It’s been a very eventful January so far. A few notes from this week:

• My son wants to be a YouTube gamer. Great! Luckily I have most of the gear needed for him already, but we needed to get a capture device to get the Xbox audio and video recorded. Trying out the Elgato HD60 X. So far it’s working perfectly. Fun project to try and figure out.
• Picked up a copy of High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails. Scanning through it’s a lot of review for me, but some interesting pieces. Glad this exists.
• Playing with various simple content managers this week. Trying to get some inspiration and ideas for a project. Stumbled upon Bear Blog. Nice little app!
• Apple Vision Pro pre-orders begin next week, January 19th. It’s very often there’s an entirely new platform to build for. Cautiously optimistic about this one.
• Set up a new project on Render. The platform has really improved a ton since the last time I used it a few years back. Having ‘projects’ to group services together is really nice. I don’t love that I have to pay $19 per user for a team access though. Especially if it’s just me, why am I paying $19/mo just for the privilege to use the platform? This project has a team of 3 so I’m paying $57 per month just to use the service. Not ideal for a small business. The rest of the services will have to be much cheaper to justify the extra expense over Heroku..
• Also spent time experimenting with Kamal on Digital Ocean, Linode, and Hetzner. Overall a very nice solution and super easy to set up. Pairing this with a fully-managed database service seems like an attractive option.
• What a mess of drama over the past week regarding the HEY calendar rejection then approval of the app. We’re working on another app of our own and have taken many steps to avoid this type of scrutiny.
• And lastly, it was quite a week for football coaching changes! Bill Belichick, Pete Carroll, and Nick Saban all out. Saban on his own terms. I presume not the last we’ll see of the others…

Cold weekend ahead in Texas. Stay warm out there… 🥶