Morgan Chen

more product brain than investor brain rn. probably overdue. i'm at the office more, on the embarcadero in the mornings again, kibo fully assumes this is his schedule now

maya said she's probably coming out from nyc for a long weekend. also if anyone pings me on Slack i probably won't see it. don't use Slack anymore

keep coming back to sequencing. before we have a real v0.1 in customers' hands, senior eng first probably makes more sense than trying to layer in go-to-market too early not even a big philosophy thing. just feels like i'll regret hiring someone into a story that's still changing every 3 days. bart this morning gave me way too much time to think about it

kept flipping Datadog vs Honeycomb longer than i wanted. settled it this morning -- Honeycomb for us the tracing is just better, especially once you actually follow a request end to end instead of staring at logs and pretending. anyway. decision made. moving on

v2 finally all the way over. api is GraphQL now, JWT auth, whole thing. killed off v1 this morning. all clients cut clean which honestly i kept expecting not to happen. idk. big one. then got on BART and immediately had to think about whether i left Kibo's food bin open

last week's green curry from Lemongrass kinda ruined me a little. same move tonight i think. friday, etc. Jamie's home at a normal hour for once so that helps

swapped the coffee subscription to a new roaster this week. old one had gotten kind of stale, like every bag tasted the same by day 3. tiny thing but ok. small win

Jordan's observability rollout write-up was really good. sent it around this morning as the doc example i want people using now. idk, nice to have something that just says the thing cleanly for once

keep thinking the move reset my brain a little. not in a huge way. just less noise maybe. bart still kind of fries me though

calendar's weirdly humane right now. fewer random investor coffees, more actual product time. office felt normal this week in a good way

i'm noticing i don't want to over-explain stuff to the team anymore. just say what we're doing, then do it. seems to land better

oh and on retreat stuff, loop Sarah in. budget still runs through HR but she's the one actually herding it this year

jamie's off nights finally so we've been eating dinner like regular people again. kibo keeps pacing the bigger apartment like he personally negotiated the square footage lol

idk. weirdly clearer than i was a month ago. not excited exactly. just can see the next stretch now

api v2 GraphQL subscriptions are actually feeling good now. dashboard updates are live without the weird laggy polling thing, and the JWT refresh finally stopped being visible to users. idk. nice when one of these just works

coffee w Mike was nice actually. he's good. seems really happy at the new gig idk. useful to be around someone who's just... settled in it

keep thinking about that Priya/Marcus thing from the offsite. got weirdly hot over design tooling of all things, and it's still not really settled. mostly just seeing them route around each other in Discord now. annoying.

keep getting little pings about stuff that is not actually the thing. Discord, recruiter, random landlord email, BART card, whatever. office has been calmer than my phone somehow

the one real item is legal still needs to clear the senior eng offer. comp is 185k base and 0.15. once they stop sitting on it, recruiting can send

idk. weirdly not stressed, just annoyed. feels like a day of tabs open and none of them are hard, just loud

Oakland is still nice though. bigger place, Kibo has already claimed the patch of sun by the window. Jamie was home for dinner last night which helped

a lot of this is just noise tbh. the investor meeting was good, which is nice, but now i owe them the follow-up deck by end of month and they want the growth numbers really clean. put it on my list and immediately had 6 other tabs open in my brain

ok, this one was pretty clean. added the api v2 mutation for bulk invoice creation. kept waiting for auth to turn into a whole side quest but jwt scopes are already handled in the gateway so we didn't have to touch the auth middleware at all. nice when something is actually just the thing.

marcus 1:1 was good this morning. he seems pretty settled on the roadmap now, which honestly helps. idk. nice to have one conversation this week that was just... normal product talk

anna's good. short update, nothing dramatic. think we're fine there.

idk, weirdly calm today. office was loud in a normal way for once and i could actually hear myself think.

also can you pull Tokyo flights for October? trying to line up the trip for Jamie before schedules get stupid.

oakland commute still feels fake. bigger apartment is real though. kibo has already claimed the sunny spot by the window.

still annoyed about the March 2023 outage tbh. put it in the retro doc so we stop pretending we'll be disciplined in the moment: no late-friday deploys. if we really have to do one, whole team on standby or it waits.

mid-week feels... calmer? idk. less investor churn, more actual product. still doing the oakland -> sf commute and i keep missing which side of the platform i need when i'm half awake

yesterday's design review was good. Priya ran the onboarding flow review and those mockups were probably the cleanest thing i've seen all quarter. she's kind of on a tear lately

Jordan ran the all-hands demo today and nailed it. did the live walkthrough himself, no weird fumbling, team was super into it. idk, nice to watch and not have to jump in

staff eng recruiter call was actually good. weirdly hard to tell with recruiters half the time but this one felt real. they're moving one of the candidates to onsite next week. idk. trying not to overread one call

Priya's packet is basically there. just waiting on the calibration meeting next week so we can send it without doing the weird half-final version thing.

idk, weird little pocket of calm today. still not fully used to the oakland -> sf commute and i almost got on the wrong train again because i was reading notes on my phone half asleep

deck is paused for a sec anyway -- investor pushed the meeting out 2 weeks so we actually have room. left off in mid-section 3 on the retention funnel. i'll pick it back up there when i reopen it

met Anna Rao today. co-founder at Tessl -- they're doing data tooling for ML pipelines. berkeley database PhD, very very sharp. and shipping fast, not just talking about it. idk, stuck with me for some reason

last night was funny. hung out with Kenji after that neuroscience meetup -- he's at Neuralink, senior researcher, working on BCI decoding. like actual brain-interface stuff, not any of the data infra/devtools universe i live in. idk. kept thinking about it on BART home

Mercury v0.1 smoke tests all green. shipped it internally, no incidents. first real ship that's been actually clean since the March outage. not making it a whole thing but yeah. nailed it.

had coffee w Anna Rao again. Tessl's hiring pretty aggressively for senior eng, specifically db internals people. kept thinking Rishi would actually fit there weirdly well. should probably intro them