Highlights I look for ways to limit the number of half-complete tasks I’m juggling. I brainstorm ways to talk with more of my early readers. I have trouble accepting a design decision in the Gleam language. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Offer a lower-friction way for users to pre-order my book Result: Switched from Kickstarter pre-orders to Stripe payment links. Grade: A I ran the initial pre-sale through Kickstarter, so I decided to just stick with it for subsequent pre-orders. After a couple of months, I realized Kickstarter requires customers to create an account to buy the book, which adds a lot of friction and discourages people from buying.

I recently returned a product to goHardDrive, a merchant that specializes in selling used hard drives. During the return process, I discovered that they were accidentally publishing details about thousands of their customers, including their full names, mailing addresses, email addresses, and order details. The leak When I requested a return from goHardDrive, they assigned me a return merchandise authorization (RMA) number ending in five numeric digits. I’m not publishing my actual RMA number, but you can imagine that it was a number like this:

I’m looking for a new programming language to learn this year, and Gleam looks like the most fun. It’s an Elixir-like language that supports static typing. I read the language tour, and it made sense to me, but I need to build something before I can judge a programming language well. I’m sharing some notes on my first few hours using Gleam in case they’re helpful to others learning Gleam or to the team developing the language.

Highlights The writing techniques I planned last month helped me publish faster and focus better. I need to find more ways to talk to readers about my book. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Publish two chapters of my book to pre-order readers Result: Published “You’re Qualified to Write a Blog Post” and “Good vs. Bad Content Marketing” Grade: A I completed these chapters and sent them to pre-order customers.