iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 23/06/2026

So incredibly grateful that we have the technology to get mid-day updates from the nursery. It's epic getting to see our baby girl having fun & learning while we can't be with her.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 23/06/2026

Anyone working from home/remote full-time? How do you find it? What's great, what's tough?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 22/06/2026

What's the biggest challenge you're facing working from home right now?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 19/06/2026

How many cups of coffee is too many cups of coffee? Asking for a friend...

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 14/06/2026

Product managers, what are your favourite: - subreddits - blogs - podcasts?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 14/06/2026

Designers, what are your favourite: - subreddits - blogs - podcasts?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 14/06/2026

Software engineers, what are your favourite: - subreddits - blogs - podcasts?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 13/06/2026

Any Shopify users built their storefront with Lovable? How've you found the experience, particularly after the store's been live for a while and/or you've had to make updates?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 13/06/2026

@figma.com's Buzz has been super helpful generating labels for all our different coffee variants - we've ended up with 64 different labels, and it would have been a real pain to do by hand. It's still a bit buggy, but so useful that it was worth dealing with the bugs.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 13/06/2026

Would y'all be interested in hearing how we've been using AI to build Session Supply? Or are you tired of AI stuff?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 13/06/2026

Sharing the progress of building a business, while you're: - building the business, - working a full-time job, and - raising a family is hard work. How do all you other entrepreneurs do this?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 12/06/2026

Shopify is our go-to for our store. Getting our products and payments set up has been super easy - it's a really great experience for shop owners. There's still a load of design work to do, getting the shop looking like Session, but we're loving it!

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 12/06/2026

Coffee supplier chosen - we're underway! We reached out to around 7 potential suppliers, 4 responded, we chatted to 3, trialled 2 and chose 1 to work with. We're making decisions quickly and moving forward - suppliers can always change later.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 07/06/2026

The next stage of Session is less about making more things and more about learning faster. The brand is good enough to share. The product direction is good enough to test. The website and email capture are live.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 05/06/2026

I read a post earlier that was almost certainly generated by ChatGPT. I could tell because it used a bunch of phrases that ChatGPT uses when I write with it. I started looking through the comments, expecting to see a whole bunch of people replying with "oh so AI, so AI" but...

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 05/06/2026

There's just something about that first coffee of the work day that is so beautiful. The ritual of brewing it, the punch of flavour, the moment of reflection. It's just lovely!

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 05/06/2026

First fully packaged samples have arrived!!! SO EXCITED!!! I'll share some pictures later!

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 05/06/2026

I've already ruled out one supplier route for Session. Not because the coffee was bad. The operating model just added too much complexity before validation.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 04/06/2026

Sometimes a lie in bed at night excited for the morning because I get to have a cup of coffee. Am I the only one?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 04/06/2026

How am I gonna sell coffee? Genuinely unsure whether I’ll be able to build something convincing enough to get people to buy coffee from me. I’m a software engineer, not a marketer, not a coffee expert. So why would people buy coffee from me?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 04/06/2026

Apparently packaging is pretty important, so I've made some decision for Session: - no coffee bean graphics - no illustrations - no loud speciality coffee language

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 03/06/2026

I've started building something that's NOT software, and the amount of relief I feel each time I see a "post your SaaS" or "I'll review your SaaS for free" is SO liberating. Should have done this a long time ago. Physical products FTW!

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 03/06/2026

Most people will probably see Session as a coffee company to start off with. That's fine...but it's not really how I'm thinking about it.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 01/06/2026

Session became a lot more real last week. - name chosen - brand direction set - first coffee lineup mapped - suppliers contacted - website live - email capture live - socials created

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 31/05/2026

This weekend is all about starting to build out some social media posts for Session. Not something I’ve historically been good at, but thankfully I’ve got some support.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 31/05/2026

I think remote workers deserve their own lifestyle brand.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 22/01/2026

@revenuecat.com Just a heads up that it looks like the Shipyard site is down at the moment.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 01/12/2025

Sending files between my phone and laptop was bit of a pain. So I built a little web app that lets me just yeet text/urls/files etc between them. Would this be useful for anyone else?

