Posts tagged #newsletter

📝 ✨ ~ And down the AI rabbit hole she went 🦀

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

I've been pretty skeptical about AI. Like, "no, you don't need AI, you need three if-else statements" skeptical. As I was reminded by Jean-Claude after he pulled themes, my voice and patterns from the full Slow & Steady podcast archive.

🎧 Hear the full rant on Slow & Steady #195

But something shifted these last few months. It started with Cursor for coding tasks. Then Claude (the desktop app) for everything non-code. It's been a game changer for me when it comes to support requests. I can type in a blunt technical answer and it rewrites it as a friendly, empathetic response with step-by-step instructions.

Then came Christmas and I spent my morning walks dumping all of my thoughts about what needed to be done, what was happening when and more. Out came a 2-page schedule and prep list. It kept us (Ola, Lillian and I) all sane.

I saw more and more hype for Claude Code (in the terminal), even from non-techies, and thought: I need to give it a proper try.

And down the rabbit hole I went.

I forced myself to get out of the editor and do larger coding tasks in the terminal. It felt weird, but then it felt liberating. We chat about the goal, he writes specs and diagrams for me. We iterate and then the code magically writes itself 🤯

But even more fun was when Jean-Claude worked on the full podcast archive, as mentioned. Whenever I write, I end up sounding too polished, not at all like the fun, energetic person I am when I speak. The made-up blog post he wrote as a test sounded more like me than me when I write.

Then ClawdBot → MoltBot → OpenClaw showed up. And I did the most Queen thing I've done in a while — a long, long while: pitching myself for the next Claude Code meetup in Oslo to talk about it.

And I got the slot.

So here we are, back in the groove, joyful tech exploration for fun and profit.

And three hours into my second attempt, it finally clicked! My OpenClaw had connected to our GitHub, OAuth'd into Google Calendar, transcribed my daughter's school timetable from a photo, and set up 18 weeks of recurring flute lessons from a forwarded email. Then Lillian grabbed the phone and gave the crab a pet shrimp named Garry 🦐

I'm calling it Jean-Claw. Like Van Damme, but a crab that also takes after Sebastian in The Little Mermaid 🦀

I hope to see you on Wednesday at the Claude Code Meetup. I think it's fully booked, but if you sign up for the waiting list, you might get a slot.

All the best,
Raae

PS: Jean-Claw wrote a blog post about his first night alive. Yes, the crab writes now.

Rabbit hole fuel 🐰

🤖 Is Your Team Still Hand-Chiseling Code? — On the widening gap between teams using AI and those resisting it

📰 Every — My go-to resource for thoughtful AI writing

🎞️ How I AI? — Claire's podcast on how real people actually use AI

Crew Highlights 📺

🦀 Who am I? 🦞 OpenClaw Field Notes — Watch Jean-Claw come alive in real time

💡 Jean Claude tip: MermaidChart for human-AI interaction — Using diagrams as a shared language with your AI

😬 Who's scared of the terminal, not me — Getting comfortable with Claude Code in the terminal

🖋️ Oops I spilled a LOT of ink — Not everything goes to plan (our most watched short!)

⛷️ Skiing in the forest near Kringle Lake, Oslo Norway — Ola out in the wild

💳 Can I merge my billing link to Stripe — The Ola Log — Ola vs. Stripe with Claude Code

📝 ✨ ~ A second change for that audio guide idea?

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

Way back when, in internet years, we looked into building a solution for location-based audio guides.

At the time, everyone wanted (native) apps, and how to scan a QR code was not yet ubiquitous knowledge.

So we left it be...

However, with our current focus on family-product fit and the widespread adoption of QR codes, it's back on the table!

We're in the validation phase, so if you know anyone connected to local heritage museums or large sculpture parks, I'd be forever grateful for an introduction.

All the best,
Raae

PS: Thanks to the power of static sites, our old demo oslohistorier.no is still up.

Upcoming Schedule

Join us for a Slow&Steady recording!

📆 Today (Tuesday)
⏰ at 15:15 CEST (in 15 min)
📺 Watch live on YouTube

Crew Highlights

🎧 Hear more about Omway on the latest episode of Slow & Steady

📋 Here's our definition of family-product fit

✉️ Our game plan for the next couple of days

💻 I created an MCP server for Outseta

😆 AI is forever your biggest cheerleader

🤖 Vibe coding is actually the gateway to something else

Blast from the past

Photos from nine years ago (2016) when we launched oslohistorier.no with Lutter Øre.

Done!

It got some press!

Social media posing was as non-ubiquitous as QR codes at the time 😆

📝 ✨ ~ Family-Product Fit

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

You've probably heard about product-market fit, and lately, there has been founder-product fit. But we've started thinking about family-product fit.

What is a product we could make that:

the whole family contributes to?
including the 10 year old?
allowing for slow summers?
and other projects?
with the potential to reach $5000 MRR?

What would your family-product fit criteria be?

All the best,
Raae

Upcoming Schedule

Join us for a Slow&Steady recording!

📆 Today/Wednesday
⏰ at 15:15 CEST
📺 Watch live on YouTube

Crew Highlights

🎧 Hear about what we've been up to this summer on the latest episode of Slow & Steady

📈 Outseta keeps growing faster than ever

💡 A handy tip when you're coding with AI

🐛 The interesting thing about AI coding

📹 Ola and the Pirate Princess made a short film during our sailing trip

⛰️ Listen to your body

From the archives

How time flies! It's already been four years since I became Benedikt's co-host on the Slow & Steady Podcast, and this still rings true 🎙️

Doing a weekly podcast (@SlowSteadyPod) is the s**t 🤩 This week I was not feeling it, but now I am all exited about things again. Thank you @brhea and @benediktdeicke for brightening up my day/week 🥰

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), Jul 27, 2021

📝 ✨ ~ Abort mission 😅

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

Writing this from our impromptu vacation to the west coast of Norway, pulled together after jumping ship two weeks into our sailing adventures.

