50by50

Log

Weekly build notes.

Day 12 May 22, 2026
Day 12: measurement infrastructure across the portfolio

Week 1 weekly review published. Search Console verified across four properties. Sitemaps shipped for every counted site. Three counted launches now have signal to measure against.

Day 11 May 21, 2026
Day 11: image-first seeding, and a second city

LocalShoot got an image-coverage overhaul (Openverse as a second photo source, an honest 'be the first to shoot here' placeholder, image-first candidate tooling) and Galveston launched as a second city with 12 verified spots on its own map.

Day 10 May 20, 2026
Day 10: LocalShoot video, then two handyman sites off one template

Half a day on the LocalShoot launch video and LinkedIn post; the other half on the first two factory sites off the home-services-leadgen template — HandyCost and Austin Handyman.

Day 9 May 19, 2026
Day 9: three repos in one day

Week 2 starts for real. The Hub publishes its Week 1 recap posts, Handscript reaches Memorial Letters Ship 1, and LocalShoot's submit flow gets rebuilt end to end.

Day 8 May 18, 2026
Day 8: a no-committed-output day

Week 2 opened on a Monday with nothing committed to any tracked repo. Backfilled honestly rather than dressed up.

Day 7 May 17, 2026
Day 7: backfill, reviewer consent, mobile QA, deploys-broken diagnosis

Three undocumented days behind, a scoreboard out of sync with reality, four pending §5 carries, and a deploy that's been quietly failing since Day 4. Sunday spent on doc discipline + closing two of the four carries.

Day 6 May 16, 2026
Day 6: zero day

No commits across any of the five repos. No uncommitted changes anywhere. A genuine rest day on Week 1 of a 132-day sprint.

Day 5 May 15, 2026
Day 5: analytics across every site, one Vercel scope-token war story, one undeploy

Five GA4 properties wired in one morning across three Astro spokes and two Next.js sites. A Pro-team token that couldn't see its own team. One unused Vercel project deleted, code preserved. The §5 gate closed on TC Media — the doc lag is a separate story.

Day 4 May 14, 2026
Day 4: the side-quest day

About six hours went somewhere else. One late-night LocalShoot fix on the way to bed was the only 50by50 commit. Build-in-public means saying so.

Day 3 May 13, 2026
Day 3 in retrospect: four workstreams, two counted launches, one very full day

The day the factory engines came online, a side-quest went live, a real product attached its domain, and the news aggregator stopped looking like a dev tool. Four streams. Forty-one commits across three repos.

Day 2 May 12, 2026
Day 2 in retrospect: eight commits between school drop-off and the recital

Planned to scaffold two sites. Shipped a design system instead — between a power outage at 2 PM and my daughter's band recital at 6:15. The honest hour-by-hour record.

Day 1 May 11, 2026
Day 1 in retrospect: what I did, what the AIs did, what nearly broke me

Idea at 9:30 AM. Walk by 11. Lunch at 1. Live site by 5. This is the honest hour-by-hour record.

Day 1 May 11, 2026
Day 1 of 132: the bet

132 days, 50 useful websites, one factory, one birthday.