Week Notes: January 18, 2026

For the next few months I’m going to be very consumed merging two companies together into one tech stack. One of the key reasons we were acquired last year was to unify a technology stack that has helped our business grow and to bring the tools we created to the larger Puck enterprise.

Both legacy organizations are running completely independent technology at the moment, but my goal is to bring it all together. Puck’s business is primarily run on Wordpress, which is a lovely platform for basic CMS needs but not great for running a complex editorial business out of the box. Quite frankly, it’s capped the growth trajectory of the company and I’ll be fixing that very soon.

But before we even think about content and publishing, I need to unify the billing and subscription side of the business. Both companies are running separate billing systems, tax systems, and reporting back-ends. And, both are single tenant by nature: they were purposely creating to run a single business. So we’ve kicked off the work of creating a multi-tenant architecture that will house legacy Air Mail, legacy Puck, and any future acquisitions all in one place.

This effort has been a ton of fun, and the team seems to be enjoying the ability to develop on a new system with some greenfield requirements and shed some of our legacy baggage. I know I feel that way.

We’re just getting started but the effort is already moving along at a steady pace. I love starting fresh and designing the architecture for the next 5–10 years of this company.

Elsewhere

In sporting news, the NFL playoffs have been such a joy this year. It’s refreshing to not have a single rooting interest so I’m able to actually enjoy the games for face value and root for the best scenarios, instead of always scheming for my team’s success.

I’m delighted to see John Harbaugh agree to a 5-year deal with the Giants to become its next head coach. I’m also delighted he’s not in the AFC. I’ll be rooting for him for sure.

Anthropic announced its Claude Cowork features which bring the power of Claude Code to more non-technical users that don’t want (or know how) to live in a terminal window. Claude Code is my absolute favorite tool right now and I’m using it constantly, for coding and non-coding projects alike. Excited to give Cowork a spin, even though I know I’ll probably keep using Code for now.

Apple announced the Apple Creator Studio which brings together Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, and a bunch of other tools into one purchase and one subscription. $12.99 per month or $129 per year seems like a great deal for these apps. Not that I need another Apple subscription, but this looks very attractive.

OpenAI explained its approach to ads within ChatGPT which has felt like an inevitability given how much money they are spending. The framing is thoughtful and coherent and seems to be well considered. I’m still more than happy to pay for an ad-free subscription because of the immense value I’m getting from ChatGPT, but I completely understand the desire to open up the market to even more users that are more price sensitive and don’t mind seeing ads in exchange for using the service.

Happy Sunday. Here’s to another great week ahead. 🏈