Life after Automattic: Week 6

I'm a frequent reader of Nick Cave's The Red Hand Files, and one of the most valuable lessons is how he sees creativity and freedom as an office job with office hours. He sits at his desk every day at 9 and starts writing.

As many of you know, I observe specific protocols to open the creative mind – I sit at a desk in my office and write, working exclusively between 9am and 5pm. Within ‘office hours’ I find my mind becomes genuinely free, and I feel a creativity that is qualitatively richer than anything I may experience outside of this time, in the disorder and distraction of the ordinary world.

What does it take to be free? 

I try to follow the same approach to coding and creation. Even now, without "a job," I force myself to sit down at my desk at around 8 AM and start being productive.

My day starts with checking the statistics of every side project I've got going on. After that, I decide what to work on that day, and start.

I don't set any boundaries for projects, and I avoid scopes or deadlines - I just work and allow myself to sidetrack as much as I want. I trust my gut and experience to make the right decisions, and I know if I make wrong ones, I can fix them quickly. It's around eight hours of pure chaos, and I love it. It's electricity and this way of working, which is both discipline and anarchy at the same time, sparks my creativity and energizes me.

I plan on writing a blog post about how this chaotic way of working beats project management systems like Agile and Shape Up (for me). But I'm still chewing on it.

So, what did I do the last four-day week?

🎁 Lijsje

Last week, I wrote:

I didn't do much development work on Lijsje this week. Instead, I've started drawing out the next feature, a product finder.

I'm proud to say that the product finder feature is almost done. It was a ton of work.

As an affiliate site, I apply to be a partner of webshops. The first step is to get them to accept you, after which you're provided with product feeds, lists of all their products. Every list tends to have another file format and other fields, so getting all those products in a database proved to be quite a hassle.

The first step was writing parsers & field mappers for the seven webshops the product finder will launch with. This was super boring work, and I'm delighted AI did it mostly for me.

Every product is stored inside a database, together with things like product category & brand. All this data is then indexed by Meilisearch, which is a very fast search engine with excellent Laravel integration and some nice features like AI embeddings.

On the front, I wanted the product finder to look like something you'd find on a real eCommerce site. [Pictures say more than words, so here it is]

Since there are now about 60K products in a database, I decided to use that data to create some extra pages where you can easily browse through everything:

I plan on launching this feature Very Soon™.

🍎 Apple Woes

Just like last week, I'm still locked out of my Apple Developer account.

Last week, Apple asked me to pay for a certified translator to translate the documents proving I own my business. In an attempt not to have to pay €250, I tried providing them with official French documents (🙏 Belgium for being tri-lingual), and because they have a French team, they were able to verify me.

Finally.

The next step was for me to provide Apple with a new account, which they'll make the owner of my Developer account. Because one Apple account can only be the owner of one Developer account. This means there's a chance this new account will also be locked at one point, and no one at Apple will be able to able to tell why once more. Let's pray it doesn't happen.

🌀 Misc

• I watched The Wild Robot with our eldest daughter on Monday. I highly recommend it; it's beautiful and heart-warming.

• Last week, I wrote about how we bought a metal shelf to store my record collection, but it turned out the shelf couldn't hold the weight. I designed and 3D-printed a solution so we could put the records on the cabinet. I was very happy with how it looked, but ... it turned out the cabinet couldn't hold the weight of the records either. So we bought a record storage solution, which will be delivered in a few weeks.

• There's a new AI Code Editor out that I gave a spin: WindSurf. I was pleasantly surprised: it was excellent in finding which files to edit and did a good job on completions and code generation (thanks to Claude 3.5).
  
  It's also cheaper than Cursor and offers unlimited fast requests (Cursor only provides 500). I don't think price should be that much of a deciding factor, because these tools should pay for themselves (like a good accountant) — but it's nice that they can offer so much value at $10/month.
  
  Theo did a video on it in which he totally bashed Windsurf, but he has since unlisted that video, probably because as an investor in Cursor he is a little bit biased and the comment section didn't agree on his opinions.
• In related news: Cursor bought Supermaven, another very capable (and fast) AI code tool. With all this rapid changes, I wouldn't take a yearly subscription to any of these tools and instead go for monthly.

✨ This week

• Launch the product finder feature of Lijsje.
• Pray to have the Apple Developer accounts resolved this week.
• Get Endgame and North Star through Apple review.