Day 302: Brain Dump

personal

Today’s post is going to be more stream of consciousness because I took a tiny bit of melatonin (I don’t know why they’re sold in 3mg doses — I smash each tablet into tiny pieces so decrease the dosage and I still feel them super intensely) and I’m starting to get very sleepy. Also my wrist hurts. Somehow it feels related even though I can’t explain why.

Browserflow

I onboarded my good friend Michael to Browserflow today, and it made me very happy to see just how blown away he was. He had worked on similar tasks (e.g. scraping sites, automating tasks) at his last company, and it was fun seeing Browserflow handling the edge cases that had come up for him. All those days toiling away at making Browserflow robust in the face of iframes, shadow DOMs, and other weird site behavior is paying off! But this is one of those things where there will always be unhandled edge cases because of the nature of the Web — everyone’s site is a unique snowflake and some are straight up atrocious (e.g. I’ve come across old web pages that don’t even have a <body> element which Browserflow assumes exists).

That onboarding session was great because we were able to immediately try using Browserflow to help automate one of his daily tasks of writing and formatting his Substack newsletter. Up until now, he was copying and pasting each paragraph before formatting it manually, but we were able to create a flow that reduces the 20-minute process down to a single click. He was also great to talk to about Browserflow as a business and we spent a lot of time discussing the opportunities here.

Some of the ideas we discussed:

  • Browserflow doesn’t have killer use cases because, well, it can do anything on any website. Its flexibility is a strength, but it makes it much harder to market because of how broad it is. Products that have faced the same challenge of not having clear “hero” use cases given how general they are:

    • Spreadsheets
    • The Internet
    • Programming
    • Other automation platforms (e.g. Zapier)

    Stimulating people’s imagination about what they could automate and improve is one of the main goals behind the gallery. It’s possible that Browserflow will be all about the long tail.

  • How dope it would be to have Browserflow run automatically in the cloud

    For the use case we worked on of Michael preparing his newsletter, he’d strongly prefer to have it be done automatically at the same time every day without him having to run it manually. It’s clear that allowing automations in the cloud would open up a whole world of automation possibilities, and I’m excited to work on that whenever that may be. Perhaps I should try doing a 3-day hackathon when I’m quarantined in Taiwan just trying to get an MVP working.

Taiwan

Speaking of Taiwan, I just got my passport back along with my gold card! Wheeee! Still need to figure out when to go exactly. I want to write a post detailing the application process and what to expect because many of my friends don’t know about the Gold Card, and the people that I’ve talked to about it have been quite keen to apply as well.

Speaking of posts I want to write, I still haven’t written my bodyweight training post that I’ve been meaning to write for months now.

Intention

Speaking of things I’ve been meaning to do for months now, I really should add a paid plan to Intention and add some of the features I’ve been keeping in my head (pomodoro mode, option to limit by unlocks rather than by time, syncing data across multiple devices). And then of course, I want to build Intention for mobile, but that seems so unlikely in the nearish future (< 1 year) given I’m having a hard enough time working on just Browserflow. But it’d be so helpful! Grr. My ambition is greater than my capabilities.

House Tasks

I made a spreadsheet of things that need fixing inside the house:

I want to fix the high and medium priority tasks before I leave for Taiwan.

My eyelids are getting so heavy that I can’t even keep my right eye open anymore (is this normal when taking melatonin? happens super consistently for me) so good night! Oh boy, it’s only 9:30pm which means I’ll definitely meet my goal to go to bed before 12am. Hell yeah. I want to fix my sleep schedule even more now after the daylight savings time shift because it’s depressing to have the day become dark at 5:30pm and I want to spend more of my waking hours when it’s bright outside.