Pacing the Mid-Tier

The title is a pun on Dario Amodei's essay We Must Pace the Frontier.

The next 4 months until February matter a lot to me. I want to spend them actually working on stuff instead of just saying "working on things", by putting things in the right order and accounting for it.

So this is sort of an action plan. Very minimal, with a little bit of detail.

1. Writing about the app I shipped

I recently shipped an app to production (with actual users, it solves a problem for them and serves a purpose). Along the way I had to make a lot of architectural and coding decisions, and I'm still not sure "coding decisions" is the right way to phrase it:

• design-level choices for the frontend, the animations, and how the UX would work
• the backend, so the code, the language and frameworks, and a way to work with AI to actually write it
• system-level design

And some product work:

• using PostHog to test features and adoption and figure out user pain points
• we also went through UAT (user acceptance testing)

I'll write a series of articles about these, maybe one area at a time, I haven't fully mapped it out yet. I really want to write about talking to users and getting feedback too. I have less knowledge there, but I work with a great product manager and I've learnt a few things from them.

2. A cooking app for two

I'm also building a personal project for me and my partner. It's a realtime multiplayer cooking app, built on Cloudflare Durable Objects. It helps us cook at home.

Sneak peek of the UI so far:

The repo is private for now. I might make it public at some point because I do think building in public is nice, but it's hosted publicly and I don't want it getting spammed. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about and there are ways to keep it secure. Once I learn more about that I'll think about open-sourcing it, and write more about it once I have a better idea of how I want to build it.

3. Writing about what I'm learning

Some of these will be about things I'm actively learning. I just found out Cloudflare runs Workers on V8 isolates instead of the traditional microVM setup (Firecracker, which AWS Lambda uses). How does that compare? That would probably be article number one.

P.S. For future me: come back in February and see what you did.