Too Much Sharpening, Not Enough Chopping

Week 3 — Sunday & Monday, October 18–19, 2026

Thwe made the first MVP build of More Than Ingredients by the end of the night on Sunday. My goal was to get it deployed, test the basics, and start adding the social features before inviting real people to try it.

I didn’t get it deployed Sunday. I couldn’t because I had blocked myself with changes to the deploy process. WTF.

Let me back up.

Thit interviewed me, and had developed a build package, that just sat there waiting for me to deploy it.

Thwe spent a lot the day sharpening the axe. That is usually a good thing. But not today.

Thwe organized ChatGPT project folders, fought its recent conversation list and less-than-stellar search, connected Google Drive, and created documents to capture our evolving development process.

Thwe even created an in-chat “note to self” workflow that writes follow-up tasks directly into a Google Doc. I can do this on any chat within the project! No more switching contexts to capture an idea. Just continue the stream of consciousness and add my coded phrase inline, Thit picks it up and adds to the to do list!

Pretty cool, actually.

Except I was supposed to be building, deploying, and testing a social recipe website.

I also distracted myself building the One Project Every Week website. Apparently, I wasn’t satisfied building one website in a week. Now I’m building two.

I did find out you can make a quick HTML page that you can fully preview inside ChatGPT that you can use to do useful stuff like generating 64-bit secrets, all without deploying any code. Useful. I need to remember that for something later.

Cool, but a distraction. Clearly I miss having Sherry around (she is visiting her parents in FL this weekend).

Lots of useful work. Very little chopping wood.

By Sunday night, I was frustrated. I’d introduced real-user testing as a goal for this week. More Than Ingredients is supposed to be social, and every day spent preparing was a day people couldn’t use it.

A recipe binder is nice, but it’s hardly a social network.

Monday: Finally, some wood chips

Getting the site running meant dealing with hosting, email accounts, passwords, configuration files, and the hundred little boxes you have to tick before a website actually works.

Some email configuration thwe’d discussed hadn’t made it into the original build. Invitations failed. Password recovery needed testing.

At one point, an invitation produced a 403 error.

But there he was. The Goblin!

One of our reusable components from Load Goblin had made the journey to More Than Ingredients. Nice to see a familiar face, even if he was delivering bad news.

Eventually, the email flows worked, and I could move on to something more interesting: loading my first recipe.

Chicago Hot BBQ Pulled Pork. My recipe, of course.

I started with the import-from-URL workflow. That exposed some issues with semantic ingredient tagging, which required changes to that one page site.

And encoding.

ENCODING!

How have thwe not solved character encoding by 2026? I’ve been dealing with this nonsense for decades.

I even found a phantom “[Ingredients]” ingredient. Turns out that one wasn’t a bug at all. The system supported ingredient subsections, like “Dry Ingredients” and “Wet Ingredients.”

An unexpected feature. I’ll take it.

With the recipe loaded, I successfully registered another of my email addresses through an invitation and saved Chicago Hot BBQ into that account’s recipe box.

It worked!

I fixed the earlier broken invitations, ran through some QA, and found surprisingly few problems. A few bugs, a few changes, but the core experience worked end to end.

I’d also sent invitations to actual friends. As of Monday night, though, my entire registered user base was still me and my various email addresses.

Not exactly viral growth.

More than a recipe box

Monday brought another reminder of why I’m building this.

I texted my former CEO to try and retrieve Mr. Prisk’s pumpkin cookie full recipe from their company Slack.

The original handwritten card I’d saved as a kid only had ingredients. I’d previously used AI to help develop the instructions, made the cookies for a company exchange, and shared the resulting recipe on Slack.

Now I had to ask my former CEO to get it back.

There’s a problem worth solving.

And I talked with my friend Lance, who was making my Chicago Hot BBQ. Again. He’s made it four times. I’ve made it twice. He’s already experimenting, adding more Potbelly giardiniera and oil to spice things up.

My recipe is becoming his recipe, too.

This is what was missing from other recipe sites. They are one way doors, best you can do is leave a comment or thumbs up. I wanted to build an interactive connected recipe site.

Recipes people discover. Recipes people share. Notes about what they changed. Eventually, different versions that tell their own stories.

So, with the MVP working, I revisited the someday maybe features backlog thwe’d deferred and asked thit what thwe should tackle next.

Discovery. Social features. Notes.

Thwe decided to go for it.

The first design was clean and functional, but it needed more personality. Thwe added a visual-direction checkpoint to our future build interviews: colors, style, inspiration. Another lesson learned.

And yes, more axe sharpening.

By Monday night, thwe had a substantially more ambitious social build ready to install and test. Not deployed yet, not proven, but ready.

Sherry was coming home Tuesday. I was nervous about installing the new build, excited about getting it into people’s hands, and thoroughly exhausted.

I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

Two days down, five to go.

And finally, thwwe have some wood chips.