TLDR

• Figma for design, prototyping, and developer handoff

• Tailwind for React component styling

• A strong focus on Health & Fitness

Figma Figma Figma

When Sketch came onto the design scene, it turned the creative world upside-down. Here was a design tool that seemed to be tailor-made for digital UI. The most noticeable difference to me was the sheer speed. You could build enormous documents with screen after screen, and Sketch wouldn't even hiccup. Compare that to the behemoth Photoshop files we've dealt with in the past, and there was simply no going back.

Sketch integrates nicely into several workflows.

After designing in Sketch, you can automatically sync your designs to Zeplin. This proved to be an excellent workflow to hand off designs for client approval, or to developers to start production. I've been on both sides of the developer handoff, and it's very smooth.

You can also sync your Sketch designs with InVision. From here, you can create interactive prototypes before actually pouring hours into programming everything.

But now there's a new kid in town.

This year, I had one client move from Sketch to Figma. At first, I was skeptical, because Sketch was just so good. But Figma takes many of the elements that make Sketch so powerful and puts them into the browser and on the cloud. This is a giant leap. No more shuffling .sketch files around. Just like we're all used to collaborating on Google Drive, now we can design in the cloud. And whenever I find a shortcoming in Figma, there's usually a plugin that fills that gap. So the potential for Figma to cover all UI design needs is immense.

And developer handoff can happen right in Figma! You can add people to a project as read-only. This means you can set up elements for export without worrying about anyone making changes to a design. And with Figma, there's no more need for another tool to generate prototypes. Build and share prototypes right from your design files.

Recently, Sketch has been promoting Sketch Cloud. It's still in its early stages, so I'm watching as it matures. There may be some design-tool wars in the near future. But for now, I'm very bullish on Figma and all its potential.

Check out just how popular Figma is right now in this 2020 Tools Survey Results from Uxtools.co.
 

Tailwind

Tailwind CSS has come a long way. I was super-skeptical of its utility at first. But by discovering how easy it is to build a component-centric system using a framework like React, I have seen the light. Layering utility styles onto components is very straightforward, and you can get really far with nicely styled elements right out of the box.

But the really impressive new development is their Tailwind UI system. These are beautifully designed, and polished UI components, built on Tailwind CSS. I see this as a whole new ecosystem, where developers can build and distribute Tailwind UI components — similar to Bootstrap. Just plug and play.

See more CSS trends in The State of CSS 2020.
 

Health

In the year of a pandemic, health has suddenly become top of mind. I see a number of trends heading towards health and fitness-centric themes.

The Apple Watch is now a health and fitness product. Sleep tracking, heart monitoring, emergency services, hand wash tracking, blood oxygen levels, and an ECG. All on your wrist.

Apple released Fitness+ this year. And with many people staying in their homes, having a service to help you get in shape from home is invaluable. Home gyms are now digital. Like biking? Get a Peloton. Rowing more your speed? Check out Hydrow. And Mirror offers a digital fitness mirror for any workout.

I expect to see a lot more products and services moving towards health and fitness in the near future. It's worth giving some thought to how your product can fit this trend.
 

Goodbye, 2020. I'll see you all in 2021!

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

My 8-year-old is coding

My daughter started showing an interest in what I do for a living. So I finally sat her down and set her up to start learning how to code.

Oh, you mean you did a Scratch tutorial with her?

No. I showed her how to make a website.

Wait, she knows how to code in JavaScript?

Nope. She's building an HTML page. I briefly introduced her to header tags, paragraph tags, and list tags.

After about ten minutes of making headlines and lists, she asked how to add an image. Now she's familiar with img tags. Five minutes later, she wanted to know how to link to other websites. Now she's writing anchor tags without even pausing to think, and understands what an HREF is.

Most recently she's pushing me to teach her more. How can she build a page where her friends can comment? How does she deploy her work to the web so others can see it? She's learning by doing. Incrementally. Making something she's passionate about. The most effective way to learn. 
 

Is HTML even a programming language?

Stack Overflow says no. Or yes. Or maybe kind of.

Who cares?

There are plenty of gatekeeping programmers that want to keep HTML out of the ranks of proper programming languages. But I could care less about the distinction. If you're building something for the web, HTML is where the rubber meets the road. And unless you're creating a monstrous canvas-only app, everything that people interact with on your site is made with HTML. (Even that canvas is an HTML tag.)

Oh, you're building a Next.js app backed by Mongoose with React components rendered on the server connected with GraphQL? Guess what that all ends up as?

That's right, HTML.
 

Immediacy

This is the greatest factor in the effectiveness of HTML as a gateway programming language. You write something in a file, open that file in your browser, and see what you wrote. Make a change to your file, refresh the browser, and you can see what your change did immediately.

Cause and effect.

There's no transpiling required, no compiling to binary, no runtime errors. It's programming in its most raw form. Instructions that a computer can read, and the end result that people can use.
 

Back to basics

In 2015, Maciej Cegłowski wrote a prescient article titled The Website Obesity Crisis. I highly recommend you read it, as his writing is endlessly entertaining. It's still relevant today, as websites get bloated with all sorts of complexity when most people just want something simple.

Here are a couple of gems pulled from that article:

The web pyramid as we observe it in the wild:

• A base layer of HTML

• A huge pile of crap

• On top of it all, a whole mess of surveillance scripts

Complexity is like a bug light for smart people. We can't resist it, even though we know it's bad for us. This stuff is just so cool to work on.

