The Blog
Sometimes we write stuff.
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Barry is Good Enough
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re continuing our Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time. Today, we’re meeting the biggest Pika fan, Barry Hess…
Who are you? (Who, who, who, who?)
My name is Barry Hess. I grew up in a rural part of Minnesota where the population of the entire county is less than 10,000 people. After getting a college degree in Computer Science, I moved to a metropolis of 25,000 people in southern Minnesota. I live here with my wife and three daughters, though our children are actively growing and slowly moving out into the world to create their own lives. 😭I’ve been coding off and on for nearly thirty years now, though there was a bit of a dalliance in management for a while.
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There's no “A” or “I” in “Jelly”
The second half of 2024 was definitely an inflection point in the world of software. Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI started to permeate products everywhere, from chatbots to operating systems, and at times it felt like everyone was taking part in a race to integrate some AI feature or other into their product.
This seems to have been particularly true in the world of customer support. Whole businesses seem to have pivoted, turning AI into their central feature as if their very lives depended on it. Some taglines from well-known companies leave no doubt:
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· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Tiptap Excerpt Extension with Rails
While building Pika’s Stream of posts layout, we had need to add the capability to manage excerpts in the Pika editor. These excerpts would be used to show a small portion of your post in a post stream while offering a “continue reading” link for readers to click to read the rest of your post. To add this capability we had to dig into extending the base open source library for our editor, Tiptap.
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You Complete Me
When Good Enough was in its infancy as a truly American LLC (formed in Delaware and representing one or two people who were only semi-serious about a business), it was fun to play around with building websites. Shawn and I were truly just playing and exploring, more than anything reminding ourselves that building software could be a satisfying activity. After a year of goofing around we were still enjoying it, but we were also running up against our limitations. Some things we were okay at, but many of our skills just weren’t that impressive.
So began the journey to Good Enough’s next phase: a collective of Good Enough people. We could make some cool, if janky, web toys alone, but with a few more people to play with…
Along came Lettini and Patrick and James and Cade. Each of us with a different set of skills and a different set of weaknesses.
Things definitely did become a lot more interesting once we teamed up! When my weaknesses got in the way, there was someone else to step into that gap and show me how it’s done. Hopefully others agree that I’m able to help them in some of the areas where I have a little more experience. 🤞
That’s enough reading for you; now it’s time to listen. Lettini, James, and I were recently asked to have a conversation on the IndieRails podcast. We are very thankful to Jeremy and Jess for this opportunity to talk about some of Good Enough’s short history. And luckily for you, we hardly talk about Rails at all!
Throughout our lovely discussion, the power of a team filled with complimentary skills kept resurfacing in my head. This experience cannot be recreated as a solo dev or by working on some project in my garage. The times where our skills don’t overlap makes this whole Good Enough experiment lovely and worthwhile. To my teammates, I thank you. You complete me!
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Jelly was #1 on Hacker News
Yesterday, Lettini took a chance and posted about Jelly on Hacker News, a discussion site notorious for it's mercurial population of tech-maybe-too-saavy experts. Jelly is a tough sell for some of them, those with the technical skill to pipe email at a low level through custom-built filters running on their own cloud servers.
I'm not going to lie to you. I was pretty nervous.
And yet...
Jelly at the top of Hacker News last night. At the time of writing, we've had over 100 comments and 281 "points" -
· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Fixing Broken Social Share Images in Twitter/X
I have an admission to make. Social share images for Pika were broken on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and Apple Messages for months. And it made me sad.
But in the past few months we got it fixed. And that made me very happy!
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· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Overriding Permalink Generation in FriendlyId
FriendlyId is a helpful Ruby gem that streamlines creating permalinks and slugs for Rails applications. In Pika we're using it to help with generating permalinks for blog posts and pages as well as slugs for tags. When a customer wrote in with a request to modify the behavior of these permalinks, I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to override the default behavior. Turns out it wasn’t too bad!
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Say hello to Jelly: the simplest way to jam on email as a team
Dear readers, we need to apologize. We know some of you have noticed that Good Enough has gotten much quieter this year than last, across this blog, our newsletter, and socials. We’ve been heads down for the last few months on something new, but we’re now ready to come back up for air and hang with you again! We know you miss hearing from us.
So allow me to formally introduce Good Enough’s next product: Jelly! It’s a new shared inbox for teams. It’s a game-changer, and it’ll be out soon.
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· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Fixing Broken Action Text Images in Atom Feeds
For a while now we've seen that images in our Pika atom feeds were not displaying in some feed readers. In fact, they weren't displaying in my own feed reader, which routes through Feedly. I was sad.
I spent a lot of time troubleshooting this. Compared our feed with a lot of atom and RSS feeds that worked. Eventually I came to a hair-brained idea: what if Rails's Action Text image display markup was confusing these feed readers?
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Grassroots
TLDNR: If you have an interest in Good Enough succeeding, we need your help! Telling friends, shouting on socials, and sharing links to our stuff with your favorite influencers–all of these things will help Good Enough succeed and continue making amazing stuff!