Pruning the garden (the end of the Daily Dev Tips newsletter)
tl;dr: I’m ending my Daily Dev Tips newsletter, and transitioning to RSS exclusively. I will still be publishing articles here (just not by email).
I’m done
I end up quoting Anna Cook a lot here. Recently, she posted on BlueSky…
I’m so tired of the tech hype machine.
Idgaf how you’re optimizing with AI, what the hell are you doing for people?
How are you making the world actually better?
Idgaf what your job title is or what you’re selling.
I could give two fucks about your manifesto or your stocks.
Be a fucking human.
And this hit on something that’s been stewing in me for months (years, really).
I’ve become so very much done with tech overall.
I used to love this industry, and I do still love many of wonderful people in it. But as we’ve shifted from a craft to industrialization, everything I loved about the work itself has died.
And so I find myself writing less and less.
A relic of the past
My Daily Dev Tips newsletter started because Jonathan Stark, my business coach at the time, told me I really should if I wanted to have a successful business.
And he was right! During the peak of my course business, my newsletter was the single biggest driver of course sales.
It was also a giant fucking chore.
This thing I loved became this job I had to do every single weekday or gosh-darnit-are-you-even-serious-about-running-business?
As I wound down my business, I diversified what I was writing about. But it still felt like this big, heavy obligation. Years of daily writing made it feel like something I had to do rather than something I wanted to do.
And recently, because I’m just frankly out of things to say or spending more time interacting with people IRL… I’m just not writing much anymore.
Newsletters are expensive!
ConvertKit, the tool that I use to manage my email newsletter, is one of the cheapest and simplest newsletter tools available. It costs me $150 a month.
Every time I send an email, I lose subscribers.
People who signed up for tips about JavaScript often don’t want to hear me talk about anti-fascism, mutual aid, gardening, and so on.
That $150/month made sense when it was a marketing tool helping me sell thousands of dollars a month in courses and growing regularly. Now, it’s just a thing draining my savings account.
I still want to write and share my thoughts. I just don’t think a newsletter is the right vehicle for that.
So…
This is the last article I plan to send by email.
If you enjoy my writing and want to keep up with it, I’ll be publishing exclusively via RSS going forward (and automating posts to my BlueSky and Mastodon accounts).
My email address continues to be publicly posted. Email me any time! I’d love to chat!