February Updates

Hey Team!

As is becoming normal, it’s been awhile since I sent my last newsletter update.

Today’s will be short and sweet but I have exciting news to share!

One reason I was less active at the end of the year is that my wife and I were planning for the arrival of our first child! And she was born on January 18th, 2025. Her name is Amelia, and both she and mom are doing great!

Been busy with taking care of both in the last few weeks, but took some time for myself recently to get this written and get everything ready to send this update out!

One of the things I wanted to get done before sending out this update is migrating off of Kit (previously ConvertKit) to Buttondown as my newsletter provider.

They offer better pricing and features that I wanted like the ability to auto-assign tags without having to pay for the higher tier on Kit.

One user facing difference you will notice is that the emails are coming from a new address and domain! We are now using weekly@coreyja.today for these newsletters. This email address won’t be able to receive messages, so the reply to is set as weekly@coreyja.com where I will see any replies you all send my way.

I’ll keep everyone here updated with how I like Buttondown, but the migration and setup process was pretty painless!

I’m still chugging away in the background on Side Project Starter Kits. This is my latest project idea to help engineers practice their coding on real-world projects, without having to be also be product managers and designers. I’m excited to launch it, and the landing page is going to launch soon. Hopefully next week!

You can preview the Landing Page here. If you want to follow along for updates enter your email on that page to sign up for my newsletter. Or if you are reading this from my newsletter you are good to go, you’re already signed up to get all my updates!

Reach out if you have specific ideas for projects you'd like to see as a Starter Kit!

I've been reading Simon Willison's Link Blog for a while, especially as he'd been covering AI and LLMs. His content is always really well done, and I also appreciate how often he posts and how he's able to share small snippets basically daily.

Recently I also came across Xuanwo's Blog and specifically his recent post about trying out a Link Blog style too.

I decided to follow simon's approach to creating a link blog, where I can share interesting links I find on the internet along with my own comments and thoughts about them. ... It’s much better than simply saving something to Readwise to read later and leaving a few highlights or dull comments like "interesting."

So I'm going to give this a shot as well! Might need to re-work my site a bit to make that reasonable, but thats part of the fun of it all! Expect to get links to some of these style posts in this newsletter as I get going. And definitely share any cool articles or posts with me, so I can use them as entries!

And that’s about all I have today! Wanted to get an email sent out using Buttondown, but keeping it short. Keep an eye out for the next newsletter which should launch Side Project Start Kits! 🎉