After the Sundance
This week is a reminder that when you live in a place for long enough, you have to watch some of your favorite parts of it fade:
- The Sundance on 9th is now apparently an “AMC Dine-In Seattle 10”. This is apparently not a new thing — Sundance’s sale to AMC went through last year — but the conversion process got kicked off in earnest in the past few months, and now suddenly this perfect, cozy theater that had an excellent blend of pop and independent films (and served Sazeracs the size of your head for $10). Now it’s AMC: the cozy chairs are there, but the drink menu has been replaced with things like “Blue Raspberry Margaritas” and the movie pre-rolls are just like every other mainstream theater. The building is the same — hell, even the staff is the same — but it’s no longer an escape.
- Clever Bottle was the only perfect bar on 2nd. To explain this, you have to understand what 2nd is: it is a maelstrom, a chaotic barrage of smoke and booze. Dive bars next to more dive bars next to barcades next to sports bars next to Clever Bottle, which was this tiny little place of refuge amongst the chaos, all candlelight and tasteful cocktails. It was the first bar in Seattle that made sense to me: the drinks were strong (but not too strong) and the music was good and everyone was quiet and pleasant. And now it’s being replaced by “Mr. Darcy’s” (which, to be fair, is from the folks who run Bathtub Gin, which is a good bar!)
I’ve lived in Seattle for four years. This rarely feels like a long amount of time, because in a lot of ways it isn’t! But it’s long enough to be able to remember the way things used to be, which is perhaps the only measure that matters.
Technically speaking
I tried to be very minimal with Buttondown’s pre-launch roadmap, skipping out on features and automations that didn’t seem to offer adequate ROI:
- There’s virtually no billing code, just a basic Stripe Connect integration so folks can register their cards. From there, I can handle subscriptions manually.
- There are basically no integration tests: I do manual sanity tests before big feature pushes, and trust my unit tests to catch anything truly catastrophic.
- No A/B testing or heat maps: I’ve got a basic Segment integration so I can create basic funnels, but that’s it.
- There’s no email automation, for lifecycle or transactional stuff: I automated the process of sending confirmation emails, since that’s a critical path, but I figured I could do everything else manually.
…And this is how I found myself spending an hour three days this week manually sending people welcome emails, because I was too dumb to automate it out.
(I eventually automated it. I’d like to say it was because I realized that ten minutes of coding was a much higher-leverage move than one hour of emailing, but really it was because G Suite throttled the emails I could send from my account.)
Other writing
- I wrote about response times.
- I wrote about using weasel words like ‘simply’ and ‘obviously’.
- I wrote about code reviews.
(Sidebar: writing this much feels great.)
Three things I really liked this week
- This is perhaps the prettiest portfolio site I have ever seen.
- Red, a stark and beautiful collection of work by Igor Piwowarcyzk.
- Subway cars in Taipei that are decorated in honor of the Universiade.
Happy Sunday
I hope you get some sun.