every birthday doing: I reverse seared a filet, bought a nice scotch, and watched an old movie with Molly.
We were going to watch Bridge on the River Kwoi but didn’t want to start a three-hour movie at eight pm, so we watched The African Queen.
We have become so old. It is fantastic.
Creating a password validator component in Vue
Sometimes you procrastinate one feature by writing another. Even if that other feature is pretty small and inconsequential. 1
For me, that other feature — if you can even call it a feature — was password strength testing for Buttondown.
This is one of those things that I always liked on other sites, but didn’t really know how to implement myself!