BONJOUR
🤖 The gist
The last time we published on a Friday was just before the holidays. In that edition, we shared that the Hey Rebekah team takes the day off in solidarity with the many cultures and faiths of our readers who do the same.
But before we head out, we want to celebrate some things—together with you, our Alpha test group:
We published 9 newsletters and not a single person hates us 🤞🏽
Our subscriber growth rate since launch is 600% 🚀
83.66% of our readers are opening our email 🙌🏽
50.7% are clicking through to links we share 🐭
You referred a total of 9 new readers 🫶🏽
Let's take a moment to appreciate our progress. Because without you, our 14 Alpha testers—mostly consisting of internal emails and our moms—we wouldn't be warming up our sender domain for primetime.
So THANK YOU! We're grateful and humbled by your support. We're sure it has nothing to do with Ambreen and Rebekah prompting you everyday. 😉
A special shout out
🙌🏽 MAD PROPS TO @MSHAMSHER who's sitting pretty on top of the leaderboard of the Hey Rebekah Referral Program. We can't believe you were able to coerce people into subscribing!
PRODUCTIVITY
🎯 Focus on the work at hand
We get a huge benefit from making a simple commitment:
Don’t miss deadlines.
The benefit is that once we agree to the deadline, we don’t have to worry about it anymore. We don’t have to negotiate, come up with excuses or even stress about it.
It won’t ship when it’s perfect.
It will ship because we said it would.
Once this is clear, the quality of what we ship goes way up. Instead of spending time and energy looking for reasons, excuses or deniability, we simply do the work.
And over time, we get better at figuring out which deadlines to promise. Because if we promise, we ship.
PSA
🚨 CircleCI and Slack hacked
Another major round of SaaS vendor hacks to share this week. If you're using CirlcleCI as your secure build partner for continuous integration, read this now.
"Immediately rotate any and all secrets stored in CircleCI. These may be stored in project environment variables or in contexts."
Slack hacked but meh...
Slack also announced a breach dated December 31, 2022 but seemingly published it on January 5th, 2023. 🤨
"We recently became aware of a security issue involving unauthorised access to a subset of Slack’s code repositories. Our customers were not affected, no action is required and the incident was quickly resolved."
DESIGN
🎨 From Raymond to Rebekah
Everybody Loves Raymond - CBS Sitcom
Every now and then, we get sappy and sentimental about the past. Last summer, we added a rewatch of CBS' Everybody Loves Raymond to the list. It's a show about a goofball, overbearing parents, and a competitive sibling. 😶
One day, in a particularly funny episode, we saw something that caught our eye. Strangely, it was the analogous color scheme of Deborah's sweater.
Colors and warmth
Our admiration of fashionable apparel aside, it reminded us of something and sent us down a rabbit hole. We scoured the web for photos of scenes from the episode to find a reasonably large file size we could color pick.
Then it occurred to us. The sweater itself felt nostalgic. What was it though?
Ah...of course! The Baja Cantina in Marina Del Rey—adorned with beautiful serapes. It was our food destination growing up. ❤️
Nostalgia to production
Mexican serape inspired draft color palette for Hey Rebekah v1
We took the Hey Rebekah serape palette and began to test it in mockups. For us, that's always been the best way to visualize the experience and solicit feedback.
After some further experimentation we made some adjustments. Then we tested internally again, followed by another round of external feedback.
Finally, we ignored what everyone said and published our production color space. 😜
Take a look and tell us what you think.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
😎 A link for all your links
bio.link | Buy Me a Coffee
Bio.link is a cool new tool from the folks behind Buy Me a Coffee. Think of it as your new personal website. It's like Linktree for the rest of us, but better. It lets you link to all of your various pages, posts, videos, and music with ease, and it's free!
Bio.link is also an absolute speed demon, with a sleek UX that's optimized for clicks. Give it a try! Your neighbor will think you're cool and on the cutting edge of internet technology.
DESIGN
🔒 Secure your IP from the A👀
Twitter.com | @FurphyRL
What happens to your data when you store it in Adobe's convenient Creative Cloud? Well, apparently, it's not in as resting-of-a-state as some might think. It turns out, that Adobe—like many other companies training large AI models—may be using our data and designs to train our future replacements. 😉
In our opinion, we should have the choice of how our IP is used, without having to opt-in to some setting. In all fairness to our friends at Adobe, this approach is the new status quo. Apple, the so-called privacy guardians of the web requires users to opt-in to Advanced Data Protection enabling end-to-end encryption for iCloud. Oh, what a painful experience that was.
If you're feeling generous and don't care—no worries—no further action required! If not, you may want to check in on your Adobe Creative Cloud privacy settings.
LOVE IT!
😍 Stuff from around the web
Oops, AI generated works may be ineligible for copyright
Apple deals a deathblow to audiobook narrators?
"Science" supports productive night owls