Building a better backscratcher
What I’ve been working on
It is Memorial Day, and feels like it. It’s eighty two degrees in Seattle: we opted to stay in town for the weekend, catching up on television and chores and taking some time to breathe.
I’ve spent the weekend (which, I’ll note with glee, is only half over) cultivating a sunburn, reading Dorothy Parker poems, and working on Buttondown (which is how I’m sending this email.)
Buttondown has been my side project for the past month or so – its a small, simple web application for sending newsletters and emails. I’m really happy with it, and it feels good to have finally built something that I’ve spent years thinking about.
It’s not revolutionary, but it makes my life a little better – which is all I’m aiming for with my projects.
And It’s basically ready for launch!
I mean, I guess it’s launched in the sense that if you wanted to you could create an account right this instant. It’s not quite at the level where I’m ready to start actively marketing it (but what is?). The tires need to be kicked; the edges need to be sanded down; there are lots of boring things, like adding failover pages and error handling, still await me on my ever-growing list of GitHub issues.
This is still my favorite part of building a new project, though. The core functionality is all wrapped up, and instead of getting from 0% to 90% I get to go from 90% to 100%. I get to futz around with fonts and weird viewports; I get to add features I’ve always wanted to have, like automatic spell check; I get to write lots of tests.
I’ve cut the suit, now I get to tailor it.
What I love about building things that scratch my own itch, too, is that it’s already at a point where I enjoy using it. Instead of going through a painful process where I need to convert the Markdown I’m writing this in to HTML and then paste it into TinyLetter and then strip the formatting and then double check that the links didn’t explode, I get to just copy and paste and hit the send button.
Building things feels good. And I’ve been lethargic with my projects the past few months, but not this one – and I feel like that’s a good sign. Maybe I’ll get bored of it in a month or two, or maybe it’ll never take off. Maybe I decide newsletters are dead and abandon it completely.
Either way, I’ve had more fun building this than anything in recent memory, and it’s reminded me what I love so much about programming – when you strip away the endless debates about front-end frameworks and the toxic communities and the general treadmill nature of everything, you’re left with the process of building something, and sometimes that can be so. goddamn. fun.
Three things I really liked this week
- This collection of Polish space stamps from 1963.
- This article from last year about the evolving definition – and role – of hypertext
- This poem by Joy Ladin
Stay cool
Happy Sunday. I hope you get the chance to build something you love.