If you follow Building Pika Out Loud, you would have heard that this year Good Enough is dogfooding and we spent the last few weeks finally moving over our site and this blog to Pika.
Today we’re announcing two more moves to Pika: our Guestbook and Newsletter — peep ‘em if you haven’t yet! 🙏
At the end of 2023, we built and launched Letterbird, a stupid simple free contact form for the web. We use it for all our own products (Pika example), and thousands of you are also using it for your own internet email forms. Thank you!
We feel pretty good that we could deliver software that does one thing good enough to be called #done and walk away, and in fact, we’ve barely touched Letterbird since launch. However, a backlog of improvement ideas has been growing, and with our team’s renewed focus, it was a good time to look at that list.
Leveling up is cool, so considering we went years without an update, we’re calling this Letterbird 2.0, why not:
Continuous integration is a great thing, and having tests and security checks run before every deploy is also a great thing. But if you’re a developer who has been shipping production code for more than a week, you definitely understand how much it can all feel like a house of cards that tumbles down nearly every day.
The Good Enough suite of products have been using GitHub Actions to make sure our automated test suites run before each deployment. The (mostly free) servers GitHub offers are predictably slow, with the Pika test suite generally taking close to ten minutes to run. (To that you say, “Delete most of your system tests!” Alas, due to Pika’s lovely editor, we unfortunately have to maintain quite a few system tests for the service.) Even when upgrading, and paying for, a higher-strength GitHub Action server we were seeing runs approaching eight minutes for Pika.
That’s already no fun, but even worse is the fact that our system tests were a bit flaky in the GitHub Actions environment. We eventually got the hint that running system tests in parallel just isn’t possible, but even running them one test at a time would lead to odd failures in part because of how slow things move in the Actions environment. So imagine the cycle of trying to deploy a Pika update and needing to run continuous integration two, three, or four times. Frustration!
Hello reader, Matthew here. For those of you who’ve been on this journey with us since the early days, you might know the story of Good Enough’s inception. It was started by Shawn and Barry as a modest effort to realize some fun product ideas, with the lofty goal of seeing if we could make the web a little more interesting while making at least enough money to cover costs. They put together a small team (that’s when I joined), and we set out on a stormy year of prototyping and building and bad ideas.
Fast forward to today, and after much trial-and-error, a zine, a printer experiment, and many illustrations that became stickers, we’re thankful to have found some modest product successes in Jelly and Pika. What we’ve learned along the way is that, to properly care for all our products as they continue to grow, more individual focus is needed.
Internally, our team has been mostly split up for a while now, as different team members gravitated to different products. Starting next week, we’ll be making it more official and reorganizing Good Enough into separate entities:
Update 12/03/2025: Yay.Boo is staying alive! 🙌 Keep your eyes peeled to Yay.Boo for updates.
We have built a lot of good products here at Good Enough. Whether you’re sharing an inbox with your team or avoiding social media with a blog, we’ve got you covered. Unfortunately, there are some products that, while very nice, have not had our attention for a long time. Two of those products are Yay.Boo and Ponder.
Ponder, our take on small forum software, was one of the first things we built as a collective. Even today, it works really well for a small group of polite folks to talk about a shared interest. Unfortunately, not many small groups found Ponder, and our team hasn’t had the bandwidth to continue improving the software.
Yay.Boo is a delightful tool with which to quickly throw some HTML online. On top of that, it has always been a playground to push the envelopes on just what a product homepage could look like. Unlike Ponder, Yay.Boo is even getting a decent amount of use.
In September, I worked on improving Pika’s image performance. I’ve had a long career now (25 years 😭) doing mostly web-programming tasks, yet somehow I’ve never set up a CDN myself. I suppose the “management years” right as my prior organization was getting bigger contributed to missing out on that experience. In any case, the work was overdue on Pika and it was time to tackle it.
Through a bit of help from online articles and online friends, I’ve gotten it mostly figured out. Here is Pika’s setup.
As we’re building Jelly, we have found ourselves looking at lots of raw emails. In particular, we’ve spent a lot of time with email headers. If you’ve ever had cause to do the same, you know it can lead to lots of scanning and squinting.
There’s got to be a better way! And here it is: Prettier Email Headers. [Ed: This project was shut down in October of 2025.]
The London Ruby User Group is one of the longest-running technology user groups in the world, having held a monthly meeting almost every single month since late 2006. It’s no small feat to have kept a local community running for so long, especially since everyone involved is a volunteer.
Jelly is the foundational tool that helps LRUG’s organisers keep things running smoothly.
The beating heart of LRUG is the mailing list, and the team regularly puts out a call for members to give presentations at the monthly LRUG meet-up. Those submissions are sent to an email address which forwards directly into Jelly.
For your small business to survive, you need customers. Not just to buy once. You need them to come back, tell their friends, and trust you over time. And yet, too many small businesses make it weirdly hard to talk to them.
Well, duh, right?
I agree, yet I see small businesses fumbling this over and over. All the attention when discussing business is about giant corporations. Whether they’re selling servers or vehicles or every product under the sun, millions of dollars pass through their doors every day. Yet it is folly to apply the methodologies of giant companies to our small businesses. It sounds obvious, but I constantly see small businesses making it hard for customers to get in touch. If a customer does get through the “contact us” gauntlet, that small business often uses needlessly complicated enterprise software to talk with customers.
