Second brain
Notes in public. They start rough and get tended over time, so some are wrong in places and all of them change.
Evergreen
-
Deploy rules for a small agency
No deploys after 3pm or on a Friday, devs push to test and never master, and what "done" means.
-
Payments are a distributed system: the 28-second void
A payment provider that voids after 28 seconds, duplicates nobody de-duplicated, and voids that never retried.
-
Stop worrying, start winning: three worry removers
A cashflow spreadsheet, a system of systems for tasks, and tracking every minute. Then goals.
-
Inherited a web app? A due-diligence checklist
What to check when a web application lands on your desk, from versions and backups to whose card pays for the domain.
-
Plan a month on one printed page
Goals, projects with next actions, a blank printed calendar in half-day blocks, and an Avoid list. Expect 40 to 50 percent.
-
Coolify on Proxmox when your LAN is 10.x
Coolify's Docker network lands on 10.0.x and swallows your LAN. Pre-create the coolify network on a spare /24 first, and check it after every update.
-
Start here
What this garden is, and the way in: positioning and selling, running an agency, legacy apps and ops, tools.
Budding
-
Interviewing a sysadmin: questions and good answers
Passwords, patching, alerting, backups and two scenarios, with the answers I was hoping to hear.
-
Choosing an audience before building anything
List every group you belong to, then cut it down with four questions. My 2014 list as the worked example.
-
Pick a niche in three steps
Catalogue the problems you have solved, pick one with a case study, then say it in the buyer's words.
-
A positioning statement you can actually fill in
One sentence with four blanks, and the four drafts it took me to fill them in for Siftware.
-
Maintenance is a market you have to make
Nobody searches for web app maintenance until it breaks. Frame it as a yearly MOT, priced against what the app is worth.
-
Retainers: sell a monthly product, not discounted hours
Ten hours a month at a discount invites the client to do the sums. Four kinds of retainer, and how to sell one.
-
WordPress to Statamic, flat-file
Skip the starter kits, keep content flat-file, read the WordPress database with Corcel, and copy the taxonomies first.
Seedlings
-
Upgrade or rewrite?
Upgrade if it can reach supported versions and the roadmap fits; rewrite if the roadmap needs what it cannot do. Never more than a year behind.
-
Run a mastermind that stays useful
One sentence each of progress, problem and opportunity; a round table, a hot seat, and one big thing for next week.
-
Anatomy of a service-offering page
The order of a page that sells one service: positioning, pain, a better tomorrow, the offer, who it is not for, and calls to action.
-
Building a product on someone else's API
What I hit building Notebud on the OneNote API, and what the sign-up survey said before I built the sync engine.
-
Running a solo annual retreat
Review last year first, answer hard questions, start with a why, and fix the deliverables before you go.
-
Don't spend a penny on ads until you can track them
Tracking first, a lead magnet and the follow-up emails written before the traffic, and early campaigns are for learning.
-
Lead magnets that work
One problem, one segment, value inside five minutes, and it should not look free.