Articles

Lessons from building in the open — what worked, what didn't, what I'd do differently. They land here first, then in the newsletter.

  • LinkedIn's Post Inspector, at linkedin.com/post-inspector, reads a URL the way LinkedIn's crawler does and clears the preview LinkedIn had stored for it, so your next share picks up the tags currently on the page. That is the whole job: it refreshes, it does not validate. When the preview is still wrong after you run it, the cache was never the problem. The image you shipped is.

  • An OpenClaw alternative is worth switching to only if it keeps the part you wanted, an agent that acts while you are asleep, and drops the part that should worry you, one always-on assistant holding every credential you own. Three shapes are on offer: another general assistant, a self-hosted workflow runner, or a narrow agent with a scheduled trigger and a single exit door.

  • Follow up on a cold email only when you can add one fact that did not exist when you sent the first one. Not a bump, not a polite reminder that you are still waiting: something the reader did not know before. Two follow-ups written that way beat six written in advance, because a sequence drafted before you send can only ever report that time has passed.

  • The right Repl.it alternative depends on which of Replit's four jobs you are replacing: the agent that writes the code, the browser environment, the always-on hosting with a public URL, and the bundled Postgres. Most disappointing switches come from swapping one of the four and discovering the other three were the part you actually relied on.

  • Replit alternatives fall into three lineages, and the useful move is to pick across them instead of inside one: browser IDEs that hand you a machine (GitHub Codespaces, CodeSandbox, Coder), agent builders that write the app for you (Lovable, Bolt, v0, Firebase Studio), and plain hosts that run whatever comes out (Vercel, Railway, Render, Fly.io).

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Products, marketing, tools: I test a lot, sum up what works, you avoid my mistakes.

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