And when this diagram is what you're in for as a front-end web developer, you better not jump in mid-way downstream. Even that nightmarish infographic recommends starting with the basics. HTML. CSS. JavaScript. In that order.
 

The hardest simplest thing

There's a real need today for web programmers that can harness HTML. Of course, this is really done with CSS, but what's CSS without HTML? Oh, you think CSS is trivial?

The most difficult thing to do in web development (besides caching and naming things) is to make something look like its intended design. And maybe that's not vanilla HTML, but a React component with Tailwind CSS styles. Regardless, knowing how the HTML works when the browser inevitably presents that code to the user is priceless.

And in the end, that's what the world will see and use. HTML.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

Code.org

Computer Science education is foundational for the ever-growing technical world that we live in, however, CS is not currently taught in the majority of our schools. Code.org is a nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to computer science in schools and increasing participation by young women and students from other underrepresented groups. Their vision is that every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science as part of their core K-12 education.
 

Free Geek

27% of Americans do not own a computer. And 1 out of 10 families do not have internet at home. This lack of access is sharply stratified along lines of income, race, age and education. Low-income families, immigrants, seniors and children are digitally under-connected, many with mobile-only internet access, which often isn’t enough. This problem is known as the “digital divide”: the gulf between those who have ready access to computers and the internet, and those who do not. Free Geek’s mission is to sustainably reuse technology, enable digital access, and provide education to create a community that empowers people to realize their potential.
 

Geeks Rule

Geeks Rule promotes the study of and engagement with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) among underserved youth. Their vision is to eliminate the racial, gender and socioeconomic gap in the STEM fields in order to meet the growing need of STEM professionals in the United States. Geeks Rule will help eliminate this gap through hands-on and mentoring programs in the major cities across the U.S.
 

Other Ways to Give Back

You don't need to donate money to help others. If you have the privilege of being able to work in the digital maker space, you're miles ahead of a large portion of the world's population. There are lots of ways to help others with lesser opportunities.

• Donate your time

• Buy artwork

• Teach

• Contribute to free open-source projects

• Write

• Build a tool for other makers

• Mentor someone

• Pay for software

• Share your process and inspire others

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

The early days

Things were simpler when I started out in web development. Knowing the basics of web programming gave me an edge as a designer. Front-end development consisted of HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript (sorry, no VBScript, Microsoft people). You write your code, test it locally, and fire up an FTP client to upload it to the server. FTP was the closest thing to DevOps for me at that time.

Eventually, the tech stack expanded a little. We started using Subversion for version control (long before Git existed). I fell in love with Flash and ActionScript. I began to think about what else I could do.

Since Flash was owned by Macromedia (before Adobe bought it), ColdFusion was being marketed heavily to the community. With ColdFusion, I could start building things with persistence. Now we're moving to the back-end. I learned about databases, SQL queries, and how to design an API. All in ColdFusion at first.

Then Flex was released, and suddenly everything was code. No more Flash timelines, and seamless integration with ColdFusion. Consuming web services, and drawing to the view all in one place. Using the languages I knew, ActionScript and ColdFusion.

At some point, I picked up a side-project that required a database, and suddenly I became a full-stack dev, although I wasn't aware of that term at the time.
 

Languages

In my experience, once you've learned two distinct languages (spoken or programming), it's easier to learn a third, and a fourth, and so on. You start noticing universal rules, and everything comes down to syntax. So having learned JavaScript, and ActionScript, and ColdFusion, it wasn't a stretch to learn PHP, and later Ruby, and jQuery, and React.js.

So very quickly, languages stop being a barrier to learning. The front-end and the back-end have little to separate them.
 

Incremental tech creep

It starts with a file. You need to set up a redirect on your WordPress site, and the best way to do it, in this case, is to modify the .htaccess file. Then you need to resize images in order to generate thumbnails, and you have to learn to install ImageMagick. You're already navigating Linux with terminal commands. Rebooting Apache. Checking if MySQL is running. Using Vim.

For me, I really had to dive into Linux-land when I provisioned my own virtual web server. Learning how Apache works, and how to install requirements, keeping the server up to date. We're not dabbling in DevOps anymore. Working on the server has become just another part of web development.
 

The cloud

The cloud changed everything. Heroku was my introduction to infrastructure as a service. Instead of fumbling around with uploading files or custom deployment scripts, managing databases, and SSL certificates, the cloud did this for us.

My biggest side-project, Link My Photos runs on Heroku. When the app became popular, suddenly I was faced with legitimate DevOps challenges. I had to scale to meet demand. Learning about concurrency, caching, sharding, followers, and background job runners became routine. Extending some pieces of the app into AWS was essential. DevOps became the primary focus, and design is a distant memory.
 

Getting back to the front

I'm not really interested in DevOps. I love learning about all the underlying technologies that power the internet, but I'd much rather make something cool. I'm interested in the parts where the user meets the app, and if everything else works, great!

But when you're a solopreneur, or a generalist, or a bootstrapper, it's not so easy to just do that one thing. And over time, you learn the full stack, almost by osmosis. Ask any React developer if all they need to know is JavaScript. Things aren't that simple anymore. Just getting React to run locally involves Node, Yarn, Babel, and a host of other technologies. And I haven't even mentioned CSS for React apps.