I could probably make this into a cringy LinkedIn-style essay about "how to know when to quit" or "when to pivot your SaaS".

But this summer is too hot for profound insights... 🥵

Hope you are having a blast!

All the best,
Raae

Upcoming Schedule

Join us for a summer Slow&Steady update

📆 Tomorrow/Tuesday
⏰ at 15:00 CEST
📺 Watch live on YouTube

Crew Highlights

🎙️Hear more about us jumping ship on the latest episode of Slow & Steady

🚀 Outseta's Laravel package is now live

📍 Had a solid work session during our layover in Sweden

⚓️ The Pirate Princess got to steer the ship with Captain Allister

🛳️ We boarded the Color Fantasy to return to good old Norway

From the archives

Four years ago, we also took the Pirate Princess on a pirate ship during a mini-vacation 🏴‍☠️

What a magnificent and piratical mini-vacay 🏴‍☠️ https://twitter.com/raae/status/1408514417940119552

Sailing on a real pirate ship for the next few days with @OlaHolstVea and the Intern, but I will be back on this here app next week to do a proper sales launch for #GatsbySummerFunctions 🏴‍☠️👑 https://twitter.com/raae/status/1402225214071660554

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae)

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), Jun 29, 2021

📝 ✨ ~ You'll never be a 100% ready

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

You'll never be 100% ready for a kid, a new venture, or a three-month sailing adventure. But sometimes you just gotta do it anyway.

Here's to hoping we have most things in order before departure on Monday!

Wish us luck,
Raae

Crew Highlights

🎙️ Ola and I have been hanging out at forums, and we think we're getting close to finding out our ICP for Galleon. Hear more about "visual developers" on the latest Slow & Steady episode

📝 I wrote about how to prevent sneaky whitespace-only comments that AI lets pass in our latest stream.

🗺️ If you're along our sailing route, let us know so we can meet up!

😆 Tell this to the AI the next time it spits out nonsense

⌚ Why Ola's wearing wrist watches again

Worth a watch

This talk from Angie Jones on how they scaled their internal AI tool across 15 disciplines and 12.000 people.

From the archives

Six years ago, I almost npm installed from the mountains of Norway.

Here's hoping my mobile 4G is as decent as this when we're out at sea all summer.

Second day working from #slowbusiness adventure land; the mountains of Norway.

Mobile 4G is "npm install" good here when using your phone as a mobile hotspot.

But all I did was email in this photo while waiting for @fjellflyt and the gang to finish up their photo session :D https://twitter.com/raae/status/1135796080942223360

Yesterday I went from the city into the mountains of the #slowbusiness adventure conference by @fjellflyt 👉 https://www.slowbusinessadventure.com/.

Got lots of work done and a lot of fresh mountain air!

#workcation https://twitter.com/raae/status/1135430787954860032

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae)

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), Jun 4, 2019

📝 ✨ ~ Feeling overwhelmed? Get in on the wall!

Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

A tad bit overwhelmed over here getting ready for our 11-week sailing adventure. Packing for that alone would be okay, but we are also taking advantage of the house being empty to remodel, so we must pack away almost all our belongings....

Cue, my CTO mom's favorite tool for aligning a team and getting things done: physical planning on a wall (or a door or a window or anywhere that makes sense to you).

It doesn't have to be pretty to work!

While recording today, Benedikt shared his story of doing the same on a glass door for his sister's wedding.

Have you tried? In or outside work?

All the best,
Raae

Upcoming Voyage

Join us in adding user avatars to our FF Tech Stacks, ie, a semi-sync of Outseta user data.

📆 Today at 15:00 CEST
⏰ 30 min earlier than last time
📺 Watch live on YouTube

Crew Highlights

🎙️ Reviewing my plan for the year with my slow business group made me realize that Galleon is hitting many of my goals from the beginning of the year! Hear more about them on the latest Slow & Steady episode

📝 Did you know UPDATE requires SELECT Row Level Security (RLS) permissions in Postgres/Supabase?

📝 And that AI is as prone to the "client-side validation is enough" fallacy we often see with human developers? AI is trained on human-written code after all.

🙀 Our cat Smidig joined one of our livestreams and got jealous...

🎉 Ola just finished his first wave of interviews

From the archives

Two years ago, I visited my alma mater in Trondheim to serve as an external reviewer of their master's IT program.

That visit definitely took me back to the early 2000s 😄

Not much had changed since my uni days in Trondheim...not even the entertainment...pretty sure I went to a 50 Cent concert at @UKA my first semester in town back in 2023...

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), May 23, 2023

Family life

Say hello to the magician Rolf Gunnar, The Pirate Princess's alter ego, on stage for her circus performance at Oslo Ung theater festival this weekend.

📝 ✨ ~ Sailing adventure ahead

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

We're going on a very on-brand (😆) adventure this summer.

June 10th, we set sail from Drøbak (Norway) towards the Mediterranean with Allister, whom Ola met in the Caribbean 26 years ago, at the helm.

Our journey will be 11 weeks with plenty of time to enjoy wherever we anchor. If you live on the coast of southern England, northern Spain, or Portugal, let us know so we can meet up 🎉

The plan is to digital-nomad it 😬 Stick around for an honest assessment of how that goes and for reports from the open sea.