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re descending deeper, ever deeper, into the Q&A column introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time. Desperate to keep things interesting, James tried to spice up the interview format…
… OK ChatGPT, I want you to read my personal website and the Good Enough website, particularly the “<person> is Good Enough” posts, and the posts I’ve written there.
https://lazyatom.com
https://interblah.net
https://goodenough.us
https://goodenough.us/blogOnce you’ve done that, I want you to conduct a question-by-question interview with me, to form the basis of a “James is Good Enough” post. Ask me one question at a time, and then use my answer to evolve the interview. We should aim for about 8 questions in total.
Don’t be boring. Use the existing posts as inspiration, but I want the post about me to be unique. I’d be cool if it went in a strange tangent.
Absolutely! Let’s kick off this interview with a question that sets the tone:
Q1: If your inner monologue were a programming language, what would it be, and why?
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re continuing our Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time. Today, we’re meeting the biggest Pika fan, Barry Hess…
Who are you? (Who, who, who, who?)
My name is Barry Hess. I grew up in a rural part of Minnesota where the population of the entire county is less than 10,000 people. After getting a college degree in Computer Science, I moved to a metropolis of 25,000 people in southern Minnesota. I live here with my wife and three daughters, though our children are actively growing and slowly moving out into the world to create their own lives. 😭
I’ve been coding off and on for nearly thirty years now, though there was a bit of a dalliance in management for a while.
The second half of 2024 was definitely an inflection point in the world of software. Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI started to permeate products everywhere, from chatbots to operating systems, and at times it felt like everyone was taking part in a race to integrate some AI feature or other into their product.
This seems to have been particularly true in the world of customer support. Whole businesses seem to have pivoted, turning AI into their central feature as if their very lives depended on it. Some taglines from well-known companies leave no doubt:
While building Pika’s Stream of posts layout, we had need to add the capability to manage excerpts in the Pika editor. These excerpts would be used to show a small portion of your post in a post stream while offering a “continue reading” link for readers to click to read the rest of your post. To add this capability we had to dig into extending the base open source library for our editor, Tiptap.
When Good Enough was in its infancy as a truly American LLC (formed in Delaware and representing one or two people who were only semi-serious about a business), it was fun to play around with building websites. Shawn and I were truly just playing and exploring, more than anything reminding ourselves that building software could be a satisfying activity. After a year of goofing around we were still enjoying it, but we were also running up against our limitations. Some things we were okay at, but many of our skills just weren’t that impressive.
So began the journey to Good Enough’s next phase: a collective of Good Enough people. We could make some cool, if janky, web toys alone, but with a few more people to play with…
Along came Lettini and Patrick and James and Cade. Each of us with a different set of skills and a different set of weaknesses.
Things definitely did become a lot more interesting once we teamed up! When my weaknesses got in the way, there was someone else to step into that gap and show me how it’s done. Hopefully others agree that I’m able to help them in some of the areas where I have a little more experience. 🤞
That’s enough reading for you; now it’s time to listen. Lettini, James, and I were recently asked to have a conversation on the IndieRails podcast. We are very thankful to Jeremy and Jess for this opportunity to talk about some of Good Enough’s short history. And luckily for you, we hardly talk about Rails at all!
Throughout our lovely discussion, the power of a team filled with complimentary skills kept resurfacing in my head. This experience cannot be recreated as a solo dev or by working on some project in my garage. The times where our skills don’t overlap makes this whole Good Enough experiment lovely and worthwhile. To my teammates, I thank you. You complete me!
Yesterday, Lettini took a chance and posted about Jelly on Hacker News, a discussion site notorious for it’s mercurial population of tech-maybe-too-saavy experts. Jelly is a tough sell for some of them, those with the technical skill to pipe email at a low level through custom-built filters running on their own cloud servers.
I’m not going to lie to you. I was pretty nervous.
And yet…
I have an admission to make. Social share images for Pika were broken on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and Apple Messages for months. And it made me sad.
But in the past few months we got it fixed. And that made me very happy!
FriendlyId is a helpful Ruby gem that streamlines creating permalinks and slugs for Rails applications. In Pika we’re using it to help with generating permalinks for blog posts and pages as well as slugs for tags. When a customer wrote in with a request to modify the behavior of these permalinks, I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to override the default behavior. Turns out it wasn’t too bad!
Dear readers, we need to apologize. We know some of you have noticed that Good Enough has gotten much quieter this year than last, across this blog, our newsletter, and socials. We’ve been heads down for the last few months on something new, but we’re now ready to come back up for air and hang with you again! We know you miss hearing from us.
So allow me to formally introduce Good Enough’s next product: Jelly! It’s a new shared inbox for teams. It’s a game-changer, and it’ll be out soon.
For a while now we’ve seen that images in our Pika atom feeds were not displaying in some feed readers. In fact, they weren’t displaying in my own feed reader, which routes through Feedly. I was sad.
I spent a lot of time troubleshooting this. Compared our feed with a lot of atom and RSS feeds that worked. Eventually I came to a hair-brained idea: what if Rails’s Action Text image display markup was confusing these feed readers?
TLDNR: If you have an interest in Good Enough succeeding, we need your help! Telling friends, shouting on socials, and sharing links to our stuff with your favorite influencers–all of these things will help Good Enough succeed and continue making amazing stuff!