All this knowledge is priceless, but I find it's too easy to get lost in the intricacies of DevOps and forget about the rest. Fortunately, there are programmers out there looking to simplify. There's the no-code movement. Netlify makes hosting and deployment incredibly simple. And services like Next.js offer full-stack React and Node environments with little responsibility on the developer.

Hopefully soon, those of us who want to focus on the front-end will have that option. Fingers crossed 🤞

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

Guided meditation

I highly recommend some type of guided meditation to get started. I've been through almost all the free content on every meditation app in the market. Headspace is a good one to learn the basics.

There's a lot to understand about meditation, but the main things I needed to learn were:

1. Just the act of sitting still for 5-20 minutes is enough

2. Focusing on your breathing is the easiest way to start out. Your mind will wander, and that's okay. Just acknowledge and bring it back to the breath.

3. There's no need to sit in a specific position, or to chant anything at all. You can sit in any comfortable position.

4. It's not a brainstorming session, but ideas will come to you. Just note them and go back to the breath.

Finding time

I heard an insightful quote once, in reference to finding time to meditate every day:

You find time to shower every day.

It's our perception of time. It's the non-essential things that we don't have time for. If we consider meditation as something essential, like showering, we will find time for it every day.
 

Consistency

Meditation doesn't work right away. You may not even feel like it's doing anything for a long, long time. For me, I didn't feel any different until about 2 weeks after starting out. Then I started to look forward to my meditation time. After meditating, I felt relaxed — less stressed, with a calm mind. Not sleepy — just rested. 

I try to meditate first thing each morning. And I find I'm able to just come back to my breath at any point in the day whenever I feel my mind start to race, or I'm not present among the people around me.
 

What works for me

This year, I started doing unguided meditation. I start a timer, sit for 20 minutes, and let my mind be, bringing it back to my breath, or no thoughts, as needed. Inevitably ideas crop up, but that's not the goal. The goal is to clear all that out of my head. To keep my subconscious calm. In the end, I feel I have more control over my own mind — which really can be a superpower.

I use Insight Timer, and set regular chimes to signal different points in the session. Here's what I'm doing currently:

• For the first 5 minutes, I focus on my breath, starting with 5 deep long breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth. This resets my brain to focus on one thing until it's able to let go.

• For the next 10 minutes, I continue to be still. If thoughts crop up, I acknowledge and let them go, coming back to the breath if needed.

• At minute 15, I let my mind wander completely. Anything that's been nagging at me throughout the session, anything I've been focused on lately - it's all on the table. I allow for one minute of this, and then at minute 16, it's back to stillness.

• At minute 19, I start focusing on my surroundings. This helps to ease the transition back to the world around me, and at minute 20, I'll open my eyes for the end of the session.

Generally, not much comes out of a meditation session for me, other than an overall feeling of calm. But every so often, I have a new idea or a solution to a problem emerge. Again, that's not the goal of these meditation sessions, but it's nice when it happens.

My own meditation practice is still a work in progress. I'm definitely closer to where I want to be in staying present. And it's helping to stay focused on the important work I'm doing as a maker, instead of the scatterbrained racing mind jumping from idea to idea.

If you meditate and have any tips to share I'd love to hear all about your experience. Or if you're just starting out and have any questions, reply and let's talk about it.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

In the Beginning was the Command Line

by Neal Stephenson

http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html
I absolutely love how Stephenson takes twice as many words to get across a point than necessary. But he does so in stories and metaphors and humor that make it all worth reading. He wrote this essay in 1999, in the days before Mac OS X, when Microsoft ruled the PC market, and the internet was growing rapidly, mainly on Unix and Linux.

Some of my favorite excerpts:

The opening "splash screen" for Microsoft Word summed it up: you were treated to a picture of an expensive enamel pen lying across a couple of sheets of fancy-looking handmade writing paper. It was obviously a bid to make the software look classy, but it failed for me, because the pen was a ballpoint, and I'm a fountain pen man. If Apple had done it, they would've used a Mont Blanc fountain pen, or maybe a Chinese calligraphy brush.

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing; it's deciding what to write.

Somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. 
 

The Last Question

by Isaac Asimov

https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
This is Asimov's self-proclaimed favorite short story of his career. Written in 1956, it's a series of brief, loosely connected stories about a computer named Multivac. It's hard to talk about this short story without ruining the end, but let's just say it's worth reading to the last sentence. It covers centralization, entropy, and the future of the universe.

Here's a taste:

"So many stars, so many planets," sighed Jerrodine, busy with her own thoughts. "I suppose families will be going out to new planets forever, the way we are now."

"Not forever," said Jerrodd, with a smile. "It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase."
 

Burning Chrome

by Willliam Gibson

http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/burning_chrome/
Gibson is far and away my favorite author. In Burning Chrome, he is setting the stage for his masterwork Sprawl series. The term "cyberspace" is coined for the first time, in reference to a "mass consensual hallucination" in computer networks. Gibson wrote Burning Chrome in 1982, pre-internet. It's the story of two freelance hackers who attempt to break into the system of a notorious cyber-criminal known as Chrome.

Classic Gibson:

Booze and Vasopressin are the ultimate in masochistic pharmacology; the juice makes you maudlin and the Vasopressin makes you remember, I mean really remember. Clinically they use the stuff to counter senile amnesia, but the street finds its own uses for things.
 