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Reposted by Lee Watkins

Zach Daniel @zachdaniel.dev · 22/09/2025

Oh, yknow, just vibe coding a full-stack-typed #React SPA with #AshFramework, #ElixirLang, #Phoenix using #Tidewave. No biggie.

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Reposted by Lee Watkins

Zach Daniel @zachdaniel.dev · 20/09/2025

One command now gets you a React SPA with full-stack types, backed by #AshFramework, #Phoenix, and #ElixirLang 🤯 Install and visit localhost:4000/ash-typescript for a handy guide 😎 Finally, a bridge to the reliability + elegance of Elixir for our React-loving friends!

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Reposted by Lee Watkins

Pedro Piñera @pepicrft.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Noora for Phoenix apps keeps getting better and better. You can make your #Elixir apps look great with a design system that builds on LiveView and vanilla CSS github.com/tuist/Noora/...

github.com

feat: add text area component by fortmarek · Pull Request #524 · tuist/Noora

Adds the Text Area component from the design system:

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 01/08/2025

Emotionally preparing myself for the #Shipaton...

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 01/08/2025

What are folks building for #shipaton? Keen to see what y'all are up to!

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 31/07/2025

Why did the React Native developer cross the road? To prove they could run on both sides!

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 31/07/2025

Current state of my latest app: ReadyFreddy.dev

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 31/07/2025

PMF is when: ✅ Customers love it ✅ Users pay for it ✅ Your mum says “That's nice, dear.”

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 30/07/2025

Ready Freddy is pretty much built...at least far-enough to get some early testers. Next job: find users! How do I do that? 😅

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 25/07/2025

The quality of the dictation from Wispr Flow is amazing. I'm loathed to type anything anymore. And the fact that it learns your vocab is delightful 👌🏻

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 24/07/2025

Trialing TaskMaster AI alongside Claude Code. I'm not sure it offers a huge amount of value over Plan mode, but we'll find out soon enough...

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 23/07/2025

What are y'all using to deploy your Elixir/Phoenix apps? I really don't want to deal with DevOps, just focus on building.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 22/07/2025

Yesterday's task was to polish Ready Freddy's UI to capture the brand and have a consistent look across the whole app - it's looking amazing and so happy with how it's coming together! I'll share some screenshots soon 👀 🔜

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 21/07/2025

When did web apps stop using Gravatar for profile pictures? Seems like such a user-friendly way to handle it, and it means you don't need to handle file upload, storage, etc. Am I missing something?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 21/07/2025

I've named the new on-call tool that I've been building... Meet: Ready Freddy! 👋 Because when alerts hit at 3am, you want something that's always ready to respond (and a bit of friendliness doesn't hurt either)

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 20/07/2025

Right, you can now create basic schedules and associate them with services. The most basic version of the app is now ready and working! Time to deploy it!

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 20/07/2025

Would you expect to have access to multiple organisations in your on-call scheduling & alerting tool? Are there cases where you'd be part of "on call" schedules for multiple orgs?

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 20/07/2025

Billing is set up with LemonSqueezy! There's still a bit of work to do to polish it up a bit, but the basics are all in place and working, which is really exciting. Now time to move onto team management - letting users create organisations, and then invite people to them.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 19/07/2025

OK, so now I'm not sure whether I should be using Stripe or LemonSqueezy - sounds like Merchant on Record could be really useful. Having a look into @peterullrich.com's lemon_ex library for this.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 19/07/2025

Starting to integrate billing now - very exciting moment. First time that I've actually built billing into a web app. Now I get to learn about all the pain of Stripe that I've heard about.

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Lee Watkins @unieklee.com · 19/07/2025

First version of the OnCall scheduling supports weekly schedules, and uses rudimentary calculations to figure out which person on the schedule is on duty "now". What options do you expect from on call scheduling?

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