Amid much holiday cheer, December was a month of progress on both Trophy and Campfire. I also dabbled with a new project that managed to capture some of my attention...

Trophy

As planned, in December I shipped the push notifications feature which one of our customers is integrating into their app. I also ended up building and shipping a Spotify-styled Wrapped feature for this same customer after they requested it with much enthusiasm.

I built an automatic data archiving system to avoid our primary database getting too big. Lastly I moved through a list of quality-of-life improvements and small features that had been accumulating over the last few months.

Campfire

Unfortunately we were not able to have the Clerk migration ready in time to ship before the end of the year. But luckily the deadline on this turned out to be mid-January rather than December 31st, so we have a bit more time. It's almost there, just putting on the finishing touches...

Aside from engineering I also began writing strategy docs for 2026. Setting the direction for Campfire in the coming year is much easier than it was last year, since rather than attacking a brand new market (ebooks) we are refocusing on the core business (writing software). This is a market we know well, and both our customer surveys and subscription cancelation data point toward the same priorities: stability and habit formation for authors. So that will be the focus, which is extra nice because it ties right in with Trophy.

Marketing will be very important for Campfire in 2026 since we need to get that engine running properly again for the writing software.

Distractions

I was consumed by an idea that came to me for a world-building MMO-style game, where players collaboratively build a world and write its stories as time moves forward at a fixed pace, with events becoming "canon" once they are in the past.

I used this as an excuse to test the latest Cursor + Claude Opus capabilities, and it spun up a monorepo for me with a NextJS website, a Vite React app for the game itself, some shared packages for UI components and whatnot, and an Express backend. I also used ChatGPT to brainstorm the design of the game. It was surprisingly helpful in that it asked me the write questions and helped crystalize the idea.

I'll have to pause work on this for most of January since I have lots to do on Campfire and Trophy, but towards the end of the month I plan to come back to it. Could be a fun little side project and one that I know could find an audience.

Next Month

First half will be a lot of early mornings to try and get this Campfire update over the line. Second half will be more relaxed. And right in the middle will be a weekend trip to Portugal to do some wedding-related stuff.

That's all for now.