weekly write up: week of august 25

This week, I’m stealing the set up my friend Ricky uses in his own substack: A picture from my life, something on my mind, a piece of content I recommend! You can check out Ricky’s substack here.

A Picture from My Life

A cloud inversion rolling over the bay, seen from a grassy hilltop in the Marin Headlands

This is at the top of a hill in the Marin Headlands, where I stumbled upon a bench I had NEVER seen before, despite having run past it at least 30 times. I always think of these cloud inversions of being at their best at the top of Mount Tam, and I regrettably despise doing the Tam Hill Climb, so I felt like this little moment of peace, Sausalito and the East Bay peaking through, was particularly special and a nice reward for my patience running up Bobcat at a steady pace. (which I again, did not PR this week, but will before the end of the year!)

Something on My Mind

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last week figuring out how to use Google for OAuth for Plate Palette, frustrating myself (and probably also Claude) with sorting out the USDA Food Database API, and trying to justify spending my time building Plate Palette, when it is not something that anyone needs or asked for, or that I really think makes the world better, or solves a pressing problem in society.

Then, I laughed at myself. (A healthy approach to anything you’re over thinking in my opinion.) I originally built Plate Palette because I realized that I could. That is in fact as good a reason as any to make something. I also realized it was a great way to learn stuff, no surprise to anyone but the USDA Food Database API is not documented as well as the Stripe API, and it took several hours of trial and error to sort out what actual information I was getting from each of the three available data sets, and then it took me actually getting focused and thinking through what I wanted to get my filtering right. I think this kind of slow meticulous work and thinking through every edge case and detail is what makes a great Product Manager, so why not practice it? I also had fun, which is again, as good a reason as any to create anything. I had fun with the idea, I had fun with the process, I’m having fun seeing little improvements as I fiddle and fix. Making stuff should be fun. If you’re going to start a venture scale company or want to get into the next batch of YC, you probably need to be building things that solve real problems, or at least that will make you and some investors a lot of money. I think making that stuff should be fun too, but making stuff just because it’s fun, doing something for the process alone is really, a okay. Honestly, we should probably be doing a lot more of that, since the robots are likely to take over anyway.

A Piece of Content I Recommend

“What’s the Most Memorable Sandwich You Ever Had?” Literal years ago my friend and at the time colleague, David Ruiz shared this podcast with me. I loved it, and I still think about it years later. I’ve obviously been thinking a lot about food, and how food is such a great way to connect with people, and I’m going to start asking people more often about their most memorable sandwich.