Greetings.
Sometimes it's really hard to rise to the surface for air when we are having so much fun writing code.
We recently released a new service, pipe, which is
exciting. It fits nicely into the services we want to build and maintain. It's
easy-to-use, lightweight, can saturate a gigabit internet connection, and solves
a real problem: securely sending and receiving events across a network. We are
slowly building libraries with easy-to-use
APIs for interacting with pipe.
This is what we love about hacking on pico. We have a singular focus here: to build tools and services we need to use. Antonio built sish because he needed to expose local services to the internet. I built pages because I needed an easy way to deploy static sites.
While we delight in people thinking what we build is cool, that's not why we are building this platform. We build and maintains services for primarily ourselves and then as a result we know other devs want to use them as well.
This leads into something else we have been thinking about lately. Our "subscription" service is not actually a subscription. It's something users have to purchase every year. We recently asked ourselves this question: why aren't we letting users automatically subscribe to pico+ every year?
This is important. We need a forcing function to make our services the best versions of themselves. This function includes a bunch of inputs, but in particular, one of them is a user explicitly re-purchasing pico+. If a user doesn't notice that they forgot to resub, then they aren't using our services like we want. We need strong signals to know which direction to go.
Another input is pico+ signups per month. Last month we hit a new personal
record for most signups in a month. Exciting!
Onto pages which has been pretty active in terms of development. A recent user
posted some explorations into
improving pgs asset serving performance
which has sparked a bunch of refactor work on the code itself. We have better
test coverage and are slowly detaching pages code from the rest of our
services. We see pages breaking out and being its own isolated project so we
can continue to make it better than ever.
We also reformatted our blog to be more structured. We are experimenting with the idea of making our blog more of a living document. So on our index page, be sure to click on the different topics, as we are going to be start updating them.
There's more -- like all my work on git-pr -- but I'm going to save that for a future ann post.