just punched the punching bag 4 fun and hurt my wrist no more of that

Song of the week is swear to god by convolk. One of the best songs I’ve heard in a long time.

Zip

Everything I built this week feels like shit but it doesn’t feel like complete shit. That’s good. If it’s not complete shit I can still give it users and see what they say. Perhaps I’ll have to endure a bit of embarrassment but I suppose if you aren’t embarrassed by what you launched then you launched to late.

It’s not to bad to be honest. Here’s the flow I built:

First, you hit a Facebook Ad. That Facebook Ad takes you here:

It’s a simple page to sign-up for these “free weekly activities”. Once they submit this form, I actually create a user for them in my DB.

Then, they get an email that looks like this:

Once they click that button, there will be a query param attached w/ their email address so the URL will looks something like:

https://app.ziphomeschool.com/v3/dashboard?u={USERS_EMAIL_ADDRESS}

There are no accounts or passwords if a user wants to access their lessons they simply hit that link on their email (There are obvious security flaws here, you don’t need to tell me).

Then, when they hit that link they can add their children to their account:

Note: focusing heavily on Pre-K and Kindergarten right now b/c over 70% of people from last week’s experiment were in those grade levels.

Finally you get take to the main dashboard:

Once the parent clicks the week, they’ll have daily activities they can complete.

Now, I’m focusing on getting people in the funnel and talking to some users.

Will discuss more next week!

Reading

Read a lot of cool stuff this week.

The Making of Prince of Persia - Dope book about all the ups and downs the creator of Prince of Persia had when making the game. The book is made up of all his diary entries. He’s goes into the technical + emotional problems he had. I’ve never related with the author of a book so much. Everything he went through feels like stuff either I already went through or am currently going through.

Age of The Essay - Super interesting PG essay about what makes a good essay. Here’s a quote I really liked: “Indeed, this is just how most good software gets created. You start by writing a stripped-down kernel (how hard can it be?) and gradually it grows into a complete operating system. Hence the next leap: could you do the same thing in painting, or in a novel?”. How to write a good essay has helped me think about Zip more effectively. It’s easy to get lost in my vision but it’s really hard to focus and put down a small brick every day and build a wall.

A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages - A paper by Alan Kay. The dude who literally came up with GUIs 70s. This paper is about an idea he had called the “Dynabook” - a personal learning machine for kids that would give them access to virtual libraries and interactive programs to help them learn by creating through various games/virtual environments. IN 1972. To say he was ahead of his time is an understatement.

Beating The Averages - Another PG essay that talks all about programing languages and what makes one “powerful” and how choosing Lisp allowed them to destroy their competitors when building ViaWeb in the 90s.

Diamond Age - Nearly done w/ this! It’s a dope sci-fi novel. I’ll have a better review next week :).