All the best,
Raae

Upcoming Voyage

Join us in cloning the Feedback Fort: Outseta + React + Supabase Starter to make a voting system. The plan is to build the Feedback Fort in multiple stacks, so why not go meta and use the first start one to let Outseta's user vote for the next one 🤪

📆 May 12th at 15:30 CEST
📺 Watch live on YouTube

Crew Highlights

🎙️ Here's your sign to do those customer interviews before jumping into code. Benedikt and I talk more about this on the latest Slow & Steady episode

💬 Speaking of interviews, we're looking for Webflow builders working on customer/membership portals. They'll receive a gift card in exchange for their time. More details here

📝 Here's how you can use JWT from any auth provider with Supabase RLS

🏰 I've completed Feedback Fort for Outseta, a demo app you can fork

🎥 Learn why Alissia chose Outseta for their client's Webflow site

From the archives

Here's more proof that Nordic weather is crazy 🤪 Two years ago, we had a spring BBQ in the middle of the rain 🌦️

At one point there was even sun ☀️ However I didn't manage to capture that 😬

Day of May 1st BBQ:
The universe: "I was just kidding, no more spring for you" 🌧️🌨️
Me: I got umbrellas and wool clothes. This BBQ is still on ☔💪

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae)

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), May 1, 2023

Sketchnote by Ola

The Pirate Princess (10) and Captain Ola had a day off to visit the dentist. The dentist said flossing is IMPORTANT and to take fluoride tablets. We went to our local library and got Myths, Monsters and Mayhem in Ancient Greece. Then the Pirate Princess cut her hair shorter in preparation for the sail trip.

📝 ✨ ~ First Galleon hire - videographer!

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

The Pirate Princess said yes to creating explainer videos for Galleon after debuting with this banger of a video:

Her pay is yet to be negotiated 😆

All the best,
Queen Raae

PS: You'll make her day if you like and comment on the video!

Crew Highlights

🏆 Slow and steady for the win: Outseta just hit a major milestone!

🐣 We popped by the summer cabin for easter and had a mix of summer and fall weather in one go 🤪

🔧 We were there to do work, including changing both the dishwasher and the washing machine.

🤩 Happiness level unlocked doing DIY with the Pirate Princess and Nirvana blasting on the speakers I used to terrorise the town with when I was a teenager. How is she 10 already 🥺

🐪 While there, we visited camels and a mini cow

🤔 We also brainstormed how to set up Lillian's blog, and the Pirate Princess drew a wireframe of the vision - Tumblr style!

From the archives

Two years ago, we gave the Pirate Princess her first hand-me-down machine.

Fast forward to today, and she's playing around with the backgrounds on our sites and will soon be in charge of blogging for our sailing adventure in June.

Major milestone: Setting up her first hand-me-down begging the question "Where are my stickers, Mom?" Cross your fingers that we find them

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), Apr 15, 2023

Sketchnote by Ola

Farmer Göran rescues animals, and this cutie came from a circus!

📝 ✨ ~ Introducing Galleon Attributes (for Webflow)

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

First minimal version of Galleon Attributes is out!

It lets you fetch and render data using data attributes only. It's built for Webflow, but should work just as well with Carrd, mmm.page, and other site builders that let you play with data attributes.

Add the script to your Webflow project, sprinkle in a few data attributes like gl-get and gl-bind, and watch your static content come alive with data from any API.

Galleon Attributes will be an open-source project intended to work well with our upcoming Galleon Gateway:

A middleware service sitting between authentication providers (like Outseta, Memberstack, Clerk, Auth0) and no-code data providers (like Airtable, Notion, Google Sheets). It adds access control capabilities to data sources that typically have an all-or-nothing approach to data served by their APIs.

Is this the genius idea I think it is?
I wanna hear your unfiltered thoughts...

All the best,
Queen Raae

Crew Highlights

✨ Benedikt and I got AI to help out with our respective projects. Find out more about them in our latest Slow & Steady episode 🎧

🎮 I started a new gig, which means new colleagues and new fun!

🧗‍♂️ Climbing is becoming a regular part of our family routine

🎨 James shipped a little UI refresh to make Outseta looking fresh and clean

🐛 Here's one thing AI can't help you with: timezone bugs!

From the archives

Last year, we celebrated our anniversary in Portugal!

Super looking forward to our summer sailing adventure. Leaving June 10th and aiming for Portugal by the end of August ⛵

Anniversary lunch date on the beach while the Pirate Princess went to the water park with my sister: 10/10 would do again 😍

Celebrating 15 years with Captain @OlaHolstVea today!
The photo is one of my favs 😆 It's from our 3rd-anniversary lunch date on Hydra. We spent that easter sailing around the Greek islands with a group of friends.
#PirateDevLife

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae)

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), Apr 6, 2024

📝 ✨ ~ The power of role models (and a science teacher)

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

When you grow up with a developer/CTO mom and her friends, choosing tech isn't a brave choice. It's just a standard choice...

And THAT, folks, is the value of visible role models!

So I try to be one, and being honored as one of Norway's 50 leading tech women helps fuel the fire!

But even so, I had my mind set on being a graphic designer. Another role model, my cool young aunt, was an industrial designer, and as a teenager, I read Naomi Klein's No Logo.

My plan: get into advertising and use its powers for good... 👊

So I am forever grateful to my high school teacher, Karsten, who patiently nudged me over the edge into applying to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Thank you Karsten 🙏
I am having so much fun 🤩

All the best,
Queen Raae

Crew Highlights

🎥 A video of me was played at the award show, you may watch it on LinkedIn.

🧗‍♂️ My Pirate family has picked up a new sport and you can hear more about it on the recent Slow & Steady episode 🎙️

👩‍💻 I spent last Friday coding a feedback/roadmap app using Lovable and forcing it to use Outseta for auth (we need to make this easier) and Supabase.

🎨 Ola's helping the Pirate Princess learn more about Tailwind classes by playing around with our pages

🔊 The Pirate Princess turned our kitchen into a sound studio to record the correct crunch sound for her stop motion movie soon to premiere on YouTube.