That line, "the street finds its own uses for things," is now colloquially used to describe an unexpected use for any technology. It sums up Gibson's (and my) belief that hacking new technology to do something else is one of the most exciting things about the time we live in.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

Style Guides

Code style guides are an excellent starting point for how to structure your code. A style guide outlines virtually every decision for how to write code in a specific language. Decisions like tabs vs. spaces, semicolons or not, brackets on new lines, variable naming conventions, etc. Style guides are available for programming languages, and for specific frameworks. If you're coding something, there's likely a style guide for it.

Here are a few resources:
 

Google Style Guides

https://google.github.io/styleguide/
Google covers a wide range of programming languages, from C++ to JavaScript, to XML. Google manages enormous teams of programmers and huge codebases, so they're an excellent resource to emulate.
 

Airbnb

https://github.com/airbnb/javascript
If you're interested specifically in JavaScript, Airbnb offers thorough style guides for all aspects of it. Including React, CSS in JavaScript, and Sass. They also have their own Ruby style guide, since Airbnb is built on Rails.
 

Python

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
Python has its own official code style guide. They even articulate why a style guide is important: A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds.
 

GitHub

https://styleguide.github.com/
What better place to find a standard style guide than the largest code hosting platform in the world? They cover the languages they use to run GitHub, including JavaScript and Ruby.

Linters

Okay, so now you've picked a style guide, and you're coding perfectly, right? Not quite. Linters are a way to enforce those rules automatically. A linter will display warnings where your code doesn't match your desired style guide, and can even correct those inconsistencies for you. Most linters will integrate right into your preferred code editor.

Here are some popular linters:
 

ESLint

https://eslint.org/
One of the most popular JavaScript linters out there, ESLint will find and fix problems in your JavaScript code. Not only will it apply your recommended style guide to your code, but it will also look for issues like redeclaring constant variables, or referencing a variable that doesn't exist. And it integrates right into VSCode.
 

RuboCop

https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop
RuboCop helps to enforce Ruby, Rails, Rspec, and Minitest style guides. Just install its gem as a development dependency, run rubocop in your Rails project directory, and watch the magic happen. And of course, here's the VSCode extension.
 

Prettier

https://prettier.io/
Prettier is a super-opinionated linter for JavaScript, HTML, CSS, GraphQL, and many other languages. If you're looking for one linter to rule them all, look no further. And it integrates with a wide range of editors, including VSCode.
 

What else?

There are lots more techniques you can use to keep your code clean. Once you have a code style and linter in place, you can further enforce these rules with continuous integration tools like Travis CI, CircleCI, or your own favorite CI service. And don't forget automated unit and integration tests. Having consistent, clean, standardized code will help your team (and your future self) to understand what your code does, and help prevent runtime errors due to sloppy programming.

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” — Martin Fowler

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

Let's take a look at how this played out.

If you've eaten out at a restaurant lately, you've likely seen QR codes for menus. This is to avoid having to touch a physical menu, and therefore avoid any Coronavirus germs that may be lingering on its surface.

While reading Pieter's Twitter thread, what stood out to me more than anything was the number of responses along the lines of, "I had that idea too!"

Just read these replies.
 

@DenisBosire

Can't believe this, just started working on this today 💀💀 ,was at a restaurant yesterday and got the idea to do this. Was going to be my weekend project.
https://twitter.com/DenisBosire/status/1318892192925175808
 

@filipp_pl

I was building similar thing, but wanted to go first to restaurants and get feedback from them. What's your idea on getting traction in this field, since restaurant owners/managers are mostly living in offline world?
https://twitter.com/filipp_pl/status/1318901336319135744
 

@randomor

Congrats! Great MVP. I’ve been parking this for almost two years now. I’ve had this idea since going back to China 2018 and seeing it everywhere and it stuck with me. The countdown on the page now actually counts up now... 😂🤦‍♂️
https://twitter.com/randomor/status/1318919459541798917
 

@ryanseanbadger

Was going to build this a few weeks back, with aim to add in ordering via the menu too, QR code would include table nunber so staff knew who order was for, then add payments via it to escape dirty cash. As usual, I couldn’t be bothered. 🙃
https://twitter.com/ryanseanbadger/status/1318903679034957831
 

@parkeragee

I created something similar the other day https://covidmenusonline.com. It is still in test mode, so you can create an account and check it out. It just needs a drag and drop menu builder to be complete.
https://twitter.com/parkeragee/status/1318896242332676096
 

@AxelVaindal

Had the same idea a while back, we worked a bit in this but struggled to make the restaurant/bar adopt the idea 🤔

I'm really curious about how you'll ship this to customer not really fond of technology, this is a great case study 😊
https://twitter.com/AxelVaindal/status/1318906488237293569


And on, and on. You can scroll down to see maker after maker talking about how they had that idea, were planning on building it, etc., etc.

So how was Pieter able to build this and get it out to the public so quickly? Why did his work? Quite simply, because he kept it simple. A few pointers:

• The market was validated with plenty of competition, but Pieter went after a specific, simpler, better execution

• He built in public and immediately launched on ProductHunt

• He used the technology he was familiar with, mainly PHP and jQuery

• He launched with an MVP, knowing he could monetize and market to customers later

So the next time you have a great idea, execute it! Before someone else like Pieter pulls it off.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

Simone Giertz

https://www.youtube.com/c/simonegiertz
The self-proclaimed "Queen of Shitty Robots" builds robots and all sorts of engineering feats. 

