Last week I spent about 1,750 words comparing my life to The Odyssey and talking about how I needed to stop sitting around and actually start moving.

Very dramatic.

So it would've been slightly embarrassing if I followed that up by doing absolutely nothing.

Thankfully, this week has been the complete opposite.

For the last eight weeks, one of my friends, Matthew, has given me basically the exact same feedback every time I send him a link to Life of Jake.

He likes it.

He thinks I should keep doing it.

And then, without fail:

"Where's the newsletter?"

Honestly, I kept ignoring him.

Not because I thought newsletters were a bad idea.

Life of Jake was always meant to have one.

The problem was, I knew that the second I touched it, I'd somehow turn "send people an email once a week" into a full engineering project.

Unfortunately, Matthew was right.

Life of Jake needed a newsletter.

And even more unfortunately...

I was also right.

It became a full engineering project.

I'M LAZY

I don't know if it's just me [[ || or maybe you're the same {{firstName}}]], but I hate doing the same thing over and over again.

The second something becomes a recurring task, I start resenting it.

If something takes me ten minutes every week, my brain immediately starts thinking of every possible reason to put it off.

So naturally, I end up wondering whether I can spend four hours building something so I never have to do those ten minutes again.

Sometimes this saves me loads of time.

Sometimes I accidentally lose an entire week.

The newsletter fell into category two.

I didn't want to write Life of Jake [[on this website || on the usual website]], then open Substack or Beehiiv, copy everything over, upload the pictures again, fix the formatting, rebuild all the weird bits, and repeat that every single week.

I wanted one process.

Write the weekly.

Publish the weekly.

Press a button.

Newsletter gets sent out.

Simple.

Except there was one tiny problem.

Websites and emails apparently really hate each other.

Life of Jake was built entirely for the web.

Photos are animated.

Videos play.

Components expand.

Everything is optimised to make the website as nice to use as possible.

Email clients like Gmail look at most of that and basically say:

"No."

So one small newsletter project slowly turned into me rebuilding almost every component I'd spent the previous seven weeks building for Life of Jake.

THERE ARE NOW THREE LIFE OF JAKES

This is probably the easiest way I can explain what I've spent the week doing.

There are basically three versions of Life of Jake now.

The first is normal Life of Jake.

You've never subscribed.

The website doesn't know who you are.

You read the weekly, click around, and every now and then I politely harass you into joining the newsletter.

The second is your Life of Jake.

If you've subscribed, or you've clicked through from one of my emails before, the site remembers you.

The newsletter pop-ups disappear.

The signup bars disappear.

Everything becomes a bit cleaner because you're already my digital friend.

It can even remember your name now.

So instead of:

Hey internet and future kids,

you might get:

Hey {{firstName | Name}}, and future kids,

Completely necessary?

Absolutely not.

Do I like it?

Yes.

Then there's the third version.

Robot Life of Jake.

You will hopefully never see this one.

This version exists purely so a machine can look at one of my weeklies and understand what the hell I've put on the page.

Every component basically gives it instructions.

I'm a normal image, leave me alone.

I'm a video, turn me into something an email can actually display.

I'm interactive, use this version instead.

I'm some weird thing Jake decided the website desperately needed at 1am...

Good luck.

The robot then rebuilds the whole weekly into something that can actually survive Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Superhuman, and whatever else people decide to read emails on.

This has taken roughly 50 versions of the master email template html.

Probably around 150 test emails.

And I don't even know how many times I've hit my Claude Code limit.

My routine this past week has basically been to use any free time I have getting this thing working.

Tired?

Doesn't matter.

Half falling asleep?

Laptop next to the bed.

Let Claude do its magic while I slowly fall asleep watching Severance.

And underneath all of this, basically the entire Life of Jake website has changed.

The funniest part?

You probably wouldn't notice any of it.

ALL THAT FOR ONE SLACK COMMAND

After all of that mess, the goal is stupidly simple.

I write Life of Jake normally on Framer.

I publish it normally.

Then I go into Slack and type:

/newsletter latest

And the machine handles almost everything else.

