The advent of LLM's and the subsequent explosion of developer tools for interfacing with them has made being an Emacs user better than ever. Since Emacs can be molded into whatever you want it to be, the latest agentic tooling can be grafted into Emacs and integrated into your workflow with little ceremony. I've experimented with a number of LLM + Emacs integrations over the past 3 years. First,…
Sitting on the porch in the Berkshires, it's 1pm. Pluto is laying out on the coffee table, tired after two days of hiking. Ran 10 miles this morning, Up our driveway, along the main road, down to the farm and back. Stopped to say hello to the guard dog next to the chicken coop. He's all grown up now. Going to take my father out for lunch shortly, we'll probably find a place to get veggie burgers.…
Sitting in the living room in the Berkshires, in the chair by the fireplace. Ran 9 miles this morning after waking up at 7:30am, groggy and tired. Trying to dial my circadian clock back to a normal cadence. My sleep schedule has gotten completely untethered from the norm. Re-inserting some level of discipline, isolating in the woods for a moment from social pressures and city life is helping so…
Sitting in the kitchen in the Berkshires. Looking out upon the meadow. Coffee and granola, 11:30 am. It's cold and windy today, albeit sunny. Pluto is sitting by the front door eagerly awaiting Julia (she is not on the way). Listening to Rubber Soul. Even when it's pre-bloom in Spring, it's beautiful here. Tranquil, quiet. Room to think. Last night I downloaded Transcribe! , a program for music…
Searching for the largest bang for my buck of what to spend time on next for FlyerFalcon . I’m at a fork in the road, where I could do more product work, or I could create web pages to get more traffic. My plan was to work through a “features” page ( which I finished yesterday ), write snippets about everything the product offers, then create subpages that go into more depth about each topic. All…
Yesterday I briefly mention that the first draft of FlyerFalcon’s feature page was done. Created Image Assets Picking up from there. Today, I spent several hours with my design cap on creating image assets to place alongside feature containers. They turned out better than I thought they would. Here’s the final product: FlyerFalcon’s feature page, in all of it’s glory. To be honest, the first…
The first draft of flyerfalcon.com/features is done. Copy is fine, will probably tinker with it more in the future, but trying not to spin my wheels too much. Tomorrow I’ll be creating some images to place above feature paragraphs. The existing sections feel bland, and definitely need visuals to help grab attention. In terms of moral, felt very unproductive today. I’ve noticed steep drops in…
Earlier today I discussed the short-term content creation plan that I have for FlyerFalcon . My goal is to provide a foundational set of webpages that thoroughly signal what problems are solved and the value of what’s being provided – for both potential customers and search engines. You see, this is my first foray into search engine optimization and trying to capture known web traffic with a…
A few weeks back, I spoke about a new project that I’ve been working on called FlyerFalcon . I’d like to discuss how I’m thinking about product development these days, and how this new project fits into my overall business architecture. Why I’m working on FlyerFalcon So, FlyerFalcon is the first serious “web app” that I’ve built, rather beyond a traditional website. Part of the allure of this…
I took most of last week off, which was much needed to clear my head. My wife and I walked on a beach, ran our dog around, and dreamed about our future. I always underestimate how useful taking a couple of days off is, to recalibrate and plot a new course of action. I’ve been feeling pretty burnt out. Not because I don’t love what I do, but because I just care so darn much. In the transition from…
In August I started building something new. It started as a small side project while learning a new stack (Elixir + Phoenix, more about this another time), but has turned into much more. It’s called FlyerFalcon , and aims to be the easiest way to generate paper business flyers for promoting businesses, services or events – locally. I haven’t spoken about FlyerFalcon at all so far, mainly because…
Here are some things that you shouldn’t do when building an internet startup: Completely rebuild your marketing page when you have meaningful web traffic So yeah, this one is self explanatory. Swift Starter Kits went through several product phases, each time pivoting the product and its messaging to reduce scope and increase focus. The biggest marketing page rework was in March, when search…
Today I splurged and bought a license for a video recording/editing tool called Screen Studio . It aims to make video creation from content recorded from the desktop, easier. So far, I haven’t been disappointed! The learning curve was minimal, and after a few attempts at recording a screengrab with properly timed cursor gestures I was able to make something that looked passable. Why did I spend…
It’s been a couple of week since my last update. I’ve had my head down working through an extensive ideation phase for the next Swift Starter Kits release, implementing a far more focused and featured foundation for new apps. Throughout the process, my thinking has changed about what this project needs to be. The previous two releases each had a different focus, starting with an authentication…
Between Tears of the Kingdom sessions (which is flippin’ amazing), I managed to get some work done on the Swift Starter Kits landing page. First, I updated the pricing section layout and colors, making styling a bit more uniform. Raised the price of the Team license, and added a higher tier with paid support + training. Separately, I learned that my LCP ( Largest Contentful Paint ) was really…
With the planning and ideation done , I’ve set to work on an iOS starter kit that will provide all of the infrastructure needed for a cloud enabled, subscription ready native app with reusable foundational features. To have a concrete usecase in mind while building this generalized kit, I’ve decided to build a cloud enabled todo list app. Afterwards I’ll work backwards and remove app specific…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the next step to take for SwiftStarterKits product work. Tons of ideas, but limited time for execution. I want to make sure continuous investment in the product line is time well spent. Up until now, I’ve written a fair amount of general purpose interface and infrastructure code, but nothing hyper focused on a specific type of app or problem set. In thinking about…
With the first version of the SwiftStarterKits documentation published, I’d like to shift gears to improving the SwiftStarterKits core product. While the existing documentation needs more investment, I simultaneously started marketing product features that don’t currently exist . Thankfully (?), I haven’t made any new sales since publishing some new marketing copy alongside the documentation , but…
I’ve recently been working on building out a documentation system for SwiftStarterKits, which I write about in detail here and here . Flash forward a week and the first version of this is shipped! It’s minimal and straight to the point, rendered fully on the server. The first version of SwiftStarterKits’ documentation has been shipped. Reiterating my previous discussions on this topic,…