17 Feb 2022
feedyour.email
Confession time: I still use a feed reader. (Honestly not sure at this point if that makes me Just A Millenial™ or makes me a weird cranky holdout insisting that I don’t want blog posts in my email.)
To help myself cope with our brave new era of newsletters without blogs, I started using Kill the Newsletter!, a handy single-purpose website that gives you a random email address and an RSS feed for emails sent to that address. I found it so helpful that I shared it with my friends, and we used it to feed our addiction to Money Stuff.
One friend reported a consistent problem, though: emails send in the morning not showing up in the feed until the afternoon, or sometimes even the next day. I suggested running our own copy so that we could debug things, but that friend isn’t specialized into web development, and I don’t want to run my own mailserver.
I didn’t realize it yet, but I had already been nerdsniped.
Over the next day, my brain automatically architected my own version in the background while I was in the shower or doing nothing in particular. By the time @numist asked how hard it would be to build a copy, I was ready to guess “about an hour”.
Somewhat predictably for writing software, I was both correct and off by 3x at the same time. In an hour, I had a proof of concept that ran end to end. To get it productionized and deployed took another two or three hours, though.
A mere two weeks of occasionally tweaking the copy, design, and functionality later, it was ready! It’s honestly pretty handy, even if I do say so myself. Try it out at feedyour.email.