Morgan Chen

idk, nice to be home on a Tuesday and not staring at DoorDash. actually wanted to cook tonight. doing the sheet pan salmon again. Jamie's still at UCSF a little longer so I have like 20 min to chop stuff before Kibo starts acting like he's never been fed.

idk. tough week. we're getting Lemongrass tonight and i'm not even pretending to branch out, just the usual Thai curry again. friday dinner solved at least.

idk, this week felt more normal in a way i forgot i missed. office was busy, not frantic. calendar didn't try to kill me. taking Jamie to that new Italian spot downtown tonight bc we actually need a real night out lol. Kibo was giving me the full betrayal face when I put shoes on.

ok so... feels a little weird that April is here already. not bad weird. more like i can actually see the shape of things again.

2 years into Scaffold and we're still 12 people, which honestly makes the day easier to hold in my head. funny how much better i got once i stopped doing endless investor laps and just went back to product. left Stripe for this and somehow that part still feels very current

ok so team stuff settling a little.

Atlas feels cleaner with Rishi running point. he's doing the standups now and keeping the roadmap in his lane, which honestly was needed.

Devon and I still in the weeds on the sharp edges, but less random thrash this week.

12 people is still small enough that every mood shift shows up immediately. office has been normal-normal lately. good sign i guess.

idk. weird how much calmer it is when ownership is actually explicit.

Jamie texted about dinner and I had to check what day it was.

ok so for outside email, just cc Sarah Kim on it. sarah@atlas-test.com. easier if she sees the thread from the start

i keep finding random vendor stuff and intro notes that skip her and then i have no idea where anything lives. annoying. just loop Sarah on external and it's mostly fine

internal i don't care as much. anything going out to customers / investors / lawyers / whoever, add sarah@atlas-test.com

ok so this is embarrassingly stable but i keep opening VS Code and thinking yep, still fine. Dracula theme forever apparently. i've tried switching a few times and last maybe 20 min.

most of my day is still TypeScript, then Go when i need to look at the agent/runtime bits. nice that my brain doesn't have to context switch on the editor part too hard.

idk. after Stripe i thought i'd end up fussier about tools than i am. turns out i mostly want boring defaults that don't get in the way. VS Code, Dracula theme, TypeScript, Go. done.

ok, one of those dumb little things that was hanging open is finally not hanging open. got api v1 talking to the new billing setup. /charges and /refunds are wired now, using the basic auth token we made last sprint. not earth-shattering, just nice to stop seeing that half-done in my head.

idk, trying to keep a few rules in my head instead of re-learning them every month. email can wait a weirdly long time if it's not from a customer or payroll.

finance one is non-negotiable now: anything over $5,000 gets flagged before we pay it. manual review, every time.

learned that one the hard way last Q4. still annoyed thinking about it. anyway Kibo is under my desk snoring like he had a big week.

ok so networking day i guess. weirdly less draining when it's not investor coffee #9. talked to Kenji Nakamura from the neuroscience meetup -- he's at Neuralink, senior researcher, works on BCI decoding algorithms. extremely not our world lol

anyway i still wrote down his email bc my brain does that: kenji@neuralink-test.com. not for anything specific rn. just one of those conversations where you leave thinking huh, people are building very strange stuff and seem pretty normal about it

lol Thai again. I'm weirdly consistent on Fridays. Lemongrass is already on the way and I am not even pretending to consider other dinner options. idk, nice when one thing in the week requires zero thought.

for summaries i want the same thing every time or i stop reading. 5 bullets max.

and keep each bullet short. 15 words-ish, hard cap.

no intro line. no outro. don't do the 'here's a quick summary' thing.

also no emoji lol. just the bullets.

funny how fast i get annoyed by format drift. content can be messy, wrapper can't

spent most of the morning in the webhook retry logic. finally fixed the exponential backoff thing and the retries stopped doing weird little pileups. not tied to any other drama, just... nice to get one clean win on the board.

kept it pretty boring, which is maybe the point. added POST /v1/webhooks today for inbound events. same basic auth setup as the rest of the api so at least we didn't invent a new weird thing for ourselves. idk, nice when a piece lands and it's just... there.

idk, i've been trying to ask for the actual thing once instead of hinting at it and then getting annoyed when nobody reads my mind.

like if we need everyone in a room, just say it. tomorrow 9:30, Redwood conference room, standup. that's the whole ask.

weird how much calmer that is. less Slack archaeology, fewer half-threads. anyway coffee's bad today.

idk, weirdly calming to have the shape of it now. less random flailing, more just... this is the thing.

Q3 is basically Project Mercury in my head at this point -- the release that gets a customer from creating a workspace through connecting the first source, the first live sync, teammate invites, and the admin path without us hand-holding it. keeps swallowing every other tab.

Jake's running point on Mercury engineering-wise, which honestly helps. I don't need twelve opinions on every cut.

still a little surreal how much better the week feels when the calendar isn't wall to wall and I can actually sit with the product for an hour

auth is still annoyingly open. keep bouncing between Clerk and Auth0 for the rewrite. Clerk is probably the default if i'm being honest, but i pulled up their pricing again and the 500k MAU math gets gross fast. gonna sit with it a couple days before i lock us in

need the auth thing in a format i can skim. Clerk, Auth0, custom auth. 3 bullets each only: what it is, upsides, biggest worry. not a memo.