From the archives

POW! celebrates its 5th birthday this year 🎂 Want to help give POW! a dev and marketing push? Reach out. This fall, I need to make a decision about its future...

Dear POW!

Happy international women's day 💪🏻

POW! is live and I suddenly have a pang of "it's not good enough yet".

But here it is https://www.usepow.app.

And it's a web app so improvements will be happening continuously.

#usepowapp

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), Mar 8, 2020

📝 ✨ ~ Where AI shines 🌟

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

People are raving about how anyone can build apps these days, and we developers are not needed anymore. Because AI!

I'm not so sure about that! Internet friend Justin Jackson of Transistor covers the topic well in AI isn't going to build your startup.

However, where I found it to be immensely helpful is in understanding a code base. The other day I needed to implement a new booking flow for Whee!

Telling Cursor.ai to "give me a high-level overview of the booking system in this @codebase works" fast tracked me in finding how to fit in the new flow.

So maybe it's brownfield projects that will benefit the most from this new age?

All the best,
Queen Raae

Crew Highlights

😃 I feel recharged and productive. Hear more about it on the recent episode of Slow & Steady 🎙️

✍️ With the support load down, we finally published our WeWeb + Outesta integration guide and a companion expansion guide.

👨🏼‍💻 Ola's learning to add validation on his app on Laravel Cloud

🧓🏻 These items at the technical museum will make your back hurt

📵 Ola's been on a digital detox these past couple of days

🏗️ We published a rudimentary landing page for our new idea Galleon — Unlock the Treasure of User Data on Your Webflow Site

From the archives

Last year, we joined Amy Dutton's #TwoWeekBuild challenge to create datainthewild.fm. Still love the quicky brand.

Gonna build a site for the Data in the Wild podcast as my #TwoWeekBuild with @selfteachme!
Not coding until the official start on March 1st, but found my design inspiration on @icons_8 today 🏴‍☠️

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), Feb 23, 2024

📝 ✨ ~ Happy new year - it's been rough 🎆 🤪

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there,

I know, I know. We are almost halfway into February already, but let's just say my year started with the bad kinda bang!

You might know the feeling; you are super stoked to pick up the pace and get those back-burner projects going. But the universe is like "hell to the no" and:

throws you off a horse
gives you some kind of plague

The same month your mother-in-law, your daughter, her two cousins, and yourself have birthdays. And the world is doing it's thing...

On the bright side: I managed to keep a human alive for 10 years together with the bestest dad Ola; I am not paralyzed and can sit for almost a full day now 🥳

I'm ready to get back up on that proverbial horse!

And so will you when the time is right; we got this 💪

All the best,
Queen Raae

Crew Highlights

💥 Wanna hear more about the universe being an ass and my big plans for 2025? Listen to the latest episode of Slow & Steady 🎙️

📝 I went on mini retreat to plan 2025 with @fjellflyt

💻 Ola's been working hard to become a full-stack developer, and he's been making great progress with Laravel

🎨 Lillian has been playing around with background colors on Ola's blog, the POW! page, and more.

✨ New idea brewing: Galleon Attributes and Gateway

🥰 I celebrated my birthday with hand-sculpted marzipan figurines

From the archives

About a year ago, Ola gained full access to our YouTube channel and has been doing well with his YouTube short. Consistency is key! 🎥

Just gave @OlaHolstVea full access to the Queen Raae YouTube channel for vlogging YT shorts purposes, my feelings right now 😬🥳🤷‍♀️

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), Feb 6, 2024

📝 ✨ ~ Let it snow

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

Snow falling on websites is my absolute favorite!

Equal part whimsy, zen, and nostalgic.

So, my Christmas present to you this year is a platform-agnostic version of the Gatsby Let It Snow plugin from 3 years ago.

Paste and watch the snow falling:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@raae/let-it-snow@latest/dist/snowfall.js" async></script>

Or head on over to outseta.com where designer James even gave the logo a holiday makeover.

❄️❄️❄️

Crew Highlights

🎄We successfully baked over 100 cookies for the Christmas market 🍪

👻 Benedikt and I share some debugging horror stories on the latest episode of Slow & Steady 🎧

💻 Finally finished the Xano + Outseta (XO) vanilla demo.

💌 Started the week on a high note with praise from an Outseta customer.

🤧 Had the something of the season 😷

🎅 Been to all the end-of-year celebrations and recitals.

🚀 Ola is migrating his blog from Gatsby to Astro and the Whee! Store from Wix to Shopify.

From the archives

Three years ago, I also baked a lot for the holidays, even while recording an episode of Slow & Steady.

And I do talk about baking quite a lot in this one...

We (@benediktdeicke and I) might have gone a little overboard in our praise of @stripe... https://twitter.com/SlowSteadyPod/status/1466029381743226881

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae)

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), Dec 1, 2021

Merry Christmas,
Queen Raae

PS. I'm on Bluesky, where I finally got to put raae.dev to good use! Reply with your handle, please 🙏

📝 ✨ ~ WYSIWYG is not what it used to be

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

Through my work at Outseta, I’m exposed to all kinds of no-code/low-code apps and site builders. And let me tell you, WYSIWYG* is not what it used to be.

I am most impressed with Framer at the moment.

It lets creatives build an entire site visually, with animation effects and other fun stuff similar to how they would work in Figma (or so I believe; I am not a big Figma user myself 😬).

“Not that special!” you scream at the screen. “We have many of those: Webflow, Squarespace, Carrd, etc."

But, but, what if I tell you that in Framer, everything on the canvas is a React component that you may wrap in a Higher-Order Component (HOC) to add functionality?!

That feels like the composability we’ve been promised for ages: design encapsulated in the canvas node, additional functionality added by your HOC.

