1. Come one! Come all!
Step right up! Right this way! Get your Jelly right here! Fresh off the presses! Ice cold, steaming hot, deliciously room temperature Jelly!
As you can clearly see, in the past month, I've gotten really good at Marketing. I mean, just look at all those CTAs—that's what we in the biz refer to as a Call To Action—drawing you in.
Do you feel drawn in? Excellent.
I'm hoping, after some recent changes we've made to the Jelly home page and some focused attention on some new industries, a lot more folks will be drawn to give Jelly a try. Have we succeeded? Time will tell.
And speaking of time and telling and such, if you'll grant me a moment of reflection, I’ve been struck by one notable difference between marketing and programming: marketing defies my programmer’s thirst for instant gratification.
When I ship a feature, it's shipped. When I fix a bug, it's fixed. Dopamine. Yay!
When I try *waves hands at long list of marketing to-dos*, did any of it work? Did it help? Worse, did it hurt?
I don't know, we'll have to wait and see.
There's likely some wisdom to be had in there, but I'm going to get some more coffee. It's not dopamine, but at least it's caffeine.
—Cade
2. Studio Update
Lately we’ve been doing a lot of marketing and spam protection, which is frankly pretty boring to talk about and share here. On the more fun technical side, the team finished some long-standing projects recently:
Pika now supports syntax highlighting and Spotify embed.
Jelly now integrates with Google, better supports attachments, and is days away from supporting quoted replies.
Letterbird now supports pre-filling the name, email, subject, and body of your contact form when embedding.
🤩🤩🤩
Oh, and this is exciting. Cade and James talked about Good Enough on The Ruby on Rails Podcast. Thanks for graciously hosting them, Elise! Give it a listen!
🤩🤩🤩
Beyond work, James is finally in his new home, Barry just got back from a lovely trip to Italy, I bought a new car to head off the tariffs, and Patrick is trying to visit Cade but his body said, “Not so fast…”
Barry has suggested we pick up the pace on our newslettering again (were you a reader when we used to post weekly?!), so perhaps these studio updates will remain pretty short and quick?
—Lettini
3. Sharing is Caring
And now for the fun stuff: links!
We’re all loving this new Pika blog: Everybody Clap Your Hands
There’s been no shortage of depressing articles about AI, just in time for a new Black Mirror season.
Barry is about to get into this new trading card game.
Birder? Have we got the website for you: app.birdweather.com
Patrick lost a day to IMG_0001
Here’s a short story from James’s archives about quantum computing. If you enjoy it, maybe check out the TV show “DEVS”.
When this was written – 13 years ago – QR codes were an amusing novelty, but now they are pretty commonplace. So why aren’t we seeing more Q-art codes?
4. In Conclusion
Who drank all my coffee? Should I make more?
I mean, we got some fancy Rwandan coffee recently, and for reasons unbeknownst to me, one of the brews tasted very strongly of asparagus. Like, I felt like I was drinking liquid asparagus. All the rest of the batches? Great. That cup? Asparagus.
I like asparagus as much as the next guy, but not in a mug at 7 in the morning.
You know what’s a lot better than asparagus in the morning though?
Toast — with Jelly. (☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞
—Cade