Hi and welcome to the first issue of my new newsletter “Trust the Process”!

Every Sunday, in this personal changelog I share what I currently work on, what’s on my mind, and cool links found during the week. Since this is the first issue, more details on that below.

Let’s kick things off!

Process

Exam season is over and I need to find a way to start creating more regularly again. Mainly inspired by Sebastian Röhl’s Devlog (great read if you’re a dev as well), I want to write regular updates about how that’s going. For one, this is a great way to force me to work on something every week; otherwise, I wouldn’t have anything to share at the end. On the other hand, it also gives me an opportunity each week to reflect on what went well, what could be done better and if I’m still heading in the right direction.

While most of that will be code/design related, I plan to, of course, also write about other areas of my life. Things like training for a marathon or how uni is going. I hope there will be something interesting for everyone who reads this.

That’s the “Process” section of this newsletter. But because I also frequently stumble upon great links on the web that I think are share-worthy, I want to do that as well. That’s why there’s gonna be a “Finds” section too in each issue. I quite enjoy reading other newsletters that share cool things from the internet (Dense Discovery, the Hiro Report, or the Verge’s Installer, just to name a few), so why not do the same?

And of course, I’m also going to share the posts from my personal blog, in case you missed them over the course of the week.

Why write a newsletter?

That’s a question I also asked myself, especially since I have my personal blog where I write as well.

But a newsletter is a different format that feels more personal somehow, more “raw” if you will because the updates are more ephemeral and in-the-moment. And since people sign up with their email address to read this, it’s also a great way of building my own little community of folks who are interested in what I do and create. Without relying on any social media platform (and without forcing you to sign up for one).

Think of this newsletter as a behind-the-scenes look at my personal desk. At the messy process that creating something is. In the spirit of Austin Kleon’s “Show Your Work”.

It’s also a great way to gain more writing experience, document my progress as I go, and build a whole catalog of proof of work. I sometimes imagine what it would be like if I look back on what I wrote in 10 years and the hundreds of posts that I produced. That’s a treasure trove of learnings, memories, and creative artefacts that hopefully makes me proud and inspires others.

Why Trust the Process?

One of the most influential pieces of advice I ever heard on the internet comes from Nathan Barry. In the context of building a successful business through writing daily, he says that it’s “Simple, not easy”.

Simple in the sense that the only thing that you have to do is just write every day. Not easy in the sense that you have to do it every day.

Like the Japanese know with their concept of “Kaizen”, all these tiny steps accumulate over time. And while you might not see a huge improvement going day to day, if you zoom out, the progress becomes visible. You just have to trust the process.

As for me, my goal right now is to focus on what I can control: Moving the needle a tiny bit every day. Through coding, designing, and writing. What comes out of it, we will see as time goes on.

Current state of other projects

After all this meta-preamble, I’m going to keep this section short. Most of my time this week has been spent thinking about and preparing this newsletter. But I’m also currently working on two projects.

The big one of course is still Morgenblau, the RSS reader that most of you probably know and the reason why you signed up for this newsletter in the first place. Over the last few months I haven’t made that much progress on it for various reasons. One big one was that I think I fell into the perfectionism trap a bit and tried to make it the “perfect” product before launching anything. The usual mistake.

That’s why the goal now is to build and launch a usable version as soon as possible that can become my daily RSS driver and replace NetNewsWire for me. I’ll share more on how that’s going in the coming issues of this newsletter.

On the side, I’m also working on my own expense tracking app (working name Zaster) for Android. I recently switched from my iPhone to a Google Pixel and one of the apps I miss the most is Dime, a beautiful expense tracker. I want to have a similar experience on Android as well.

As I plan to mainly use this just myself, the app is almost completely vibe-coded and looks very similar to Dime. But depending on how well it works, I might polish it a bit more and release it officially. You’ll hear it here first.

Finds

Cool things I discovered this week:

• ‌Chemical Light by Josie Edwards: Earworm of the week.
• goodnews.eu: For a daily dose of optimism.
• Airspace: Using your Atmosphere account as a database you own.
• @passport: Easier authentication for Atmosphere apps
• On Verticality: Very niche blog about “the human need to escape the surface of the Earth”.
• Bloom: Alternative to Conductor or AmpCode by the folks at Spatie
• Typesafe AI: The most interesting AI model release since Fable in my opinion.
• Make one customer happy: A really simple approach to building a good product.
• Thin Air, Real Money: Play as Trump and you cannot lose, play as investor and you always lose.
• Moonjar: Essentially Cleanshot but for agents, looks really helpful for help center or changelog-type screenshots.

From the blog

This week I published:

• Switching to a Pixel: I moved from iOS to Android.

That’s it for this issue. Thanks for sticking around! If you have any questions, feedback, or just want to say hi, reply to this email and it will land straight in my inbox.

Until the next one, Dominik