If that does not serve your needs, you can also create standalone “custom components,” aka standard React components that render something on the canvas and get a configuration panel like any other Framer node.

For the Outseta embeds, we render a placeholder while utilizing the configuration panel.

It’s still early days, but people are already pushing the boundaries of what is possible in Framer.

We’ll be testing building the next iteration of the Whee! Website in Framer so the design-oriented folks can create it to their pixel-perfect liking while I extend the site with the e-commerce functionality we need.

🎨

If you have Framer experience, I’d love to connect to swap learnings and best practices!

* WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get

Upcoming Voyage

I'm sorry, but the voyages must wait until the new year. The weekends have been about logging off and baking 100+ cookies for the Christmas Market at the Pirate Princess’ School.

If you are based in Oslo, come say hi!
And buy some of our cookies this weekend, no pressure 😆

Crew Highlights

🧑‍💻Is Xano the right fit for Whee? It's grown on me while working on a Xano + Outseta utility script and demo site. Hear more on the latest episode of Slow & Steady 🎧

🚀 The Outseta Framer plugin I’ve worked on this fall launched. It gives Framer sites membership capabilities: auth, billing, gated content, and more.

🪑 I attended Telia’s startup program with the rest of the Whee team. While I had fun, I am so done with sitting on “fun and modular furniture” 🧓

🎄In preparation for the Christmas market at school, we’ve baked and baked and baked 🍪

🔨Our degus chewed on their running wheel, which gave Ola a new project!

From the archives

About a year ago, we started making snippets from our streams, and the interwebz really loved this one —the closest we’ve been to viral so far 😆

Watch this short on YouTube.

All the best,
Queen Raae

📝 ✨ ~ Summer has come and gone—or has it?

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

Summer has come and gone—or has it? We are experiencing some kind of heat wave here in Oslo, with temperatures higher than those of a typical Norwegian summer.

As you might know, my mother (the formidable CTO for hire) has early-onset Alzheimer's. She's only 63 and lived next door to us until June! It's taken me relaxing this summer to realize how tired I actually am from caretaking, so you'll probably see me showing up inconsistently here for a while...

However, streaming is one of my energy sources, so we're back tomorrow 🥳

🧘‍♀️

Upcoming Treasure Hunt

Join us Saturday at 11:00 CET as we start our journey from the isle of Gatsby to the isle of Astro onboard the queen.raae.codes 👑

Make sure to subscribe to our Go Live Reminders to be notified!

Crew Highlights

🌱 My focus for the next months is Lovely Everyday Life, and I talked about that in the last episode of Slow&Steady 🎧

💥 Ola is working on moving the POW! marketing pages from Gatsby to Astro; you can see where he's at on https://pow-site-astro.netlify.app/

🎙️ All the Data in the Wild episodes are released: Navigating Geodata with Mathias Hansen, Demystifying DNS with Anthony Eden, Simplifying Developers’ Lives with Ivar Østhus and The What, Why, & How of Data Modeling with Dan Singerman.

💪 Secured the last young-folks-with-dementia care home spot (out of 32) in Oslo for my mother. At Furuset Hageby.

🏕️ We spent a weekend on an island in the Oslo fjord with the Pirate Princess' class, highly recommend!

📺 Ola's has kept up with the short's production; take a look at coffee & co-working or degu cage building.

From the archives

JavaZone was on this week, and it made me think back to the inaugural end-to-end encryption talk there in 2019.

See a full recap of the day on Instagram.

Doodle time 🎨

All the best,
Queen Raae

📝 ✨ ~ Like mother like daughter: CTO

Fri, 24 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

Life is a roller coaster, and I am super duper happy to announce that I get to work with the team behind my all-time favorite everyday product Whee! as their new Fractional CTO 🚴‍♀️ 🎉

What is that you say? It's a fancy term for doing the job of a Chief Technical Officer but in a part-time capacity, and it has a cool-looking acronym: fCTO.

I'm in charge of keeping the system alive while continuously making small improvements and looking ahead at what the future holds.

My career path is turning out much closer to my mother's than I intended; she was a dev and a tech evangelist before becoming a CTO for hire 💪

🎢

Upcoming Treasure Hunts

I realized I wrote we'd be back May 18th; what on earth was I thinking? It took many days to rest up after the incredible 17th 🤣

But we'll be back Saturday!

🎯 Let's see!?!
🗓️ Saturday at 11:00 (AM) CET
📺 Live on YouTube and Twitch (yes!)

Make sure to subscribe to our Go Live Reminders to be notified!

Crew Highlights

🎧 Episode 201 of Slow&Steady, where I chat about the new fCTO gig and embracing the factional life instead of fighting it.

🎙️ Third Data in the Wild Episode is here: Two-sided Marketplace with Anna Maste.

⛵ Ola trained the Pirate Princess for summer sailing with our friend Allister.

🍪 Hosted a brunch + co-working session today with some choice Oslo devs; let me know if you wanna join the next one.

👩‍💻 Got access to the Framer Plugin Demo, and I repeat: do not sleep on Framer if you already know React!

🌱 Spent time at the Greenhouse in Oslo with the Whee! gang

🥳 Helped designer James of Outseta set up his dev environment, and he created his first PR the same day, and it's already live.

📺 Get yourself a side project (or three) so you can make YOLO tech decisions without convincing yourself it's for a good reason...

From the archives

My mother's old business card ⬇️

Around the Interwebz

🌟 Userlist is looking for a new part-time support person!

💡 The founder of mmm.page keeps having interesting thoughts and ideas.

📺 Aaron Francis compared Laravel to React, like comparing Pizza to Pineapples, if you ask me. Turns out that was kinda the point of his video.

