This week had two things going on: I shipped some new features to BriefAI, and I finally stopped tolerating how this blog looked. Productive week. Relative to some.
BriefAI: What’s New
When I built BriefAI the first time around, the core idea was simple — type a company name, get a brief before a call. That still works. But two things kept nagging at me, as things tend to do at 11pm when I should be doing something else.
The first was meetings. Your calendar already knows who you’re meeting with and when. It felt wrong to make someone look up a contact manually when the meeting is sitting right there in their schedule, quietly judging you. So I added Meeting Prep.
Meeting Prep lets you select any upcoming calendar event and get a tailored brief for it — goals for the meeting, a suggested agenda, questions to ask, and context on each attendee pulled from your email history with them. It pulls everything together before you have to think about it. Thinking is optional now, apparently.
The second thing was visibility across accounts. A single brief is useful when you know who you’re calling. But if you’re managing a book of business, the scarier problem is the accounts you’ve forgotten about — the ones going quiet while you’re focused elsewhere, slowly souring, not sending you any helpful warning emails about it.
Account Dashboard lets you track a watchlist of companies and scan them all at once. You get a ranked view of your book of business by relationship health — color-coded Warm, Neutral, or Cold, with days since last contact. One click drops you into a full brief on any account. The Cold accounts are color-coded red, which feels a little harsh but is probably fair.
Together these two features push BriefAI closer to what I actually wanted it to be: something that keeps you on top of your relationships without requiring you to remember to check. Which, if you’re the kind of person who needs a tool like this, is the whole point.
Code is on GitHub — github.com/JacobSaf/BriefAI
The Blog
This site used to run on a custom framework my friend Sean built called Ordinary. It still does, actually — but now there’s a Hugo layer on top of it, because apparently one framework wasn’t enough character-building.
Sean recommended Hugo as a way to get proper theming, tags, an archive, RSS, and a functioning About page without me having to hand-roll every piece of it. He was right, which I’ll admit without too much resistance because the results speak for themselves. I spent a chunk of this week picking a theme (CleanWhite), migrating my three existing posts, wiring up my profile photo, finding a header image I liked, and getting everything deployed. There were several rounds of Ordinary throwing errors at me for file extensions it didn’t recognize and assets that were too large. Normal stuff.
The result is what you’re looking at now. It’s cleaner, it has navigation that works, and I didn’t have to build any of it from scratch. Progress.
The Job Market, Briefly
Still out here. The entry-level software engineering market is as sparse as it’s been since I started looking — if those roles exist, they are not advertising. Sales Engineer and Solutions Consultant roles are a little more promising given my background, which is where most of my energy is going.
In the meantime I’ll keep building things. It’s better for my sanity than refreshing job boards, and at least I have something to show for it.