Life After Automattic: Week 4

I didn't like the ring of "Freedom Update". It sounded too much "USA! USA! USA!", so I renamed it to Life After Automattic.

For those who missed the backstory: Four weeks ago, CEO Matt Mullenweg asked all of Automattic to either get behind him or leave the company with a 6-month severance. I took the offer, and I'm now taking some time off to think about what's next for me, try out some projects, do some fun coding, and reprioritize life.

This week's update is lighter than usual since it was Autumn break—the kids were home from school, and I spent most of my time with them. I also caught a cold, which is my least favorite way of being sick. You're functional enough to do things, but everything feels like a drag, and there's just so much congestion to deal with.

Lijsje

Lijsje started gaining traction, primarily thanks to the Google Adwords campaign.

Made some notable improvements this week:

• Added reminder emails for empty lists and lists that haven't had any items checked off after a week. Once again, Laravel made this surprisingly straightforward to implement.
• I added a blog with some inspirational tips.
• I pimped my admin dashboard to contain some stats which give insight into the target audience.

Endgame

Endgame is ready to ship, but I'm stuck in Apple Developer account limbo. Last week, I created a new Apple Developer account properly linked to my business and started transferring everything from my old account. Just as I was nearly finished, I got locked out of the new account.

Every attempt at unlocking it has resulted in a 24-hour waiting period followed by...

I'm in touch with their support, but the back-and-forth is painfully slow. Next week's mission: try to reach an actual human at Apple.

In the meantime, I'm working on features planned for v1.1:

• Push notifications ("Damn boy, you only have 70 million steps left!")
• Support for sharing to TikTok and Snapchat

Misc

• We finished cleaning out the cellar. There was a lot of junk to bring to the recycling center. I'm so glad it's finally all gone.

• It looks like GitHub brought most of the stuff that makes Cursor the best AI-powered code editor to Visual Studio & Copilot. Most importantly, support for more models (they're finally admitting that ChatGPT sucks at coding) and multi-file edits. I'm planning to give it a try next week.
• The makers of my favorite browser, Arc, announced last week that they'd put Arc on the back burner while they work on a new simplified browser. Arc's been my primary browser for these past 2+ years and I've always had the fear that something like this will happen. Investors always want their money back.
  
  I've dabbled with the SigmaOS browser this past week, and I don't know. I like its speed and Apple integration (logging into Apple with TouchID is more fun than Apple's very flawed Passkey flow), but I miss the pinned tabs at the top and bookmark folders. And Safari Devtools—it's kind of like going back to the 1900s.