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’ve been experimenting a bit with Gleam and Elixir lately as part of my search for a new programming language. One of Gleam’s flagship features is that it can call Elixir code and libraries, but I couldn’t find any examples of how to do that. I wrote a simple example of calling an Elixir library from a Gleam project, based on my beginner’s understanding of the Gleam/Elixir/Erlang ecosystem. Install dependencies For this example, I’m using

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.