I took it easy for most of June to help out with Owen and generally try to make things as easy as possible for my wife. We now have 4 kids – ages 6, 5, 3, and the newborn, which means there’s rarely a dull moment in the Mazur household.
Preceden
I put some time into Preceden during the break, knocking out a few small product improvements here and there.
One of these included integrating Headway, an in-app changelog notification widget that lets me keep users informed about recent updates to the Preceden:
In addition to being able to read them directly in the app, Headway generates a public page where anyone can follow the changes. I also hooked Headway up to Preceden’s long-neglected Twitter account where it shares updates when I publish them:
Recent updates include:
- Triangular event sides
- More bar name position options
- Sharing timelines via a private URL
- Dashed connection lines
- Improved dialog box design
And yes, I do need to resume marketing initiatives one of these days.
Help Scout
I took June completely off from Help Scout. As a contractor, it’s not paid time off, but I put in extra hours in May in preparation for the time off in June so thankfully didn’t have to forgo any income to take the time off.
With the hire of Michael, the new Data Lead, in May, my work at Help Scout is changing: I have more bandwidth to tackle bigger data projects because Michael has taken on a lot of the other day to day responsibilities.
The big project I’m starting is building out a Likelihood to Close Score that uses machine learning to help us estimate the probability that a trial will go onto become a customer. It’s requiring picking up some new skills because it’s one thing to build a scikit-learn model locally in a Jupyter Notebook, another thing to get a model in production and have the score available in our data warehouse to use in Looker and other analyses. I’ll write a post down the road sharing how it all works, assuming I can figure it out.
What I’m listening to
Lots of podcasts thanks to some long car rides during my break + listening in the morning during yoga:
- My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri
- Lex Fridman, a polymath who interviews lots of brilliant folks in technology, science, and entrepreneurship. I’ve listened to his interviews with Vitalik Buterin about Ethereum 2.0, Bryan Johnson about building brain-computer interfaces at Kernel, Sam Harris about consciousness, Silvio Micali about Algorand, Jason Calacanis about angel investing, and Clara Sousa-Silva about her work detecting phosphene on Venus which might be a sign of life there.
- Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen
- Art of Product with Ben Orenstein and Derrick Reimer
What I’m reading
- The Big Short about the 2008 market crash
- The Body by Bill Bryson. One of his other books, A Short History of Nearly Everything, is my favorite book.
- Project Hail Mary, a fantastic new sci-fi novel by Andy Weir who wrote The Martian
- Lying for Money about how fraud works
Hope all is well with you all 👋.
Matt Mazur 