What I'm doing now

So. It’s been a minute¹.

I last published² something here a year and a half ago, and then it went quiet. So! Let me tell you what I’m up to.

If you’ve been following along³ you’ll know that since mid-2023, I was part⁴ of Good Enough, a little company of friends making small, thoughtful software products:

• Pika – blogging for people who just want to write,
• Jelly – a shared inbox for the rest of us.
• AlbumWhale – curating collections of the best music.
• Letterbird – the easiest, most beautiful way to put a contact form on your website.
• … and a few other things.

With dizzying ideals and lofty ambition, Good Enough rose higher and higher, into the cosmic expanse… and then gracefully wound down, like a firework that bursts beautifully and then scatters into a handful of glowing embers, each drifting off in its own direction.

(I am making light of this but in reality it was a process undertaken with a level of conscientiousness, generosity and kindness that I doubt I’ll ever encounter again. What a time. I had the space to think about things like this and coin phrases like “Remototem”. I built an unreleased product called “Chicken”. What a time.)

From those embers, a few things flourished. Pika and LetterBird carried on with the reborn Good Enough.

The glowing ember that is Jelly… came with me.

Jelly

I’ve wanted something like Jelly since the very first days of helping organise Ruby Manor. Back then we were a handful of volunteers trying to coordinate everything over a tangle of email threads, losing track of who’d replied to what, things falling through cracks.

I remember thinking: all I want is a way for me and the friends working on this conference to be able to see the same emails, see who has replies to what, jump in and help out, all without it being a complete disaster, and – importantly – without paying through the nose for it.

That’s Jelly. Shared email for small teams (companies, groups, collectives, rag-tag vagabonds, whoever). And I love that it exists.

Here’s what I care about most: keeping it affordable. No per-seat pricing that punishes you for growing. Deciding who can contribute to your conversations with the world shouldn’t ever come down to “can we afford it”.

The basic plan covers everything I would’ve wanted for Ruby Manor and then some – shared inboxes, assignments, internal notes, labels, the works. The Royal Plan serves teams with more needs – API access, integrations, scheduled sending, that sort of thing – and that extra revenue helps make the whole service sustainable so that we can keep the price low for the community groups and non-profits who need it most.

I’m always looking at ways to make it more affordable while still being sustainable. That balance is tricky, but it’s the one I care about getting right.

I’m also really proud of the documentation that Jelly has (and I’ll write more about that soon). You can start with The Jelly Philosophy. What’s that, you say? A manifesto? Well… you said it, not me.

Other things

I’m also doing some consulting work, which helps keep food on the table while Jelly grows. It’s a good balance, actually. The consulting gives me a regular change of context, and then I come back to Jelly with fresh eyes and renewed energy for the product work.

Writing

I’ve got a few posts brewing about some of the more interesting technical things I’ve built in Jelly recently. A system for generating realistic demo data. An automated screenshot pipeline for the help centre. A neat feature flag architecture. The small, specific, slightly-obsessive solutions that make daily life as a solo developer that little bit better.

More soon. Probably.