2025-04-30 08:00:00
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.
With the help of AI, I threw together this tool that accepts a raw email paste. Then it shows those headers and header values in a format that is easier on the eyes. I also asked AI to do some research into the definition of each header and include citations. As always, I practiced the “don’t trust and verify” method when working with AI.
If you ever find yourself staring at email headers, I think you should give Prettier Email Headers a try!
2025-04-28 08:00:00
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.
All of the volunteer organisational team can see each talk proposal conversation, and can respond directly or privately discuss the talk right in that thread. And, most importantly, anyone can quickly get up to speed with where a talk proposal is because the whole history of the conversation is right there.
This is particularly important for a volunteer-led organisation like LRUG, because at any time one of the organisation team might be on vacation or busy with life and work; but because any other member can jump in and seamlessly pick up a conversation, LRUG never stumbles.
Jelly helps the LRUG team make sure that no conversation is accidentally ignored, because it’s always clear who’s got what.
As well as talk proposals, LRUG uses Jelly to coordinate with venues, to field questions from community members and attendees, and to coordinate with other user groups. Jelly acts as a shared inbox for all of LRUG’s communication, with specific email addresses for sponsors, job posting to the mailing list, and general organisational matters. Jelly handles everything.
LRUG’s longest-running organiser, Murray Steele, says:
We looked at other more "complete" support tools like ZenDesk and HelpScout, but they are way more expensive (you have to pay per user) and more complex than we need. Jelly presents email just like email, and there's a flat cost which means we don't get penalised whenever someone new joins our team.
2025-04-24 08:00:00
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.
Small businesses don’t get the spotlight, but they are the engine of the economy. To wit, in the United States:
And beyond the stats, small businesses are who we turn to every day: your corner coffee shop, your local cleaner, your neighborhood software team. And don’t forget that every big business started small. Small businesses are the genesis of innovation. We all need small businesses to succeed.
Most small teams aren’t trying to become giant corporations. They want to make a living doing work for a fair return. Many of them work hard in hopes of moving the needle from a fair return to a comfortable life, and maybe even some riches down the road. Yet it’s amazing how often it’s forgotten: you need customers to succeed. Success in small business starts with human conversation.
While talking effectively with your customers does not guarantee success, it is certainly a requirement. Here’s what that looks like: a customer has a question and your team responds kindly, clearly, and quickly. Or sometimes your team wants to reach out with a question for a customer. It’s a simple, human interaction that cannot be done effectively by automation or AI. It’s the air your small business is breathing. Starve that air, and everything else suffers. Your product or service is almost secondary to building a healthy relationship with each of your customers. Big business doesn’t operate this way. We shouldn’t expect it to show us how to build real relationships.
We’re doing our best here at Good Enough to build healthy, happy customer relationships. Whenever you write to us about any of our products, someone on the team is going to reply to offer help or an explanation or an alternative. Fact is, if you write to us about anything, we’re going to reply to offer help or an explanation or an alternative. As an online business, we’re talking with customers primarily over email. For us, Jelly makes those conversations easy to have—human, not hectic.
Actual customer support is remarkable. Actual, healthy human relationships are important. Actual customer conversations are a key to small business success. Choose your actions and tools accordingly.
2025-04-22 08:00:00
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...
https://lazyatom.com
https://interblah.net
https://goodenough.us
https://goodenough.us/blog
Once 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.
Q1: If your inner monologue were a programming language, what would it be, and why?
E_WHAT_THE_HELL_ARE_YOU_TALKING_ABOUT_THIS_IS_NONSENSE
Fantastic. You’ve got a reflective meta-loop keeping everything in check. Let’s follow that thought deeper:
Q2: What’s one recurring loop or thought-process that’s currently being tagged by your inner supervisor as E_WHAT_THE_HELL_ARE_YOU_TALKING_ABOUT_THIS_IS_NONSENSE?
Fair enough—let’s rewind a bit and start from a more grounded place.
Q3: OK James, tell me a bit about who you are, what you’re doing these days, and how you fit into the Good Enough story?
That’s perfect; let’s build on that a bit.
Q4: You mentioned it’s long been your dream to build great products with love. What does “building with love” mean for you personally—especially after two decades of programming?
Great! Let’s push into this tension a bit more:
Q5: Loving your users is admirable, but what’s a memorable example of when loving users conflicted with practical realities—like deadlines, budgets, or even your team’s sanity? How did you navigate that?
Alright, let’s throw practicalities aside and pivot into something more colorful.
Q5 (take two): If Good Enough were secretly a front for a mysterious cult, what strange rituals or beliefs would you and your teammates secretly adhere to, and why would you be tempted to join in?
Q6: If Tony the Pony, Zalgo, and Y2K emerged through your DVD player at midnight and demanded you justify your existence in precisely one feature you’ve built or contributed to, which one would you pick, and how would you convince them to spare humanity based on it?
Q7: If Jelly and Chicken were literally dishes on a menu at the Good Enough café (the front for the aforementioned cult, obviously), how would you describe their flavors and textures to customers who wander in, unsuspecting of their metaphysical implications?
Q7 (revised): What is it about Jelly, as an idea, that resonated with you deeply enough that it stuck around in your mind until you could finally build it at Good Enough?
It should be a simple thing! But all these big software products make it complicated, smother it in bells and whistles -- and now AI, no offence GPT. There should be a "no-brainer" answer for a group that wants to use email together.