Some of my favorites:

• The Breakfast Machine

• Chopping Machine

• TRUCKLA

Jan Hakon Erichsen

https://www.instagram.com/janerichsen/
Erichsen loves destroying fruit and balloons with sharp objects. And his face. Seeing his posts in my timeline always brightens my day. Don't try this at home!

Some of my favorites:

• Flower Thief

• Taco Smash Machine

• Spaghetti Swirl

Matty Benedetto

https://www.instagram.com/mattybenedetto/
Benedetto is the maker behind Unnecessary Inventions. He designs and creates "fake products that solve non-existent problems." I'm laughing just thinking about some of these.

Some of my favorites:

• The Commuter Cup Carrier™

• Farmer-B-Gone™

• The Coro-neck™

MSCHF

https://mschf.xyz/
Every other Monday, MSCHF drops a new product. They even have an app so you can get notified of secret drops. Super-creative stuff, and some are legitimate products! Still silly.

Some of my favorites:

• This Foot Does Not Exist

• The Office (Slack)

• Alexagate

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

DOOM

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM
You may have noticed that anytime new hardware is available, someone ports the classic FPS game DOOM to it. See It Runs Doom! It even runs on a toaster. The source code is built in C, and it's a masterclass in-game mechanics and resource optimization from the mind of John Carmack. It's also a lot of messy code by today's standards, but it's a testament to the genius it took to actually pull this off in 1993.
 

Kickstarter

iOS: https://github.com/kickstarter/ios-oss
Android: https://github.com/kickstarter/android-oss
Kickstarter open-sourced their mobile app codebases, and it's built completely around reactive programming. When I first set out to learn reactive programming, these were invaluable references for how to structure an app. Today, all of my mobile apps are based on the core principles of these repositories.
 

TensorFlow

https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow
TensorFlow is a platform for machine learning, originally built by the Google Brain team. It's built in Python and C++, and is a painstakingly well-organized codebase. Have a look behind the scenes of what some of the best of the best can do with code.
 

Bootstrap

https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap
The most popular front-end web toolkit, Bootstrap set the bar for modular HTML/CSS components. When starting out on a new web project, the way I structure my CSS is highly influenced by the methodology in Bootstrap. Splitting Sass files into core, typography, layouts, and UI elements make for clean, easy to understand code.
 

three.js

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js
Back in the Flash days, I once built a 3D engine from scratch. It didn't do much (no shaders, no physics, etc.). But it could plot elements in a three-dimensional space, and render interactive wireframes. Today, we have three.js, and plenty of libraries built on top of it like A-Frame. The codebase is well organized and easy to dive right in. It covers a lot of technology under the hood, like WebGL, Canvas 2D, and CSS3D. The math module alone is enough to satisfy your left brain appetite. 
 

What did I miss?

Are there any code repositories you find interesting? Reply and let me know so I can View Source!

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

Blitzscaling

Reid Hoffman, of Greylock Partners and the co-founder of LinkedIn, is an avid component of rapidly scaling companies, prioritizing speed over efficiency in order to massively grow in value as quickly as possible. Typically, this comes with an infusion of cash in the form of venture capital, with the idea of leaping way ahead of any competition, even before it exists.

He wrote a book about it.

This is great when you're backed with enough VC money to burn through your runway at will.

But what if you're a bootstrapper? How can you scale without that level of support?
 

Preemptive Scaleability

Too often I see technical solopreneurs belaboring over scalability. Let's make sure we build this using micro-services, in the cloud, and we need to be prepared for a huge surge when we launch!

Scaling for zero customers is still zero. Scaleability should not be your primary concern when building a product. Focus on the product itself. And the customer.
 

Snailscaling

Scaling slowly is more manageable for the bootstrapper. Instead of focusing on infrastructure, you can pay attention to customer feedback. Here are some things I've learned to snailcscale:
 

Customer Communication

In your early stages, you don't need the latest Customer Relationship Management software to manage your customers. Talk to them directly. Compose one-off emails. Be available. When it gets to the point that this is unmanageable, that's the time to invest in some CRM.
 

Automation

Along the same lines, doing things manually at first is a great way to get a direct handle on your scaling needs. If you find that you're constantly repeating some task, to the point where it's taking up too much of your time, it's time to automate it. I like to apply this to customer requests. Listen to customers, and handle requests on a needs basis at first. But when 10 customers ask for that same thing, maybe it's time to build that into the product.
 

Overhead Costs

Don't jump the gun and prep for an enormous server. Just get it up there, and make sure your costs are covered. When I launched Link My Photos, I had one customer paying $10/month, and my server costs were $7/month. The infrastructure has never exceeded the revenue.
 

Refactor

Refactoring is a part of product development. You don't need to prepare for every possible scenario before it happens. That's impossible! Accept the fact that at some point, if you're lucky, you'll need to optimize. But don't waste time optimizing what may never be used. Do it when it's absolutely necessary.
 

A Parting Link My Photos Anecdote

After 2 years or so, Link My Photos was extremely profitable for the amount of effort involved. Then one day, during Comic-Con, a ridiculously popular customer signed up and basically brought the app to a screeching halt. When they would post a new photo, tens of thousands of their followers would instantly visit Link My Photos to check the link, overloading our server infrastructure. I had not prepared for this.

