Hello Reader,
It's the school holidays this week in Singapore, and I've been busy writing and coding. And the coding has been... incredibly addictive.
This week, I want to talk about what I've been working on to ensure reliable email delivery to readers. I also want to talk about the joys of being a builder.
Fighting with emails
Last week, I noted how things are going to change as AI starts to upend everything as we know it. Unfortunately, some subscribers of this newsletter would never have seen that commentary. The reason? The ML spam filter at Office 365 had once again decided to drop incoming Tech Stories emails.
No warning. No appearing in Junk. Just gone. And I have a ringside view of it happening: incoming emails to my main address first go through Google Workspace, which forwards to Office 365, because I like Outlook and it works best there. Anyway, the newsletter shows up in Gmail but never makes it to Office 365.
This isn't the first time this has happened either. It turns out that email deliverability is an arcane subject, and achieving 100% deliverability is wishful thinking, or an influencer trying to sell you a course about why you need to build your own audience through email.
I've been studying the issue with renewed vigour for a couple of weeks, and the only option beyond trying to ignore it would be to use another reputable email sending service. And if I'm doing that, to rebuild my stack to be able to swap sending services at will. I've set up the initial groundwork, and I think I might actually pull it off.
The toughest part? Filling in the forms and waiting for manual approvals. Because email is arcane, remember? Wish me luck.
Hyper productivity
I showed the LinkedIn app I created to someone this week. Her first reaction: "I'd pay to use that!" It's really nice to hear, I confess. Of course, there's that inconvenient fact that I'd always thought of myself as its sole user. So back to the drawing board.
What I've done since is redesign the whole thing for mobile responsiveness, switch to a framework better suited for the growing features I have in mind, and deploy it on a proper database server. And yes, make it multi-user with a more robust asynchronous polling backend.
Obviously, what I really mean is that I had Claude Code do it for me. Because while I'm very good at explaining technology, I'm also honest enough to admit that I'm mediocre at coding and setting up Linux servers.
All of this done in a few days, as a hobbyist project, when it would have taken a team of experienced developers several weeks before the era of AI. I believe we're living through a fundamental shift in who gets to build software. And it's only just getting started.
That's all I have for today. As usual, you can reply to this email to reach me.
Regards,
Paul Mah
