Besides tracking my progress in a 5x8-inch Field Book, I also use Basecamp. True to its word, it is simple project management. I use it with the family, with my writing and programming. One feature I enjoy is the automated question. At a period you choose, an email is sent for you to respond to its question. Every Monday morning, I’m challenged with what I’ve done the prior week. When I have one of my frequent periods of “didn’t do enough,” scanning through the prior weeks’ responses is encouraging. I’m still charging with finishing ScribUnity. The basic application works, and I have an instance in production. There were a lot of pivots with the internals (user management, etc.), and I have a question or two about sending the emails. I have two ways of shipping it, either as a SaaS (Software as a Service) or self-hostable PSaaS (Perpetual Software as a Service). I’ve coined the latter phrase as the type of application that is a SaaS where the licensee holds a perpetual license. This is inspired by the Once product line. Until about a month ago, I was heading down the traditional path before accepting that I did not want to be a SaaS provider. I’m building these applications because I want to use them. But if others want to use them, I’m happy to share. It looks like it costs $6/mo to host SU on Digital Ocean, but I’ve not stress tested it.  Following the Once inspiration, I have to figure out how to install the application on a production server. My plan for SU was to get it production-ready by 15 June, and I got there the week...

We’ve all seen the scene. Two skilled combatants square off in a duel, waiting for the other to blink so they can strike. Such as it was with me. I stared at an upcoming month and blinked. It did not. My attempted habit is to record in a few different places what happens. I have a Finish calendar behind my monitor. I have a 5x8-inch Field Book where I also write what happens. Most days are filled in with something that happened. On 18 March, one of our cats got out and into a fight with a local cat. As with me and time, our cat blinked and the other cat won. As work heated, my focus on writing and coding at home slowed. No writing. I took my youngest camping with a bunch of other boys his age. I went to the RailsConf 2024 and chased that with a work-related conference. More thoughtful people have shared their RailsConf experience. I went less for the talks and more for the inspiration, and came away rewarded. One keynote explained how she went from a non-technical person to selling application in a year, then struggled for profitability as she scaled until she hit pay dirt. Another keynote described different start-ups who struggled to get to production until they pivoted to Ruby on Rails from React and the other contemporary JavaScript frameworks. One CTO privately admitted his team’s incredulity when he said they could deliver features in weeks instead of months. Technical talks were no less inspiring. What looked like a simple talk on testing led me to commit to employing automated testing for my application. With a bit of developed code and...