After seeking some advice from some tech-savvy friends, I managed to re-architect the cloud server to take make these huge surges manageable. But with that new architecture came more cost. In one swift moment, Link My Photos profits were cut by over half. That hurt.

But it could have been worse. If I had constructed this infrastructure earlier in preparation for that type of usage, the app would not have been profitable for all those years leading up to this. When you're bootstrapping, you look forward to these moments of panic. You can move quickly and decisively when the time calls for it.

Don't overstretch yourself by rushing ahead to get there. Grow sustainably. That's how you snailscale.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

Constraints by example

What better way to explain how constraints can elevate your work than to take a look at some projects and makers that have done this exceptionally well.
 

Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote

Chuck Jones established 9 rules for all the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote interactions. These are as follows:

1. The Road Runner cannot harm the coyote except by going “Beep-Beep.”

2. No outside force can harm the coyote – only his own ineptitude or the failure of the ACME products.

3. The coyote could stop anytime – If he were not a fanatic.

4. No dialogue ever, except “Beep-Beep!”

5. The Road Runner must stay on the road.

6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters.

7. All materials, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the ACME corporation.

8. Whenever possible, make gravity the coyote’s greatest enemy.

9. The coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.

The Road Runner and the Coyote's relationship is simple, and it's this simplicity, these rules or constraints, that make their interactions so hilarious.
 

Diana Smith

Diana Smith is a web developer and artist who creates detailed portraits and artwork using only CSS. Here, the medium itself is the constraint. Check out some of her artwork:

• https://diana-adrianne.com/purecss-gaze/

• https://diana-adrianne.com/purecss-lace/

• https://diana-adrianne.com/purecss-pink/

• https://diana-adrianne.com/purecss-zigario/

• https://diana-adrianne.com/purecss-francine/

Picasso's Blue Period

Between 1901 and 1904, Pablo Picasso painted exclusively monochromatic paintings in shades of blue. These turned out to be some of his most popular works. The subject matter is somber, often depicting beggars, prostitutes, and drunks, and are inspired by the suicide death of his friend in 1901. By limiting both his color palette and content, Picasso produced a cohesive, iconic body of work that stands the test of time.
 

Twitter

When Twitter launched in 2006, its creators placed a limit of 140 characters on each tweet. This constraint was born of necessity since the original concept needed to work with SMS messaging, which had severe limits on data length. But the character constraint proved the defining characteristic of tweeting, producing bite-size pieces of content in a feed format, and has resulted in a unique medium for writing and consuming content. Although this character limit has been expanded to 280 characters, the constraint continues to be the most important aspect of the Twitter platform.
 

Thinking about constraints

The next time you're brainstorming a project, take a moment to consider what constraints could be applied to your work. By adding constraints, you may just discover the secret sauce that elevates the end result to something greater.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

Getting into a routine

It took about two months before writing felt like routine, rather than something new to learn. After two months, preparing the weekly newsletter was just an expected task to do, like taking out the weekly recycling or going to the gym. Having the newsletter on a Friday is nice, because I start thinking about what to write on Monday, and usually by Thursday I have a good idea of what the newsletter will be.
 

Forever a procrastinator

Along those lines, I've reconfirmed my serial tendency to be a procrastinator. As I write this, it's Friday morning. I've long ago come to terms with the fact that if I don't have a deadline, that thing will likely never get done. And if I do have a deadline, I'll most likely wait until the absolute last minute to meet it.
 

Replies are the best

My absolute favorite thing about this newsletter is hearing from people who read it. It's fun to read replies to some of the things I write about, and I've had some interesting back and forth conversations on past issues. Keep those replies coming!
 

Generating ideas

When I started writing Serial Maker, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to come up with a topic each week. But so far, I haven't even come close to running out of ideas. I have a backlog of things I'd like to cover, and somehow, each week I've been able to come up with something.
 

Growing subscribers

Not surprisingly, tweeting about each week's newsletter to my small number of Twitter followers generates zero new subscribers. This was expected, but it is still interesting to see. People aren't going to subscribe to something based on a tweet, and at this point, anyone who actually reads my tweets already knows about the newsletter. However, after writing a blog post, I typically see an immediate bump in subscribers. This might just be the ideal scenario anyway. If someone likes what you're writing, they'd be more likely to want to read more. 
 

Thank you

I can't thank you enough for reading and engaging with Serial Maker. I hope you're getting something useful out of my wide, random, range of topics. Knowing that there's an audience for my thoughts keeps me motivated, so thank you for reading and supporting this effort!
 

Going forward

Fortunately, I still enjoy writing this newsletter. At times, it can feel like a chore, especially when I have a million other things that need to get done. But most weeks I genuinely look forward to writing something. So until the day comes where I feel like it's not fun to write each week, I'll be writing Serial Maker 😀. I'm also planning on repurposing some of the evergreen content into blog posts, and I can't wait to revisit some of these past emails.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

Poolside FM

This is so much fun. Who needs Spotify when you have some chill 90s tunes, brought to you by a gnarly retro interface? There's TV, chat, mixtapes, and a guestbook to keep you vibing. I can only imagine how much of a joy this must have been to build.
 