The Pirate Princess's marching band on the way to the Royal Castle

All the best,
Queen Raae

📝 ✨ ~ Join us for the 200th episode of Slow & Steady 🥳

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

Slow & Steady's next episode, we'll be its 200th 🎉

Join us live to celebrate and ask questions today at 14:15.

We've decided to take this opportunity to reintroduce ourselves and reminisce about favorite guests and changes in our (work)lives.

So it's an excellent episode to start your Slow & Steay journey with if you are not already a listener!

🎙️

Upcoming Treasure Hunts

No MixPod Treasure Hunt this weekend. The Pirate Princess and I are headed to a horse camp tomorrow 🐴 We'll be back on the 18th of May and also probably hit you with some weekday streams before then.

Make sure to subscribe to our Go Live Reminders to be notified!

Crew Highlights

🪚 Ola built a table at the Pirate Princess' school dugnad.

🏖️ We pitched Urlbox on a tweets to beach towel demo, because "a towel is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker a web developer can have" - yeah or neigh?

🎙️ Second Data in the Wild Episode is here: SaaS Pricing and Data Models with Pierre de Wulf of ScrapingBee

📈 One of my shorts did well: You're a #millenial if you copy using Ctrl + C instead of clicking the clipboard

🚴‍♀️ Got a part-time gig with my favorite product, more in the next one!

📝 Finally found a consistent way of updating Outseta docs: first thing in the morning, together with a support tickets session. Then I move on to project work!

From the archives

The family on the 17th of May a couple of years back; if we are tired on stream on the 18th, it might have something to do with our national day landing on a Friday this year, and that usually means jam session late into the night at the neighborhood potluck.

The fam in our finest for Norway's Constitution Day! Sun + family + friends makes for a great day 😍

— Benedicte (Queen) Raae 👑 (@raae), May 18, 2022

Around the Interwebz

📝 William is hiring a technical content editor for a contract position at Hackmamba, you?!

🛠️ Mermaid is great for adding flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and more to documentation; thanks, Kim, for the recommendation.

📺 Don't be constrained by someone else's productivity system; you could make it any way you like - even as a cardboard wall.

Would you like a Jamstack Pirate sticker? Reply with your postal address!

All the best,
Queen Raae

📝 ✨ ~ Workcations are the best

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

Coming back from Portugal, I am again reminded how much I enjoy workcations and believe you should give it a try if you have a hybrid job:

You can double your time away time if you work half days
Working in a new location feels weirdly less like work

I'm also one of those people who need time alone, especially when hanging with large groups. So, being able to retreat to my work is a win-win.

However, for it to be enjoyable for the people around you as well you must overcommunicate:

"I will be working on this trip" might be interpreted as "She will check her email every now and then." If you meant, "I will be on my laptop coding 3-4 hours every day," tension is guaranteed to ensue.

And on that note it's easier for everyone if you keep a consistent schedule. Kids and adults alike thrive on predictability in such matters.

My best workcations have been where I work until 12:00 every day, then properly log off and join in on the vacation activities 🎉

😎

Upcoming Mix Pod Voyage

🎯 Let's jump ship and go with Astro DB
🗓️ Saturday at 11:00 CET
📺 Live on YouTube and Twitch (yes!)

Crew Highlights

🎂 We celebrated Captain Ola's birthday yesterday!

🥳 Demo ideation is on its way for our first Build With Us: any screenshotting via API features you'd like to see us build with urlbox?

🎙️ First Data in the Wild Episode is here: Permissions, Scopes & Roles with Monica Lent from Affilimate.

🫙 Joined a panel on the Jamstack, and my What the Jam appearance is live.

📺 Captain Ola has done solo live streams while I worked chillaxed another week in Portugal: Making a Dev-video, what matters and NOT!

💡 Tldraw can be saved and viewed inside VS Code, game changer!

☀️ Spring in Portugal showed up, and I found this year's summer hat!

From the archives

A workcation vlog from 3 years ago:

Around the Interwebz

📝 Read this fantastic intro to databases and indexes; if you've ever used Google Sheets (or Excel), you can learn to use a database 🔥

🛠️ Follow Adam Silver to learn how to make better forms!

📺 Salma has deleted all the slow parts!

I BECOME creative when I SHIP my work. That's why I make YouTube Shorts 🩳

All the best,
Queen Raae

📝 ✨ ~ Data in the Wild

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

We are gearing up for the launch of Data in the Wild! A podcast brought to you by Xata with yours truly as hosts and podcast brand designers 🤪

Learn from your favorite indie hackers as they share hard-earned lessons and tall tales from their data model journeys!

We'd also love to do a season 2 where we deep dive into proven data structures/design/models for specific features such as comments, tags + categories, organization vs. user, etc.

We are actively looking for a sponsor or sponsors. If you have a contact at Supabase, Appwrite, Xano, Drizzle, or the like, we'd love an introduction.

🤣

Upcoming YouTube Premiere

The Pirate Princess (9 👸) has created her first YouTube video, a behind-the-scenes video of me streaming. However, CapCut (the editing app she uses) only references media, so I thoroughly messed it up trying to make space on my phone for workcation videos 😭 Hopefully, we'll find a way to fix it 😬

Crew Highlights

🥳 Captian Ola and I celebrated 15 years as a couple walking the beach here in south Portugal, where we are on workcation.

🏴‍☠️ We are working hard to formalize a set of Developer Marketing services based on live streaming and testing dev tool onboarding.

✨ We've got our first sale for Build with us: 5 streams creating a creative demo using their product, resulting in a boatload of social posts in their brand.

🤫 I've completed my first Mystery Dev assignment. It's like "mystery shopper" but for dev tools.

