- Life
- We took the train from SF to Chicago. People say it’s one of the most beautiful train rides in the world (the typical American thing to say), and the best part was meeting people along the way, mostly retired couples and a young tech guy afraid of flying.
- Chicago surprised us. Public transportation, bike lanes, a lake that looks like a beach, cheaper rents than the Bay and a shorter flight to Brazil. It seems too good to be true, so there must be something we haven’t found yet (the winter, probably). We’re strongly considering moving there next year.
- Back in the Bay, now house sitting in El Cerrito with Ellie, in a house with one of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen and nothing within walking distance except trails. The neighbors walk together every morning at 7:15, which is a great excuse to wake up early. Waking up before 7 is so cool, the mornings get so much longer.
- Work
- Finished moving all my sites off Namecheap, which was way easier than I thought, and wrote about it in Cloudflare Built EmDash. I Built NeighDash. NeighDash is public now, in case it helps someone else leave WordPress. Reddit, as usual, either removed my posts or sent the haters 😛
- Started two new alarms: Exercise Alarm, which you can only stop by doing your squats or push ups, and Loud Birds, for people who sleep through everything. Before building more of them, I ran small ad tests for each idea. Bird Rise still beats all of them, and Loud Birds came out as the most expensive one.
- Biggest ads surprise of the month: running the Bird Rise campaigns worldwide, optimized for an event right before the paywall instead of installs, found the winning ads much faster. Downloads spiked and the trial start rate dropped by half, so now I’m waiting to see if the volume makes up for it.
- Made a new batch of Bird Rise ad videos with my own AI video editor, it edits real footage, not generative sloppy videos, and they turned out good enough that I didn’t have to touch a single one. I also made a little tool that generates simple ad images, so I can test ideas without opening Figma.
- Our bird articles show up on Google, sometimes in first place, but almost nobody clicks (thanks, AI summaries). They’re a long term bet anyway.
- Playing with a little photo app that sharpens zoomed in pictures of birds and landscapes. It’s mostly for me, and it has been giving me some deep thoughts about what a picture even is (a post is coming).
- BirDJ is on its way to the App Store, after fixing both things App Review didn’t like.
- Working on too many projects in parallel on the same day is not good, I’m learning that one again.
- Relaxing
- Slow afternoons in Berkeley, hopping between coffee shops and daydreaming about where we’ll live next.
- Exercise
- Mostly walking. Chicago is so walkable that we overdid it, and in El Cerrito I joined the neighbors’ 7:15 walk with Ellie, which turned me into a morning person (for now).