Winamp Skin Museum

Before there was streaming music, but after the glory days of mixtapes, you had to download your songs to your computer via Napster or rip them from your awesome CD collection into MP3 format. Winamp was hands-down the best MP3 player ever, and anyone could design a Winamp UI. The Winamp Skin Museum showcases the creativity and attention to detail that went into some of the greatest Winamp skins ever made.
 

Paul Robertson

Quite possibly the greatest pixel artist I've ever seen, Paul Robertson's pixel art and animations have been featured in mainstream movies and television shows like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Rick and Morty, and The Simpsons. You can buy his art prints on his INPRNT store.
 

98.css

Tired of your shiny new material design interface? Return your web design back to simpler days with the 98.css design system. The only thing that's missing is the blue screen of death, which would make perfect sense for your error pages.
 

DOSBox

Relive the golden age of 90s video games with DOSBox, an x86 emulator with DOS. Even though Doom has been ported to virtually every OS since, it's still nice to play the influential first-person shooter in its original habitat. And let your nostalgia go wild with some of the greatest classic adventure and strategy games of all time.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

A tale of three skeuomorphs

Continuing with our iconography theme from last week, here's some more reading on icons. Shift Happens dives into the history of skeuomorphs in the context of modern computing. From trashcans to floppy disks to keyboard keys, skeuomorphs permeate our daily computing lives.
 

Icons8 Animated icons 2.0

More iconography! Icons8 released its second iteration of animated icons. Check them out. They've got full color, line art, and solid-filled styles.
 

Web Design in 4 minutes

This is a brilliant take on learning how to build a webpage from scratch. I love this approach, and if you're looking to jump right into a simple page, this is a great place to start.
 

Airport

An App Store outside of THE App Store. As a consumer, get a sneak peak at apps before they hit the official Apple App Store. As a developer, get your app in front of a large audience before you go public. The interesting thing about Airport is it seems that some apps are intentionally never going to be available on the App Store, essentially using TestFlight as its own distribution platform, which goes directly against Apple's developer policies. We'll see how this plays out.
 

Web Brutalism, Seamfulness, and Notion

Brandon Dorn takes an insightful look at usability in the modern web, with some digs at Jacob Nielsen's usability over everything approach. Specifically, how brutalist websites thumb their nose at usability altogether for the sake of being anti-art, and in the process, authentic. This is a long read, but well worth it.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋
 

Susan Kare

The modern computer icon system owes a huge debt of gratitude to Susan Kare. She is responsible for the original Macintosh icons. Her work gave the Mac its huge personality. Check out this article about her work at Apple: The Story Behind Susan Kare’s Iconic Design Work for Apple.
 

Michael Flarup

A Danish designer, Michael creates some of the most stunning app icons ever. Take a look at his work at PixelResort. And his project, Apply Pixels is chock-full of design resources. Download free app icon templates for iOS and Android, along with tons of other goodies.
 

Jon Hicks

Jon created the Firefox browser app icon, one of my favorite app icons of all time. He designed the emoticons for Skype. And he recently made the iconography for Spotify. See his work at https://hicksdesign.co.uk/.
 

Stefan Dziallas

Stefan is one super-talented icon designer. Just take a look at his clients on the iconwerk website. His style is clean, minimal, bold, and bright.
 

Bonus! Icon libraries

5 of my favorite icon collections.

• Feather Icons: https://feathericons.com/

• Heroicons: https://heroicons.com/

• Streamline Icons: https://streamlineicons.com/

• The Noun Project: https://thenounproject.com/

• Line Icons: https://lineicons.com/

Use these in your next project, or find some inspiration for your next icon creation!

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. And don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord!

Until next week,

Craig
 

How I VSCode

First off, do you want to see how others use VS Code? Check out How I VSCode by Scott Watermasysk. You can publish all the VS Code extensions you use to your own profile. Here's mine.
 

Show me the extensions!

These are some of my go-to extensions for VS Code.
 

Polacode

It's Polaroid for your code. If you've ever wanted to screengrab a code snippet, this extension makes it super easy to capture and share.
 

GitLens

VS Code has git built-in, but GitLens takes that to another level. At a glance, you can see who committed code, navigate repos, and compare changes.
 

IntelliCode

AI-driven code completion. Save your fingers and speed up development time by letting the computer finish your code statements.
 

ESLint

Write better code. Let ESLint find problems and fix them automatically.
 

Don't forget the themes!

Of course, no code editor would be complete without some awesome themes. Here are some of my favorites.
 

Dracula

Bright, distinct colors over a dark background. This is my current theme.
 

SynthWave '84

Neon dreams. Make your code glow!
 

Nord

Grab your ice fishing rod and chill out with these clear arctic nordic colors.
 

Palenight

Like funky ligatures? This is your theme. Check out those "f"s.
 

One Dark Pro

If you miss Atom's beautiful dark theme, reminisce with One Dark Pro.


Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. And don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord!

Until next week,

Craig
 

The Dunning-Kruger effect

Most people have an inability to recognize their own lack of ability. In psychology, this contributes to the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. 

Along the journey of competence in a subject, very early on there's a sense of knowledge gained — to the point where we may feel like, "oh, this is easy... I'm already good at this." Then, as we advance, we start to realize how much more there is to learn and recognize it will be an enormous challenge to truly advance. But over time, knowledge is gained, and our sense of confidence grows accordingly.
 

