Life after Automattic: Week 5

Good news: my severance paycheck came in this week 🎉🎉 One of my biggest fears these past weeks was for Automattic not being able to honor their part of the deal. I can only imagine that having to pay 159 employees half a year of salary is a big sum of money to pay at once.

But they came through 🙏

🍎 Apple woes

Last week, I mentioned how I was locked out of the new Apple account I set up for my business, and could not access their Developer portal and make changes to any of my apps.

Last week, I was still hopeful this would be resolved with a phone call and a support engineer clicking a big unlock button.

Boy, was I wrong! This week, I called normal Apple Support, who sent me to Developer Support, who sent me to Apple Support, who sent me back to Developer Support, and they finally escalated my problem.

After a highly frustrating week, I'm now at the point where Apple demands me to pay a certified translator to translate my private company's incorporation papers from Dutch to English to prove that I own my own company — information that can just as easily be viewed online by anyone.

I get that they need to have some process to ensure that no one can take over someone else's business, but this amount of bureaucracy seems very un-Apple to me.

After countless calls and emails, not a single Apple representative could explain why my account was locked in the first place. Had this happened to my personal Apple account instead, years of irreplaceable family photos and memories would have vanished into thin air - all without explanation or solution.

🎁 Lijsje

Lijsje, my wishlist application, has been growing slowly but steadily. I'm seeing organic traffic pick up, and it has passed 600 wishlists now. Even though the numbers are small, I like lines that go up.

I didn't do much development work on Lijsje this week. Instead, I've started drawing out the next feature, a product finder. The idea is that you no longer need to copy/paste links but can instead search or browse for the items you'd want on your wishlist.

To create something like that, you need access to product feeds from affiliate partners, and to get those, you need to prove that your product offers enough value. So it's been a bit of a chicken and egg story — but we'll get there.

🏁 Endgame

I implemented notifications in Endgame, a feature I planned to add in the first update, but since Apple is giving me some extra time due to the account issues.

🌟 North Star

After watching a video about using Cursor to create an iPhone app in minutes, I wanted to give it a try as well.

My first attempt was to let it create an app to find ducks nearby. Why? Because ducks are fun.

I gave it access to a bird spotting API and let it do its thing.

After about an hour (we lost a lot of time because the API only has USA bird sightings), I ended up with a working app that shows where in the neighborhood there's a chance to see ducks. Amazing stuff.

Building this sample app reminded me of a fascination I've always had. Whenever I'm someplace, I always wonder about two things:

• Which direction is home?
• How far is it for a bird?

I always end up checking the map and being completely off. I used Cursor's AI once more to develop an app for my very specific fascination. It's called North Star, and it simply allows you to add places and shows you which direction they lie and how far they are (in km/mi and steps).

It still needs some work, but I plan to release it once Apple returns my account.

As for the premise of generating whole apps without coding - Claude/Cursor is genuinely impressive at this. However, it's still mediocre at project planning and tends to stack new features on top of each other without considering overall architecture. Using these tools without understanding the generated code will likely backfire sooner or later. In my experience, I often had to guide Cursor toward better solutions or ask it to revise earlier decisions. However, I cannot wait for this all to improve even more. Two years ago we found the first iteration of GitHub Copilot mindblowing, and it didn't do much more than offering fancy autocomplete, today we're generating complete apps. 🤯

It is a game-changer for this kind of small ideas I have all the time, though.

🌀 Misc

• I wrote a blog post on My 2024 programming stack.
• I moved two WordPress sites to self-hosting this week. It's remarkable how much faster they run compared to where they were hosted before.
• We bought a metal shelf to hold my vinyl records this week. It turns out vinyl is very heavy and the shelf started to bulge under the weight. I went ahead and designed a simple modular storage solution to keep the records together and upright, which uses interlocks to be able to extend it. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

✨ Up this week

• Today's a public Holiday. We're taking the kids to the movies later today. I'll be watching "The Wild Robot" with our eldest, and my girlfriend will go to "Fox & Hare" with the two smaller ones.
• I hope to resolve the Apple woes this week 🤞 Worst case I just pay to have some documents translated and have this all over with.
• If time allows, I want to start creating Wannabes's backend in Laravel. Currently, the backend is an old Meteor app that can no longer be updated reliably, with a small GraphQL API sitting in front.