Morgan Chen

Drafted the follow-up and sent it to two firms. Kept it pretty tight -- one update, one ask, no extra throat clearing.

long day but good, actually. out with kibo now and it's doing that annoying sf drizzle where you're not really wet til you get home. jamie's on shift so probably leftovers after this, maybe just toast honestly

Devon sent another HN thing at 11. opened it in bed, got maybe halfway, phone hit me in the face. seemed very him. Jamie was like are you seriously reading Hacker News right now lol

Thursday. investor list first while my brain still works, then customer call later. want one clean pass on who actually matters vs who just likes devtools in theory. if i can keep the morning from getting eaten by internal stuff, good.

Went through the list Devon sent. About 15 names. Split it into maybe / probably / skip and pushed notes back on each. A few are obvious no's -- too late-stage or they'll want a cleaner growth story than we have right now. 3 feel actually worth time.

Jake pinged again about doing the whole team in Discord instead of Slack. idk. maybe. feels like a Friday-night-ops-gaming-server in my head still, which is probably unfair. gonna sit with it.

Send a quick hey saw your note to the customer with the billing q. Keep it warm, say we're on it.

good thursday, weirdly. felt like stuff actually moved today. not fireworks, just traction. jamie's cooking tonight so i'm mostly trying not to ruin that by opening slack again

Friday shape is pretty contained. Two calls, 1:1 with Marcus, and trying not to let random cleanup eat the whole afternoon. If I can get out by 5 that'd be great. probably Blue Bottle first and then straight into it.

Scaffold's 2 years on Monday. Been half-thinking if we should do anything at all. Leaning small dinner, team + Devon, keep it pretty low-key. Logged it here so I don't turn it into a whole thing.

Need the read on Acme billing this morning. I saw a ~4h hole in the dashboard, then it backfilled. Figure out what actually happened and drop it in the thread -- timestamps, whether this was ingest vs render, and if anyone touched the job. Not escalating, not emailing them. Just want the facts in one place.

Marcus 1:1 was good. he's thinking way harder about the on-call rotation than I even asked for, in a good way. had notes on handoff gaps and where we keep making the same pager mistake at like 2am... which, yeah. not making a big speech about it but he's really settling in

friday. not cooked, just done enough. office emptied out around 5 and my brain went with it. heading back now. jamie's on late shift so probably leftovers + kibo doing perimeter checks in the kitchen

rain backed us down to a very small Mission walk instead of the whole hike plan. honestly fine. Blue Bottle was all steamed-up windows and wet dogs tied outside, Jamie got her usual, Kibo did the little shake all over my jeans and now we're back home

espresso machine thread says "almost there" and yeah... almost. somebody's been messing with the PID again. just pulled a shot that was weirdly 2 temperatures at once. very committed crema though lol

ok so Devon's 2am HN links are fully a bit now. i see the preview, think "there he is," and keep moving. stopped opening them half the time. not even out of annoyance, more like affection at this point. some people send good morning texts, my cofounder sends a 1:58am discourse on databases or whatever. sunday has been very low rpm. jamie's at UCSF, kibo's doing his little apartment patrol.

still raining. again. i think this is the wettest jan i can remember here? whole block smells like wet concrete and dog fur, Kibo came back in with those absurd little muddy ankles. Jamie's at UCSF tonight so it's just me listening to the windows do that ticking thing

drafting the Jan 23 note to the team for Scaffold's 2-year mark. Q1 2023, somehow. keeping it short. basically we've built something. back to work. feels right

Order pizza for ~12 tonight. Margherita / pepperoni / veggie split, no anchovies.

Sent the internal note. Kept it short: we're two. on to the next thing. No extra framing.

Dinner was nice. way too much pizza lol. Priya did this very short toast and kept it normal, which helped bc if she'd gone any longer I would've been useless. team looked tired but in a good way. nailed it.

rain finally backed off so i got the Embarcadero run without feeling like i was sloshing through a car wash. weirdly good. first time this year my legs felt normal before the ferry building, not negotiating with me the whole way

ok so deck review first while i'm still useful, then the two 1:1s. want one clean pass on the slides before people start nibbling at wording. steady enough this morning. blue bottle and inbox, then office.

can you pull up the staff eng JD draft when you have a sec want to look at the current wording before I see Devon. still not decided on posting it pre-raise or sitting tight for a bit -- just need the latest version in front of me

back on the IF thing today. weirdly easy when the calendar isn't trying to feed me at 11:45. first food at 1 and nobody noticed or cared, which is ideal

Customer call ran long. They want a custom webhook retry window instead of the default one; I logged it for the team and dropped notes in the thread. That's it.

Get 6 investor intro calls on the books for the first week of February 2023. Prefer Tue-Thu mornings. Use the maybe/probably list Devon and I cut yesterday -- skip the no's.

send Priya: this is good. onboarding flow v2 went out clean, no weird edges, just reads easy. she's been on a tear a bit lol

Kibo found a tiny brown mutt at the park and fully imprinted lol. they did that side-by-side trot for like 12 min, then both stopped to sniff the same sad tennis ball like it was a board meeting. owner was a guy named Luis. very serious dog friendship, apparently

wednesday was... fine? no fires, no weird customer thing, no one-slack-message-that-turns-into-3-hours. filing that as a win lol. jamie's on shift so just me, kibo, and whatever is left in the fridge

Thursday. deck v2 first, need it tighter before i look at it with Devon. customer call at 3. trying to keep the middle of the day clear -- if anything non-urgent lands, push it.

Acme staging was slow again this morning. Third time in January 2023 by my count. It came back, whatever, but put the timestamp in the thread and note whether this was the same dashboard drag thing or something new -- don't send them anything.

Jake on Discord again. after the raise, man. maybe I'm being annoying about it but I do not want to explain to customers why the company suddenly lives in Discord lol

now we're debating if the espresso machine even lives on the counter. kitchen faction is gaining ground. i walked by and two people were fully measuring clearance like this is a remodel, not a 12-person office. machine looked innocent

Remind me tomorrow to submit December expenses.

keep thinking about Sonoma Lodge for some reason. last spring they sold us on a 'coworking room' and it was literally a router on a shelf with consumer cable. whole thing fell over the second more than like 3 people were on it. two full days of planning just gone. still annoys me more than it should. maybe bc it was such a dumb failure mode.

ok so customer pinged a billing integration error first thing. i'm on that before anything else. want 45 min clear to repro and see if it's us or their Stripe setup -- if something non-urgent tries to land this morning, move it.

ok so i think it's not the webhook handler itself. Stripe event lands, we ack 200 fast, then the worker picks up `invoice.payment_succeeded` and tries to hydrate the account off `customer.subscription.updated` state that hasn't arrived yet. classic out-of-order, except we're making it worse bc billing-service is reading the replica. trace shows ~420ms lag on the read replica and the retry backoff is 250ms/500ms/1s, so first retry still misses sometimes. ticket is basically around evt_ vs sub_ timing, not signature verify. leaning: force this path to primary for 2 queries, or stash entitlement calc behind the invoice event only and stop depending on the subscription update at all. latter is cleaner but touches more code. if you see me forget, the bad assumption is in BillingOrchestrator around account_state_version, not in the webhook gateway.

back from that client lunch. absolutely dumping on 101 and somehow everyone forgot how lanes work. took forever to go basically nowhere, windshield wipers on max the whole time

Wrapped. finally resolved. I'm home on the couch and kind of dead. Kibo did his full spin thing when I walked in, which was honestly a lot for my brain. Jamie's still at UCSF so it's just me and bad takeout.