Beginner's mind in martial arts

Shoshin is often applied to the experience of studying Japanese martial arts. I touch upon this briefly in 7 ways training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu will level up your programming skills. The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu experience is broken up into 5 belt colors: white, blue, purple, brown, and black. It often takes well over 10 years of training to achieve a black belt.

Upon entering a gym for the first time, the white belt knows nothing. But after a few sessions, their knowledge of grappling is expanded tremendously. There are innumerable new techniques to learn in the beginning. So there's a sense of, "Wow, now I'm a Jiu-Jitsu expert. Here I come, black belt." Many white belts walk away thinking they've experienced all there is.

Then the white belt earns their blue belt and they're thrust into a world of pain and frustration. As a blue belt, you have more opportunities to compete against advanced partners. And the blue belt starts to think, "I'll never learn all there is to learn in this sport." Many blue belts walk away thinking the journey is too hard and too long.

But if a blue belt manages to make it through to purple belt, the attitude shifts. Looking back at their struggles through white and blue, and seeing how much they've learned, but also having a sense of how much more there is to learn, a new outlook is formed. Knowing that you don't know what you don't know is liberating. The purple belt will approach his future journey with an open mind... a beginner's mind.
 

The beginner's maker mind

All of this is simply learning how to learn. Recognizing that we cannot evaluate our own level of competency, the maker who embraces Shoshin will always be willing to improve, to approach making with an open mind, and to listen to the ideas of others. It allows us as makers to continue to evolve, to explore new mediums, new technologies, to never pigeon hole ourselves into one path, but to use our passion for learning to build amazing things.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. And don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord!

Until next week,

Craig
 

Gestalt 🌑

‟The whole is other than the sum of the parts.”
—Kurt Koffka

When we observe something, we perceive it as a whole, well before we are able to distinguish its parts. This is the fundamental theory of gestalt. There are several principles commonly associated with gestalt theory. Seeing their usage in logo design will help to understand the concepts.

• Similarity: we group like things together. The feathers of the NBC peacock logo are all similar shapes, and our mind sees them as one.

• Continuation: the eye naturally follows a line. Observe the lines running through the Coca-Cola logo.

• Closure: our brains fill in missing parts. We see a panda, instead of black shapes in the WWF logo.

• Proximity: we group close things together. We see letters, not broken lines in the 8-bar IBM logo.

• Figure/Ground: we isolate foreground objects from a background. Everyone sees the mountain in the Toblerone logo. But do you see the bear?

• Symmetry and order: our brain attempts to simplify ambiguous shapes. The Roxy logo is the Quiksilver logo, tilted and reflected to make a heart.

There are other principles, but these cover a lot of ground. In a nutshell, gestalt attempts to understand the psychology behind how our mind interprets pure design objects: shapes, colors, direction. 
 

Metaphor 🌕

A successful visual metaphor should cause the viewer to want to look again. There is something more meaningful than what first may appear. Often times one visual element is compared to another visual element that belongs to a different category altogether. You've likely seen this used in advertising. Check out this board of visual metaphors for some excellent examples.

Think of a Jaguar, as the visual representation of a car company, implying speed and prowess. The negative space between the "E" and the "x" in the FedEx logo forms an arrow, a fitting metaphor for a delivery company. 

But metaphor goes beyond design. In the film Memento, everything in a flashback (moving forward in time) is shot in black-and-white, while the present (going backward through time) is shot in full color. These are two separate stories, woven together in the film. When they meet, the black-and-white slowly changes to color, not unlike watching a Polaroid film develop. In doing so, the director Christopher Nolan provides further meaning to the viewer.
 

Putting it together 🌓

When making your next visual creation, pay attention to both the gestalt and the metaphor. Keep in mind the relationship between the parts of your vision, and remember that everything has meaning.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. And don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord!

Until next week,

Craig
 

AI Dungeon ⚔️

https://play.aidungeon.io/
AI Dungeon is an AI-generated text adventure that uses deep learning to create each game experience. The latest version is built on top of OpenAI's new GPT-3 model to generate each story block and possible action. Just enter any action-based command to move the story along. It's way more interesting than look, go north, and inventory from classic text adventures.
 

Tinkered Thinking ✍️

https://tinkeredthinking.com/?id=836
Every other paragraph in this AI collaboration was written by GPT-3. Witness GPT-3 write about itself in the third person. Without the italics, would you know a machine generated this content?
 

Layout Generator ⚛️

https://twitter.com/sharifshameem/status/1282676454690451457
Sharif Shameem built a layout generator that generates React apps. Describe the layout you want, and watch your computer program the working JSX code. That's right, a computer is coding now.
 

Three.js Generator 🌎

https://twitter.com/Antonio_GomezM/status/1287969287110443008
React apps too mundane? How about a 3D scene? Describe the elements in the scene, and watch GPT-3 write three.js code snippets for you. Built by Antonio Gomez.
 

Ingredient Parser 🍎

https://twitter.com/lawderpaul/status/1284972517749338112
Take a picture of any nutrition label, and GPT-3 will identify the ingredients, determine if it's healthy, and provide a definition of the food.
 

Give me the GPT-3! 🤯

Want to get started using GPT-3? You'll need to sign up for access to the beta API (I'm still waiting for my invite). Once you have access to the API, here's a library to quickly put together web demos of your project. Want to see more? Check out this list of awesome GPT-3 links.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. And don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord!

Until next week,

Craig