Shipping

— 3 minute read

I wanted to mark today with a quick post on here because it’s been a bit of a good day. Who am I kidding: it’s been a very good day!

It’s been a very good day because today, I shipped Piccalilli. After 90 hours of production work, hellish data migrations and painstaking design stuff, it’s finally live.

I forced myself to ship it permalink

Just under two weeks ago, I felt this project was stagnating and I was doing what I always do and got obsessive over non important stuff, so to give myself accountability I tweeted this from the Piccalilli account:

I'm setting an ambitious target. The new piccalil.li site and most importantly, newsletter, will go live on March 10th 2020.

Issue #33 will land in your inboxes, packed full of amazing stuff from around the web.

I'm so bloody excited.

[frantically works on site]

Source

Setting that deadline was the rod in my ass that I needed, so I flipped open my trusty bullet journal, opened a double spread and jotted myself a todo list to get it done:

My bullet journal with a scrawled two page list of things to do to get it out of the door

I didn’t get all the tasks done on there, but that didn’t matter. Getting the list down on paper was my way of unloading the stuff out of my head and for me to see my own progress as I added the little “X” next to each complete item. This is one of the many things I love about bullet journalling: the cognitive unloading.

A work in progress permalink

The site is by no means perfect. I’ve made sure the finish of the site is of a high standard because it’s gonna be my primary business ongoing, but there’s so much left to do on it. But that’s fine because I shipped it. It's real and an ongoing project!

It seemed pretty apt that this morning, while driving my kid to nursery, I was listening to Chris and Dave on ShopTalk and Dave said this to Chris:

Chris, one thing I love about you is your ability to hit the publish button.

It’s super important to remember that once your site goes live it’s not done and you know what, even though I planned to go live today, that bit of the episode gave me a little nudge to get on with it and get it out there.

A hell of a good start permalink

Today has blown my mind because the site has had over 10,000 page views and over 250 new subscribers! Thank you all so much for your support.


This isn't an overly structured post. I’m just really happy that I got my new site out of the door, so now, I can focus on content and the newsletter.

Thank you all for your kind words, today—especially about the design. It’s made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Hi 👋, I’m Andy — an educator and web designer

I produce front-end development tutorials over at Front-End Challenges Club and Piccalilli. You can sign up for updates on Piccalilli to stay up to date with its progress.

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