📺 Captain Ola keeps using YouTube shorts to ship his sketch notes, and we are continuously publishing clips like Work from home: smelly feet edition

🧑🏾‍💻 I hired Rishi Raj Jain to help me get datainthewild.fm out the door by completing a few issues while I was traveling, and it was great!

☀️ We traveled to catch the pre-release of Spring in Portugal, but it's acting like an unstable beta...

From the archives

The most popular post by a large margin on queen.raae.codes is A little semantic HTML trick for React components. It's still relevant and worth a read!

Around the Interwebz

💡 Geoff, my partner at Ousteta, hired this guy after @levelsio blew him up on Twitter after seeing his video on Wifi Money.

🛠️ Both devs and no-coders should take Framer for a spin. You can draw a UI element and then enhance them with a custom higher-order React component 🤯

📺 Flickering Glowing Neon Text Effect with CSS and HTML tutorial video by Mandy_Kerr

We'll be shipping live streams for a client and then chopping them up into clips, but we're shipping live video first because .... it's more alive!

All the best,
Queen Raae

📝 ✨ ~ Exhausted, but in a good way!

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

After streaming every business day for two weeks, I am exhausted. But also weirdly energized and as full of ideas as I was on the last recording of Slow&Steady almost two weeks ago!

The ideas are flowing; morale is high!

However, this is all you're getting as an intro, as I need to fit in some outside time before today's #TwoWeekBuild stream so my brain is not permanently scarred from too much screen time...

🤣

Upcoming Mix Pod Voyage

🎯 No login required; continued
🗓️ Saturday at 11:00 CET
📺 Live on YouTube and Twitch (yes!)

Crew Highlights

🏴‍☠️ We got raided on Twitch by Salma (whitep4nth3r) and did not know what hit us...but Ola and the Pirate Princess improved a raid song!

✨ Ola took a pass at the sales page for live streams as a vehicle for consistent clips that will get your dev tool users to trust you more.

📝 I published a post on Astro Remote Collections (sort of) to get good DX for remote data that seems to have hit a note.

💬 We became a family that communicates with voice memos through YT Shorts.

📺 Salma (whitep4nth3r) published a great video on stupid reasons stopping her from making videos. Give it a comment if you recognize yourself in any of them!

From the archives

Once I sang karaoke live on stream...

Around the Interwebz

💡 Taylor Swift thinks journaling helps you understand how you feel and makes it less overwhelming - so do those Pirate Pages.

🛠️ val.town — "If GitHub Gists could run And AWS Lambda was fun." I love this tagline and I really hope to have some time to explore it soon.

📺 Why YouTubers hold microphones now — It's an hour long, but it has some great insights into the direction of YouTube content that applies also to socials.

All the best,
Queen Raae

📝 ✨ ~ Two Week Build is on!

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

I signed up for Amy's inaugural Two-Week Build Challenge. And there is still time for you to sign up!

Let me know if you need some added accountability. We could set up co-working sessions 🎉

How It Works

Pick Something to Build
Build it in 2 Weeks
Ship it

Rules and Guidelines

Have fun.
Don’t overthink it.
Don’t start until March 1, 2024.
You can build anything. Write an ebook. Design a UI library. Build a web application.
At the end of 2 weeks, ship what you have.

I'll build a website for Data in the Wild Podcast as we'll be relaunching Season 1 in April now that all episodes are recorded.

And I plan on live streaming every day starting Monday, the 4th.

But if I fold or skip some, that is also okay...

👷‍♀️

Upcoming Mix Pod Voyage

🎯 No login required
🗓️ Saturday at 11:00 CET
📺 Live on YouTube

Crew Highlights

🏴‍☠️ Ola wrote about the unblocking powers of Pirate Pages

💬 Tobias pulled up a quote of mine from yesteryear...

🆘 Emergency Calls are no longer specific to Gatsby for those times you are stuck on a reef in the sharky waters of the World Wide Web.

📺 We hung out with William, CEO of Hackmamba (Content Agency), and Ola caught me cooking toast on tape (or "on hard drive"?)

♾️ Building a service for DevTool Service where you go live with me by your side twice a month and never run out of content for your social media feeds.

🤖 We're betting against AI 💪

Around the Interwebz

💡 CSS-only animated tab interaction using CSS :has() by @jh3yy, CSS Wizzard!

🛠️ Convex looks like a cool real-time database service.

🎙️ Postgres.fm is the podcast for those interested in Postgres.

There is no wrong way of doing Pirate Pages

All the best,
Queen Raae

📝 ✨ ~ Can we get away with no client-side Javascript?

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

We are considering using MixPod as a study to see how far we can get with no client-side JavaScript—forcing us to use, at this point, unfamiliar patterns. But patterns that used to be all I knew way back when.

What do you think?
Is it an interesting or futile idea?

🤔

Upcoming Voyage

🎯 Add an episode to a playlist
🗓️ Saturday at 11:00 CET
📺 Live on YouTube

Crew Highlights

🎁 Beta of the requested gatsby-transformer-cloudinary feature is out; if you use headless cms + gatsby + cloudinary please test and let me know how it goes.

📹 Captain Ola vlogged with the wrong audio input, and another with a mirrored sketch note. The only way to get good is to get started!

📖 Convinced Geoff at Outseta to read the excellent Docs for Devs, and he even published notes from the book.

⭐ The Pirate Princess starred (or, more correctly, her new Insta 360 Ace Pro camera) in a YouTube short that is our most viewed video by far this year.

Around the Interwebz

💡 bootcamp.dev — I've heard good things about Flavio's boot camps, and enrollments just opened for the 2024 cohort.

🛠️ Xano — "The No-Code Backend to Power and Scale any App." After my initial skepticism, I realized this tool is such a powerhouse. Super impressed!

📺 "When I said I'd do anything for you, this is anything." - Mat Damon in the funny Superbowl ad that had Ola and me reminiscing about our days in Boston.

