Update for the week ending on Friday, Mar 28, 2025

Refactoring English

The Kickstarter ends Monday, and we’re very close to the goal!

• Published “How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read”
  • This did well on Lobsters
  • It flopped on HN
  • It got a grouchy response on reddit
  • And then today, someone else resubmitted to HN, and it stayed in the top 10 for most of the day. I got lucky that it was a relatively slow news day on HN.
• The HN Popularity Ranking showed up on HN, which caused John Gruber to write about it
  • Fixed some issues in the metadata for the ranking based on commenter feedback
  • My observation: People in the 1000-5000 range are happy to be included. People in the <1000 range mostly had gripes.
• Added a pledge meter to the self-ads
• Started experimenting with Typst for writing the actual book.
  • It’s surprisingly difficult to just make a book because I guess it’s designed primarily for academic papers.
• Tried reaching out to CircleCI again about sponsorship

fusion

fusion is an open-source RSS reader I found when looking for an RSS aggregator to host on my NixOS system. I like that it’s written in Go and uses SQLite as a backend, so it’s pretty easy to self-host. The maintainer is very responsive to PRs as well.

• Added support for recovering from failures with exponential backoff
• Added support for feeds that use relative path links
• Added a dedicated method for retrieving a feed’s declared link
• Pulled the single-feed logic into its own struct
• Simplified fetching to only query a feed once per polling cycle, even on error
• Refactored the httpx package
• Refactor RSS parsing code into a dedicated package
• Unexported some symbols that didn’t have external usage
• Simplified an API from a pointer type to a non-pointer type

What Got Done

• Turned off signups.
  • It’s just in maintenance mode, and I’m not sure how long it makes sense to keep it online given that I’m the only consistent user.

Streamablize

My personal utility for converting videos to web-streamable videos

• Added support for a compression level control
• Fixed a bug that prevented webms from converting

Misc

• Scheduled next Indie Founders Western Mass meetup
• Swapped winter tires for summer tires on my car