Update for the week ending on Friday, Sep 4, 2026

Refactoring English

• Started working on new blog post, “Antipatterns in Software Blogging.”

Book

• Declared 1.0 release of book
• Covered passive clauses in passive voice chapter
• Did final tweaks for 1.0 release
• Started researching the process of creating a print version

Website

• Merged together the purchase page and landing page
• Added a custom 404 page
• Added testimonials to the main page
• Moved the list of supporters off the landing page
• Cleaned up remaining references to “Early Access”
  • It’s now just a regular purchase

HN Popularity Contest

• Fixed Bunny Shield rules
  • I was accidentally blocking all requests to /domain routes
• Migrated the site from Netlify to surge.sh
• Migrated the Netlify function logic to a Fly.io scale-to-zero service
• Migrated CI from CircleCI to NixCI
• Migrated HTML checks from htmlproofer to lychee

Hit the Front Page of Hacker News

This is the site for my old course, and I noticed one bug and went down a rabbit hole of updating everything to my new patterns

• The bug I noticed was that if you click a section in the navbar, it just uses JS to scroll instead of updating the URL with the anchor target, so now that’s fixed
  • e.g., https://hitthefrontpage.com/#reviews
• Converted the site from plain HTML to generated HTML with eleventy
  • The site’s based on a template I purchased, but the code was terrible and was always such a pain to edit because it had tons of repetitive boilerplate.
  • Conversion to eleventy was a great job for AI because it could refactor and verify that the generated output was functionally equivalent.
• Replaced a ton of extraneous dependencies like Bootstrap, FontAwesome, jQuery
• Added better linting to the frontend
• Converted everything to a nix-based build
• Switched from CircleCI to CrowCI + NixBuild.net
• Moved hosting to surge.sh

Weekly Snippets

• Moved CI to NixCI

Mail Archiver

I’ve been meaning to take my old mail offline because it’s a lot of sensitive information to store in plaintext with a third-party vendor, but I’m deathly afraid of losing email, so I’m trying to be cautious about the move. I don’t want to delete a folder just because I think I have it archived and later find out I didn’t capture all the messages.

• Switched to batched JMAP operations
  • We were doing JMAP calls on a per-message basis, which was creating thousands of HTTP calls for large threads, and I realized we could coalesce together the
• Added more robustness checks to bulk archive jobs
• Improved performance of indexing and page loading
• Added email address auto-complete
• Added more filters for searching emails by archive
• Migrated to go-evolutionary-migrate v2

go-evolutionary-migrate

• Moved the repo from Codeberg to Codefloe
• Added a CrowCI/NixCI config
• Tightened rules on SQL filenames
  • I realized in Mail Archiver that I’d created two SQL migrations with the prefix 005-, and that’s something that the library should hard fail on so that we don’t apply migrations in unexpected order.

go-app-starter

• Added bash as an input to deploy-to-fly
• Migrated evolutionary migrations to Codefloe

NixOS config

• Removed myself from the docker group
  • After everyone made fun of DHH for doing this by default, I realized this was my setup.
  • Apparently, it’s a free elevation to root for anything that can run in the context of an account in the docker group.

Hacker News Observer

• Added tracking for stories on the second chance pool and invited lists
• Downstreamed changes from go-app-starter

Misc

• Had call with another founder considering a sale of their business
• Did monthly bookkeeping