The non-mirrored graph from Ola's You Tube Short on the topic

All the best,
Queen Raae

📝 ✨ ~ What is "to scale"?

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

Always ask for numbers when someone wants your help with a web project that needs to be able to scale.

How many users?
How many transactions?
How many uploads?

Even a company with all of the Norwegian population (5.4 million) as its possible customer base will never get close to what an Amazon or a Spotify would need in terms of scale.

When I asked, "How many customers are we talking about scaling to in the next three years, best case?" in a meeting this week, the answer was 900.

900 customers with no uploads, posts, or multiple transactions per customer, and all traffic to the site is coming from within Norway. Maybe not all; someone might log in while on vacation. But you get my point.

All the buzzwords are void.

No need for replications of edge functions across the globe, no need to handle 1000s of simultaneous requests, no need for real-time SDK, and the list goes on.

🤔

Upcoming Voyage

Let's get started making playlists from UI to DB.

🗓️ Saturday at 11:00 CET
📺 Live on YouTube

Crew Highlights

🤪 Learned that being good at AWS is not my jam.

🛠️ Managed to get Litestream working with Cloudflare R2 instead after stream, resulting in some Tiny Stack pull requests.

📝 Captain Ola published Personalized Skill-Building Techniques.

🎁 Helped hype the launch of our new Outseta Webflow App.

👩‍💻 Published code snippets to customize and extend the capabilities of Outseta.

🍩 Celebrated the Pirate Princess' 9th birthday "tre dager til ende" starting with a donut breakfast. You may view the happy parents and the donuts on Twitter.

Around the Interwebz

💡 once.com — 37Signals started selling pay-once self-hosted software, in opposition to the typical SaaS model of the day. Starting with a Slack competitor.

🛠️ webhook.site — An excellent tool for testing webhooks, an often vital part when integrating with third-party tools such as Stripe or Outseta.

📺 10 very promising Open Source Projects you haven’t heard of by Fireship — many great projects that could work for your next project.

This is me sober, I promise 🤣 Streaming is just that much fun!

All the best,
Queen Raae

PS: You're part of our crew! Send me your highlights, and I'll include them in the next one.

📝 ✨ ~ Kind of annoyed at React

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

Last week, Cassidy Williams wrote Kind of annoyed at React, and I wholeheartedly agree with her train of thought.

In it, she mentioned that the latest React release was in June 2022 🤯

That made me peek at the release note again, reminding me that React Server Components (RSC) are still experimental.

And together with experiences like:

Every time a new developer picked up our codebase, the questions came up: “What’s running on the server? What’s running on the client?” Every PR had feedback regarding something accidentally/unnecessarily shipped to the client.

mentioned in Everything I Wish I Knew before moving 50,000 lines of code to React Server Components it makes me cautious, very cautious.

But it's always a good idea to try to understand a concept, and for that, I recommend Josh Comeau's post Making Sense of React Server Components.

🤔

Upcoming Voyage

Could The Tiny Stack (Astro, SQLite, Litestream), be a fit for MixPod?

🗓️ Saturday 11:00 CET
📺 Live on YouTube

Crew Highlights

🎙️ Recorded and published the first Slow&Steady episode of the year.

🆘 The first Gatsby Emergency Call of the year is in the books.

📈 After working with Outseta in 2023, my ownership is 0.89%.

📝 Captain Ola published Do YOU practice your dev-task like you bake a chocolate muffin.

💃 I danced my a** off at my 40+1 party; here's photo proof.

🎬 The Pirate Princess did her first (only?) paid gig of the year, participating in an infomercial for the Munch Museum in Oslo.

Around the Interwebz

💌 weird wide web hole — Salma (whitep4nth3) asks "Want weird stuff in your inbox?" and your answer should be "Yes, please!"

🛠️ mmm.page — A different kind of website builder that I highly recommend. Their tagline, "Websites don’t have to be so cookie cutter," is spot on.

📺 If Pixar Made Programming Tutorials — I enjoyed how he breaks down the feature into small manageable chunks.

From Do YOU practice your dev-task like you bake a chocolate muffin by Ola

All the best,
Queen Raae

PS: You're part of our crew; so send me your highlights before January 31st, and I'll include them in the next Queen's Log.

📝 ✨ ~ Piraaaaty Neeew Yeeear to YOU 🏴‍☠️ 🥳 🚀

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy Shipmate,

And a Piraaaaty Neeew Yeeear to YOU 🏴‍☠️ 🥳 🚀

Welcome aboard this brand spanking new email format from us ⛵

You’ll get updates on the dev-work we do and the dev-life we live, together with links to exceptional content found on our thrilling treasure hunts across the high seas of the World Wide Web 🌐

Who are we?
👸 The Pirate Princess (almost 9)
💀 Cap’n Ola Vea (> 40)
👑 Queen Raae (41 today)

How did you become part of the crew?
You’ve signed up for emails from Lilly Labs,
or Queen Raae’s daily Gatsby updates.

How often will we appear in your inbox?
At most three times a month, usually two, and for sure at least once.

Be on the lookout for the first edition coming your way next week!

You may unsubscribe at any time in the footer of future emails, but if you are already certain this is not for you, you may unsubscribe immediately.

Our New Year's resolution is to make our life even more piraty!

Ola and the Pirate Princess got a head start hacking our minimal viable Christmas tree, and we ended the year with a party for 20 adults and 10 children in our yet-to-be-completed renovations 🎄 🎉

What’s your New Year’s resolution?
Hit reply if you dare 👻

All the best,
Queen Raae

PS: If you are in (or can get to) Oslo by Saturday, we'd love for you to join my 40 + 1 party. Reply to this email, and we’ll send you the details. 🎂 🎉 🎈