I think Jelly can be that answer.
Let’s wrap this up neatly:
Final Question (Q8): You’ve spent your career advocating for simplicity in software. Do you think there’s a deeper personal philosophy beneath that, something you’re trying to express beyond just “good software design”?
At this point ChatGPT tried to summarise the whole thing into a coherent post and, to be honest, it was garbage.
So, instead, you get the raw interview. Judge me harshly, for I deserve it.
2025-04-15 08:00:00
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.
What do you do at Good Enough?
I started Good Enough with Shawn.
For the past year my primary work has been Pika, which is near and dear to my heart. An illustration of me even sits on the Pika homepage, yet somehow Pika still keeps attracting new customers. Baffling! To accomplish my work, I mostly code Ruby on Rails while sometimes talking to AIs to help me write JavaScript. I also try to do some marketing work as best I can, write a bit, and help out with our other products.
What are the tools of your trade?
Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, repeat. I’ve been using RubyMine as my editor for the past year, along with Cody as my AI assistant.
(I’m thinking of taking a month to try using a more integrated AI code editor.) While AI is more of a sounding board for my Rails work, it has become key for me to be able to accomplish anything at all in the JavaScript world. Aside from that, it’s my trusty MacBook Pro, a browser, Terminal, and reading the docs.
What’s your origin story?
I entered college as a Physics major, but knew enough about myself to take a Computer Science class in my first semester. I think I changed my major within a week. Though I loved computers, there wasn’t much programming in my life before college. My coding through college was primarily C++ for class, and I loved iterating on the little projects to make them more and more user friendly. From there I got into web development of the basic sort: HTML, CSS, SSI, and eventually PHP.
My career started at an insurance company, which onboarded new employees with an intensive, three-month COBOL training class. So, yes, I spent a couple of years being paid to code COBOL before transitioning to a Java team. After about six years, I had an early-life crisis and left that job for parts unknown. (Literally, I had no new job lined up, and my wife was pregnant with our second child. Do not try this at home!)
I was very fortunate to run into the Harvest founders, and was able to start working with them from (nearly) the beginning of that product. It was there that I was able to experience the tiny, scrappy startup; the growing, scrappy startup; and eventually the medium-sized company, established in its niche. I went from coding many of the original features to helping build a team to managing the entire technical team.
Eventually, it was time to move on to a new experience, and here I am at Good Enough, trying something rather different!
What’s new? How are things going?
Oh, you know, life keeps barreling on! As I mentioned above, our children continue to grow. We have a tight-knit family and love to hang out together. We also love to travel together! We just got back from visiting our oldest while she was studying abroad in Florence, Italy. It was fantastic.
Our middle child is heading to college in the fall, and we’ll continue to adapt. As you can imagine, this is all bittersweet, but we are doing our best to cherish the moments and enjoy watching our children grow into lovely adults.
What’s your drink of choice?
In the past few years, I’ve gotten into making cocktails.
I don’t make a cocktail often, but I really enjoy the variety of flavors that exist out there—I had no idea until I started making them!
I love a good Negroni. Paper Planes are awesome, as are Last Words and Enzonis. If I’m being honest, though, the most frequently drunk cocktail in the Hess household is the Gin & Tonic.
Any parting words of wisdom for our dear readers?
It’s okay to be mildly addicted to Fortnite if you take care to play with family and friends. It’s a fun game that’s always changing. The fun is enhanced by planning together and succeeding (or more likely failing) together.
When you play too much alone, and spend all of your “content viewing time” watching YouTube videos about how to play better (even though you never really get that good because you can’t put that much time into training), then perhaps you’ve went too far.
I may or may not be giving this speech to myself. Don’t worry, I have a totally balanced Fortnite life these days!
Where can you be found on the internet?
This blog, Pika’s blog, and my blog on Pika.
I’m also haltingly involved in various social sites @bjhess:
Want to know other things about our team? Let us know what really interests you!
2025-01-17 08:00:00
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:
The best AI Agent and AI-first Customer Service Platform
Try our new AI integration!
AI-first service.
... and I can see the appeal for some businesses.
But personally, I hate talking to bot or AI customer service tools. Is there anything more frustrating than carefully explaining your issue, then inexplicably being railroaded through some set of pointless questions or regurgitated knowledge-base articles, desperately hoping that if you can only jump through all these hoops like a good little boy, you might be able to eventually get in touch with an actual person who can actually read and understand your question and actually help you at the end of the tortuous process? It makes my blood boil!
And as these big players double down on AI, it feels clearer than ever that they are really only focussed on customers who are so big that they don’t need to care how frustrating their support processes are. Companies for whom support is a cost centre they are trying to minimise.
Jelly takes a different position. Jelly is about connecting actual people having actual conversations — support requests, questions, and all other kinds of collaboration.
We're a small company, too. We know that the communication between us and our customers, existing or potential, will be one of the biggest factors in our success. There's no way we want an AI agent representing us in those vital conversations. Our bet is that there are thousands of other small companies and groups who neither need nor want an AI agent sitting between them and the people they want to communicate with.
If you've been looking for a way for your team to share an inbox and work together to talk to your users, customers, clients, collaborators, and anyone else -- try Jelly. It's the simplest, most elegant, most humane way to work on email as a team.