The Lights Were Always On

The last thing published on this blog went up in March 2016. It was a post about getting burned building on someone else’s platform. Then nothing. For ten years.

Fair enough if you assumed the lights went out.

They didn’t. Here’s what actually happened: every product we launched got its own website, its own blog, and its own people to talk to. So that’s where all the writing went. Skyclerk news went on Skyclerk. Options Cafe news went on Options Cafe. The one site nobody ever wrote for was the one with the company’s name on it.

Cobbler’s kids. No shoes.

Meanwhile the shop kept running. Skyclerk has been doing bookkeeping for small businesses since 2010 and still costs $6 a month. Nothing got switched off. We just stopped narrating.

So — an update. Ten years on one page.

Options Cafe

Options Cafe launched in 2016 as a trading platform. Charts, screeners, a broker connection, the works. Good software. And for eight years, people kept asking us the same thing in support emails.

Not “can you add this feature.” It was “how do you trade this?”

Turns out we’d built the tools and skipped the part people actually needed. So in 2024 we tore the whole thing down and rebuilt it as a course.

It’s a zero-to-hero options course. Fourteen-plus hours of lecture, from “what is a call” through credit spreads, iron condors, the Wheel, and earnings plays. Four new videos a month. Buy it once, keep it forever, including everything added later.

The part we’re proudest of isn’t the video count. It’s that every strategy we teach is one we actually trade, tracked out in the open — 2,384 trades shared and counting, wins and losses both. If a strategy has a bad year, you get to watch it have a bad year. That’s the whole point.

We’re past 1,200 students now. Rebuilding a product from scratch after eight years is a miserable, humbling thing to do. It was also obviously the right call, which is the annoying part.

Harbor

Go back and read that 2016 post. It’s about how we built three products on top of Evernote, and how that ended.

Ten years later we built the alternative.

Harbor is a private notes app and second brain. Notes, scans, photos, audio, handwriting, web clips. It reads text inside your photos and PDFs, transcribes your voice memos, and searches all of it. Native apps on Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android, and the web. Works offline. Notebooks you can lock behind zero-knowledge encryption, so not even we can read them.

But the features aren’t really the pitch. The pitch is that it’s yours.

Import from Evernote in one step. Export any time you like. Cancel and your account goes read-only instead of hostage. The price is $99 a year and it’s locked for three years, then capped after that. No free plan that quietly gets gutted. No surprise doubling.

We spent a decade being on the wrong end of somebody else’s platform decisions. Harbor is us writing down the promises we wished we’d been given, and then having to keep them.

The small stuff

Not everything needs to be a company. Some things are just the tools we wanted, so we built them and gave them away:

SpiceEdit — a mouse-first code editor for SSH work. One 10 MB Go binary, no config files, no plugins, no setup. For the times you’re four servers deep and you’d rather not fight Neovim. Free, MIT.

Herdr Plus — an open source plugin for herdr, the terminal multiplexer and agent runtime. It adds a fuzzy Quick Actions launcher and Projects, which spins up a whole workspace — tabs, panes, startup commands — from one TOML file. Free, MIT.

Jitter Box — a speed test between your own devices instead of to a server in another state. When the Wi-Fi feels bad but your ISP test says 900 Mbps, this tells you which one is lying. Mac, iPhone, and a free Linux CLI.

Remote SQLite — a Mac menu bar app that lets TablePlus and friends browse a SQLite database on a remote box over plain SSH.

There’s also Oregon Past Due Rent, which prints and mails legally compliant past-due rent notices for Oregon landlords the same day. Deeply unglamorous. Extremely useful if you’re a landlord in Oregon.

And one more

The newest one is still warm: Feasible.

It started because our analytics bill got ridiculous. A million pageviews a month, and the going rate was several hundred dollars a year — sometimes several thousand — to count them. Counting pageviews is cheap. The price shouldn’t be.

Feasible is website analytics on a single page. No cookies, no consent banner, no IP addresses stored, no report builder to learn. Unlimited sites, teammates, goals, and funnels. A million pageviews a month for $99 a year. It’s open source, so you can host it yourself and pay nothing.

This site runs on it. Go look at feasible.lol and tell us what’s missing.

Back to it

That’s ten years. Two products we rebuilt from the ground up, a handful of small ones we gave away, and one company website that sat there gathering dust the entire time.

The dust is off. We’ll try not to make you wait another decade.

❡