Morgan Chen

idk. mostly just realizing the next layer of this is more people, not more thinking. a couple intro threads, a couple follow-ups, that's basically it

for Jake i shouldn't keep pinging him direct. Priya runs his calendar, so if i need time with him it has to go through her

kind of nice to have something this unglamorous be the answer. just... email Priya, line up the slot, move on

finally got the Figma org through. took like 3 weeks of procurement ping pong w finance for one stupid seat, but it's ours now and the org seat is live kind of embarrassing how relieved i am about that lol

keep blanking on the iOS build plumbing. we're still on fastlane for the beta channel, right? i can never remember if TestFlight is going through beta or some other lane. not even a real problem, just one of those tiny things that keeps floating back up

that auth options summary format was right. the 3 bullets thing. i could skim it between meetings without rereading.

just use that for summaries now. same shape as the auth one.

ran the onboarding flow review in Figma yesterday. async comments were actually good there, way less scattered than the doc thread

so yeah we're just gonna make the Figma file the default place for design review now. simpler

idk, personal-life admin keeps taking up weird space in my head. not even dramatic. just stuff like remembering Kibo can't have chicken at all. not "a little is fine" -- even tiny amounts and he's wrecked after

Jamie's back on normal-ish hours so we've been doing dinner again, which helps. Maya's coming out soon too. mostly thinking i need to text whoever ends up watching Kibo in very plain english: no chicken, no treats with chicken meal, none of it

still have the contractor bid open. need to pick Acme vs Foundry by end of week. Acme is cheaper. Foundry's refs came back better. idk, sitting with that for a minute

keep noticing how much better the day goes if i get the Embarcadero 5k in first. most mornings lately. if it's avoidable don't put anything on me before 8am.

idk. weirdly attached to that run right now. same stretch, same dumb wind off the water, Kibo losing his mind when i come back sweaty.

also realizing i've basically stopped saying yes to random investor coffee unless it's really worth it. run, shower, office. cleaner.

idk why this keeps turning into a convo every time someone books travel. just keep the trip under $2k total

flight + hotel together, not each. finance flags anything over and then it lands back with me

putting it here so it's not fuzzy later: if the combined number is 2001 we are now doing a whole justification dance. not worth it

same thing on offsites / customer visits / random conference stuff. under 2k and move on

feels very adult and annoying that i know exactly where the finance flag kicks in lol

i keep seeing people optimize the flight and then book a wild hotel. no. it's the sum

not a big principle thing. just the rule we have. stay under so nobody has to touch it

anyway. weirdly tired of format debates today

rough week. still feel kind of cooked from last month's prod outage. we were fully down for 18 hours, then the post-mortem turned into its own whole thing idk. i thought i'd be over it by now but i'm still dragging a bit

we're finally pushing the design system refresh next week. took basically 3 months, which is... a lot for buttons and spacing lol. idk. feels good to have that noise almost off my desk

api v1 is starting to hit the basic auth tier cap more than i'd like. traffic's up, which ok, but 100 req/min is not a lot once a few bigger accounts get noisy. might need to just upgrade it instead of pretending this stays intermittent

Q1 retro was fine. same complaint again: release process is still too manual. too many handoffs, too much human glue. ticketing it now before we do the thing where everyone complains once and then lives with it for another quarter.

getting a weird mix right now. some inbox noise, some actually useful asks. hard to tell which is which til i'm already 4 emails deep

keep thinking about the Sonoma offsite thing from last year. that lodge had literally zero wifi. whole planning block just died on arrival

so yeah if anyone sends venue options again, remote is out unless they can confirm connectivity in writing. not doing the 'maybe the lodge router is fine' thing twice

idk. feels like a lot of people wanting a slice of attention at once. then one real customer note comes in and it's instantly obvious what matters

also dinners with Jamie have made me way less insane this month. small thing maybe

keep thinking about the payments module for some reason. if it comes up again i need to look at that rate limit fix before prod. Jake changed something in there last week and it looked a little off. don't want to just assume it's fine

keep coming back to the dumbest part of B1. root cause was like 10 lines. not even a scary diff. we shipped it at 4:50 on wednesday, it started going weird after people were already offline, and the response dragged through thursday morning. so the thing itself was small and the outage turned into an 18h mess mostly bc of the timing and fuzzy rollback path. just... don't do late deploys without coverage

keep thinking about Priya's design review yesterday. onboarding flow mockups were stupid clean, prob the best thing anyone on the team has put in front of me this quarter. not making a whole thing of it, just... nailed it.

keep having to remind myself the db shape is slightly weird now. spun up a prod read replica in us-west-2 last week so read traffic can land there, but writes still hit us-east-1. not a huge deal, just easy to say the wrong thing if i'm moving too fast

keep thinking about how much less annoying releases got basically overnight. Marcus finished the new deploy pipeline and we're already down to like half the old release time. he's been on a tear lately. not even in a loud way, just keeps landing stuff

weirdly normal stretch lately. dinners with Jamie again bc she's off the night block and the calendar finally has air in it

office feels better too. not loud, just people actually in there, shipping stuff, fewer random finance calls eating the day

i keep opening Slack out of muscle memory and then closing it. we moved everyone to Discord last week anyway. #eng-team stayed #eng-team so at least that part didn't change