It reads the weekly.

Downloads what it needs.

Converts what it needs.

Builds the email.

Puts everything where it needs to go.

And gets the newsletter ready to send.

In short I have spent a ridiculous amount of time making something look ridiculously easy.

But that's exactly why I chose to do it this way.

I could've used another newsletter platform and saved myself a lot of pain this week.

But then every Tuesday I'd still have another little job waiting for me.

Copy this.

Paste that.

Upload this.

Fix that.

And I know myself well enough to know what eventually happens when something becomes annoying to maintain.

I stop wanting to do it.

I don't want Life of Jake to become another job.

I want to live my life, build Clickrabbit, come back here once a week, write about whatever happened, and press publish.

The boring bits can be somebody else's problem.

Preferably a computer's.

LIFE OF JAKE ALSO HAS A DJ NOW

If you've already had a little snoop around the site this week, you might've noticed the Spotify section looks a bit different.

Before, the song for each week was purely vibes.

I'd finish writing, open Spotify, skip through loads of songs, and try to decide which one somehow represented the week.

Which was another completely unnecessary decision I had created for myself.

So obviously I automated that too.

Life of Jake now has a little Spotify system running in the background that tracks what I'm actually listening to.

[[||Sadly, this bit still doesn't work in the newsletter, but you can check it out on the site.]]

Every 15 minutes, it grabs my latest listening data and adds it to a database.

Then every Monday, another little robot basically tells me:

Jake, this is the song you've absolutely rinsed this week.

So that's the song that goes in.

Which unfortunately means I can no longer pretend my music taste is cooler than it actually is.

This week has exposed me particularly badly.

Apparently I've listened to Bubbly by Colbie Caillat 13 times.

But come on.

You cannot tell me Bubbly isn't a banger.

[[|| If you've never heard it before {{firstName}}, please play it in the background whilst you read this.]]

Anyway, I actually prefer doing it this way.

Life of Jake is slowly becoming a little time capsule.

The writing shows what I was thinking.

The photos show what things looked like.

And now the music shows what I actually had playing while all of it was happening.

THIS WOULD'VE KILLED LIFE OF JAKE EIGHT WEEKS AGO

This week also made me realise something quite funny.

Imagine before launching Week 0 I'd told myself I needed all of this first.

And all the other random stuff I've slowly added over the last two months.

I probably would've given up before anyone ever saw Life of Jake.

Instead, I launched something that worked.

Then something annoyed me.

So I fixed it.

Then something else became repetitive.

So I automated it.

Then people started reading.

So I made it easier for them to keep reading.

Then Matthew continued shouting about a newsletter.

So, annoyingly, I built the newsletter.

I think the moral is pretty simple.

Whatever your dream is, it doesn't matter if you can't conceptualise the whole thing yet.

You don't need to know how to build all of it today.

You just need to keep taking a few steps in roughly the right direction.

I didn't know what Life of Jake needed until Life of Jake actually existed.

And if I'd known everything that would eventually go into this before I started, I probably would've never attempted it.

Luckily, I didn't.

I just started with what I knew.

Eight weeks later, here we are.

An idiot in motion will always go further than a genius at rest.

ANYWAY, HERE'S A DINOSAUR

This has become dangerously close to a technology newsletter.

So let's fix that.

On Sunday I went to Bahia Park with my family for my nephew's birthday.

It's a water park in Algeciras, Spain, not far from Gibraltar.

It was a lovely day and a nice break from staring at code.

I also met a dinosaur.

He tried to bite my head a few times.

We eventually reached an understanding.

He will take my brother instead.

Unfortunately though, the break didn't last very long because I got home and immediately started fixing the newsletter again.

So yeah.

Maybe I haven't completely nailed this whole work-life balance thing yet.

But at least the giant engineering week is basically done.

Life of Jake works.

The newsletter works.

The weird little systems work.

And hopefully from here I can spend a lot less time maintaining a website about my life...

and a bit more time actually having one.

On that note, I've genuinely got to go.

I'm late for padel with the boys.

Time to destroy my friends.