Blogs

Last Week Last week was about getting unblocked on a problem that ended up being bigger than “just swap email for SMS”. Shokken’s guest notifications were reliably landing in spam, which makes a waitlist product feel broken at exactly the moment it needs to feel dependable. Switching to SMS meant walking into telecom compliance, and compliance meant I needed to be a verifiable organization. The two concrete goals were: form an LLC, and use that newly formed LLC to apply for toll-free SMS access with my upstream provider....

Last Week Week 52 was mostly about removing friction for testers: automated TestFlight distribution, and federated login so onboarding didn’t depend on email OTP deliverability. The plan for the follow-up was polishing—tightening the UX and smoothing out the rough edges now that both Android and iOS builds were broadly installable. Instead, I ran into a different kind of deliverability problem: not “can users log in?”, but “can guests actually receive the waitlist notifications?...

Last Week Week 51 ended with two competing realities: iOS testing finally went live, but the very first step in the funnel (logging in) was brittle because email OTP deliverability is not something you can “design your way out of” with better copy. I also had too much iOS release work that required sitting down at a Mac and clicking through App Store Connect. This week was about reducing those two sources of friction: automate iOS distribution so I can ship without ceremony, and give testers a login path that doesn’t depend on a brand new sending domain being trusted by Gmail....

Last Week Last week was about getting iOS out of the “it builds on my machine” phase. I moved the CI/CD pipeline off expensive hosted macOS runners, set up a self-hosted runner that can reliably archive the Compose Multiplatform iOS app, and worked through App Store Connect’s metadata and policy checklist so TestFlight wouldn’t be blocked on paperwork. The big open question was whether Apple would force Sign in with Apple even for an early testing build....

Last Week Week 49 ended with two unfinished promises. I picked Codex as the long-term Kotlin Multiplatform copilot and got the first iOS archive to upload through GitHub Actions, but that victory came with a warning label: hosted macOS runners eat ten times as many minutes, and I only had 2,000 free credits to burn. I also committed to finishing the App Store Connect onboarding so TestFlight could mirror the Android alpha track....

Last Week Week 48 was the long-postponed reset after a month of travel. I dusted off the Kotlin Multiplatform repo, replayed the Android alpha build, and made a very public promise: stop treating the weekly vlog as postcards and start shipping again. That entry ended with two concrete goals for this week. First, I needed to pick a long-term coding copilot so I could lean on the same assistant every day instead of juggling trials....

Last Week Week 47 was recorded at the gate, squeezed in between boarding calls on the final leg of the trip home. I didn’t open the Shokken repo, didn’t touch the feature list, and didn’t change a single line of code. Instead, I used that short update as a promise: once I was back at a real desk, I would stop issuing travel postcards and start delivering actual progress again....

Travel Day Check-In I am squeezing in this entry between boarding calls. The camera only captured a few sentences because there is still nothing meaningful to report on Shokken itself—I’m wrapping up the last leg of travel and staying disciplined about keeping the weekly commitment alive even when the laptop stays zipped. Last week you heard about the international leg; this time I am pointing back toward the States....

Dispatch from Another Country “Week number? I don’t know.” That line opens the video and sums up the whole situation. I have not looked at the Shokken app in quite a while because travel has me bouncing into yet another noisy but fun country. The laptop is staying zipped, so nothing changed this week beyond keeping the weekly promise to say hello. Thanksgiving Target In the clip I reiterate the travel plan: I will not touch the app for another two weeks....

Last Week Week 44 was sent from a rainy West Lake balcony where I promised to keep publishing even if the laptop stayed zipped up. I kept the Shokken alpha exactly where it was, let the CI pipeline recycle screenshots on its own, and mostly used my phone to confirm that tester messages were getting answered within a day. That check-in was really a travel postcard that said, “all systems nominal, founder temporarily offline....