On the Death and Rebirth of My Substack
💀 — I'm rebooting this into a developer blog!
Hey folks!
I know, I know. It’s been quite some time! I have missed writing for y’all and capturing all of the things that I see and encounter in bite-sized chunks. But here’s the thing — I wanted to build and that hunger kept growing.
So, an idea that I had with my dad more than 10+ years ago finally became an opportunity. I’m not sure if there was any one, singular moment that launched things but I knew that I had to and go try some of this “AI” stuff that I kept hearing about and test-driving.
Sure, I was building it for other people but I wanted to build it for myself. So, I found a few friends and we started putting things together. And the grind was real:
I wrote over 500,000 lines of code, the vast majority this month! When I’m in, I’m in. The project, as you can already tell via the rebrand, is DeathNote, a digital dead man’s switch that we built with the highest levels of encryption, security, and protection possible.
Why? Because our community is going to trust their most important thoughts and data here, like passwords, final wishes for your social media (and/or pets), and more. We built some handy templates too for folks to use:
How does it work? Pretty simple, actually:
Sign up.
Create a “death note,” a final note with whatever you want.
Invite someone you trust to receive the note when you die.
Verify you’re alive via an automated system so it doesn’t send early.
That’s it. As simple as that sounds it took some serious level of sophisticated thinking to get it right and to ensure perfect and flawless delivery. Was it worth building military-grade security, privacy, and protection for a simple text file?
Yeah, it kinda is.
But that’s not really what this is about.
I mean, it is, but, it isn’t.
What this is really about is that I’m evolving this Substack into a developer blog, where I’ll share candid thoughts about building in the industry of death and working on a small but hopefully fun (and profitable!) SaaS business with people that I really, really, really love.
I hope you’ll follow along.
And yes, AI and AI-related tools will be a huge part of this continued sequence of writing! I’m using MCP servers, agents and sub-agents and sub-sub-agents and a ton of open source tools that make the insane amounts of productivity possible (as see in that screenshot above).
Many of these are are driving — autonomously! — a lot of our fundamental workflows and processes from design to product development to deployment and even GTM motions (although I’m just starting to look into that).
Many of these (sub)agents even have cute names, like our YOLO agent:
And our zombie (process) slaying sub-agent that is constantly reviewing ports and sanitizing them for local development for faster build times.
Many of these are simple slaves but some of them are complex, driven by real-time autonomous events. One even plays a sound of one of our cat’s MEOW if someone happens. So ratchet.
The point is this: This newsletter should actually become much more interesting because I’ll be sharing what I’m doing in-practice and in real-time as we build this small product out.
I’d love it if you’d join me.
— Summer
Finally, I want to give a shoutout to all of you who have supported me since the very beginning of this small newsletter! It really helped keep me going and for those that financially supported me, even if for a small time, I really appreciate that as it gave me to courage to go even one step further.
It all started with some experiments with AI and booting up Stable Diffusion locally and just being absolutely blown away by it. I started building, small stuff, and then realized I could build worlds.
But building stuff is hard. Building stuff by yourself is even harder, even though you can go faster. I’m stoked that I have a small community to start this new season with and I’d love and take any feedback that you might have!
There’s so much more to the story of why I started working on this but that’ll come out in time. I have at least until the point of when my death note fires.
💀