Field note: April

April was the month I stopped pretending I could ship four big things at once. I shipped two. The other two were still good ideas; they just weren't this month's ideas.

What I shipped

• Sage After Dark v0 — this site, soft-launched to a list of forty-three people. Two essays, three dispatches, a tutorial. Surprised by the response — six replies in the first hour.
• Trayd onboarding rewrite — cut time-to-first-value from twelve minutes to two. The ten minutes we removed were almost entirely "config" the customer didn't actually need.
• Killed two side projects — the AI photo organizer (already done well by Photos), the meal planner (I don't actually plan meals).

What I read

• Working in Public — Nadia Eghbal · re-reading. The chapter on "casual contributors" maps weirdly well to blog audiences.
• The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick · skim it again every six months. Six months overdue.
• ~30 essays on Construction Physics · the energy and logistics history is the most useful "tech industry analog" I've found.
• The Vercel Postgres GA writeup · I was waiting for this.

What I noticed

The interesting tech writers in 2026 are mostly not writing about tech. They're writing about cities, energy, food systems, and labor — and using software craft as an analogy. The reverse is also true: the interesting essays from non-engineers are reaching for engineering metaphors. Something is converging.

The other thing I noticed: every time I pick "build the system that makes the work easier" over "do more of the work," I regret it less than I expect to. Compounding is doing its quiet job.

What I'm tracking next month

1. Write the first arc episode of Trayd, In Public.
2. Get to 100 newsletter subscribers (currently 43).
3. Build the Sage After Dark archive page — I want to see the shape of the body of work.
4. Stop checking analytics more than once a week.

Five would be a stretch goal. Four is a list.