Hello, World

I subscribe to too many newsletters. You probably do too.

The problem isn’t the content — it’s that good stuff gets buried. Something important drops on a Tuesday and by Friday it’s under forty other emails. I wanted a way to see what kept coming up across sources — the stories that multiple newsletters thought were worth covering — without reading all of them.

So I built this.

The feed on the homepage ingests newsletters and tech communities, pulls out the links, and surfaces what’s worth reading. The more sources mention something, the more it matters. Simple idea, more fun to build than I expected.

It also doubles as a portfolio, which — yes, I know. Building a product to show you can build products. It felt less embarrassing than a slide deck.

Stack is Elixir/Phoenix with a Node.js scraper pipeline, Cloudflare Email Workers for newsletter ingestion, Claude for story extraction, and self-hosted on Hetzner. This blog is for writing about building it.

Why Elixir?

Honestly, I wanted to learn it properly. I’d been adjacent to it for a while and kept hearing good things. Phoenix clicked fast — LiveView, Ecto, NimblePublisher, it all fits together in a way that doesn’t feel like fighting the framework. The BEAM’s fault tolerance is overkill for a personal site. The ergonomics are not.

What’s next

Newsletter ingestion is almost there — Cloudflare Email Worker relays to the server, Claude extracts the stories. Next up is the weekly digest: surfacing whatever showed up in three or more newsletters that week. After that, filling out the Work section with actual case studies instead of “more soon.”