nickbaum

We started using Quill 1.x around 2016, I initially liked it a lot. Jason proactively reached out to me when I first tweeted about considering Quill, and he was helpful when I had questions about the implementation.

Fast forward to 2019, we were running into some bugs, Quill 1.x was in maintenance mode, and 2.0 was effectively undocumented [1]. I reached out to Jason on Twitter [2] to get a sense for the timeline, and he basically told me to get lost. (Also his company Slab now blocks me on Twitter, though I imagine he just meant to block me from his personal account.)

Everyone has stressful days, especially when building a startup, so maybe that was just a bad time for me to reach out. My best guess is that they were focused on their own company (fair!) and barely had the time to maintain Quill for their own internal usage, let alone release it as open source. If that's the case, I wish they'd been upfront about it.

5 years later, Quill v2 is finally live. I'm glad to see Slab is still around, and I hope they have the bandwidth to publicly maintain Quill going forward. But if you're thinking about using this in production, I would push on what their commitment is to supporting it, and have a plan for if they stop responding.

(Jason, if you're on this thread, no hard feelings, water under the bridge. Feel free to ignore or chime in with your own perspective.)

Storyworth is a meaningful business with a lean team and a big emphasis on work/life balance. We’re looking for experienced, full-stack engineers with strong product skills who are interested in flexible hours (20-30 hours/week) with good pay.

Storyworth helps people record their family stories and print them in beautiful hardcover books. We’re profitable with no need to fundraise. We’re a small team by choice, with low overhead and few meetings. Everyone is remote and works flexible hours, including our leadership team.

We’re hiring a couple of engineers who enjoy building products end to end, from the UI to the database query. We’re looking for optimistic, self-motivated people, who value working at the top of their craft AND having time for the other things they care about. Our stack is Python (Tornado), Mongo, Svelte and Tailwind.

We rarely have open roles, so if this sounds interesting, please read the full role description and follow the instructions to apply:

When I first built StoryWorth, it only worked over email because I thought voice recording would be too complex (both to use and to implement).

However, users kept asking for it so I finally bit the bullet... and it was way easier than I expected. Using the Twilio API, I had voice recordings over the phone working within days.

The team is also super friendly. Less than a month after our launch, someone reached out to me and they wrote about our company on their blog: