all writing

weekly write up: week of september 8

What did you do this week? What’s next?

Last Week’s Goals were:

  • Get at least 1 person to try my meal planning app: ❌
  • Learn something about computer vision: ✅
  • Send some emails: ✅

But, I did get 3 more people trying Plate Palette. We’re up to 14 users now! I am okay with this trade off! I love Plate Palette, it’s been fun to build, and it’s given me a tool I needed: a way to track some of my food, think about my diet, and then let it go and not obsess. I am more than happy to share that joy with others. I also used Claude to add a “blog” component to Plate Palette, primarily to drive some SEO traffic that way. AI written content made me feel gross, but I want to compare the pure AI generated SEO content to my non-AI writing here, so, onwards. Up next, I might see what I can learn about paid ads with a $10 budget on Google and Meta and maybe with ChatGPT too?! Will we have 32 users next week?!

I had worried that adding a good photo upload tracking feature to Plate Palette was going to be more complex than I thought. It turns out there’s a free Gemini model you can use for this, and it works pretty well for my use case! Here’s a video of me logging dragon fruit this morning. I don’t know what’s up next here, feature requests for Plate Palette anyone?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do next, and what kind of people I want to build for. If it’s not clear by now, athletes, dietitians, and people who think about what they eat are a group I have a lot of love for. I sent out some emails to registered dietitians in my orbit, and I’m excited to chat more with people in the coming weeks, so up next is doubling down on finding people to talk to. I have mixed feelings about surveys as an information source, but they can’t hurt so my goal for the upcoming week is to get 100 responses to this survey about nutrition habits.

If you know a dietitian or health coach you think I should talk to, please send me an email (aeables@gmail.com) so we can connect.

This Week’s Goals

  • Get 100 responses on the nutrition habits survey
  • Schedule 10 calls with folks who complete the survey
  • Put together some SEO learnings and ask for feedback
  • Get started on paid ad experiments

I ate some great stuff this week, mostly because it made me feel connected to people I love. Some family friends who are more on the family side than the friends side were in town, and wanted to grab a sandwich in my neighborhood. In a nod to memorable sandwiches, they said they’ve been thinking about a November on Dutch Crunch from Irving Subs, since the last time they visited. They had recently bonded with a friend in Minnesota about the lack of Dutch crunch in the midwest too, so sandwiches were ordered, and thoroughly enjoyed.

We had waffles for dinner one day last week. I kept reading about whipping up the egg whites into stiff peaks before making waffles to get them as airy as possible. Honestly, I don’t think it made that big of a difference. Save your time, and also, if you’ve still got access to a college dining hall waffle maker, please invite me over for breakfast sometime soon. Waffles for dinner were special this week because I got to experiment with the egg whites, and because my daughter currently loves having breakfast for dinner. I told her that a friend’s grandmother calls it “silly supper.” Something about dinner being silly, knowing that something you like is similar to a friend, and knowing there just aren’t rules around when you can eat waffles is magical.

We had some daycare friends over for tacos in the backyard yesterday. San Francisco is hitting peak summer here in September- the kids played with the water table and chalked all over the patio, the adults drank white wine and non alcoholic beers, and we all ate some “Korean Street Tacos” from one of my favorite cookbooks by Emma Coburn. If you really want to help me out, and you aren’t going to take my Nutrition Habits survey, I'd love for you to go give my meal some fire on Linecook. Linecook is an app (“strava for home chefs”) that I’ve been loving lately. They’re on my dream companies list (C’mon Nick and Nick- hire me!) because they’re already doing something I think is much needed in the world: bringing some normalcy and fun back to social media, taking some weird algorithms out, and helping people enjoy what they eat, and the people they eat with.

Thinking about work- there’s a push and a pull between feeling like you absolutely have to create something, you care so much you have to shout from the rooftops about it, and what problems need to be solved. I started reading Runnin’ Down a Dream, and should finish it before next week. Maybe that will enlighten me in some more ways here.

Have you changed your mind on anything? What have you learned?

Speaking of dream companies and problems that need to be solved, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the various components of what makes a job great. I had someone I loved working with break it down to three things: good money, good people, a product you care about. I liked that framework- it’s not complete but it’s given me something to think about. Along with all that thinking comes changing my mind, or clarifying a lot about what working with good people means to me.

I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of people I loved working with. People who are confident and humble, and genuinely care about others, people who are brilliant and thoughtful in ways that I am not. I have very few former colleagues who I would say I didn’t enjoy and respect. I also have some former colleagues who I wouldn’t necessarily want to work with again. It’s not that I thought they weren’t good at their jobs, or anything else, it’s that working with them didn’t bring out anything in me that clearly drove me to being better, or challenged me in meaningful ways. So much of what makes people you work with great to work with, actually has to do with you. For me, this is making me realize that the people I want to work with are the people who are the best coaches and best at giving feedback.

I’ve got a lot more thoughts on what makes feedback great, but so far all I have is that one of the best parts of feedback is just realizing people are out there reading/listening/responding in any way at all. (Did you notice that highlighting things now gives you an emoji keyboard to react to my writing? 😉)

What went well? What didn’t go well? What could be improved?

WWW: Not a lot of crazy recipes, but a lot of meals that made me pretty happy, mostly because of how they connected me to friends and family.

WWW: Back on the running wagon last week. Wednesday's workout was a bit atrocious, but I showed up, got it done and was proud of checking that box.

WWW: Three day weekend, lovely summer weather, time on the beach with my fam, 9/10, minus one point because toddlers and sand, sigh.

WCBI: The flexibility of being able to do damn near anything makes it a bit hard to decide what to do on any given day or week, AI makes multitasking way too easy, and it all just leads to too much brain rot.