So it’s April 17, 2023, I get my weekly Dense Discovery email and in the Apps & Sites section they have a link to Album Whale: “If you love music (and album covers!), create lists of your favorite albums with this neat, ad-free web app, then share it with your friends.” And I’m like – I do – I do love music, and I like making lists and I like sharing with friends (I did in fact share it with our developer Jon who was already hip to it ;-p) so I checked it out and it’s cool.
Typically that would have been it but something was nagging me about the site and I couldn’t work out what it was. I went back to the front page and read further – the writing was concise and funny – the presentation was simply effective and they were doing this for free and just because they could. I remember thinking – how cool are these people?! So like any good organization we totally ripped some of their page design and incorporated it into the next iteration of the curator stream which we’ll release later this quarter ;-p
I signed up for their substack a month or two later and have enjoyed watching the company evolve. We use their Letterbird contact form on the Foundation website – it’s really easy to use. And when I finally decided to start blogging again, I chose their Pika blogging platform and am just stoked with the interface and the simple ease of use – also just how fast it is!
Looking to raise the visibility of not only a great writing tool – Pika – but also Good Enough themselves – I reached out and asked if they’d be up for making a playlist and answering a few questions about writing, music, life, etc. This is the result.
If you want a place of your own online, I highly recommend Pika. Or if you just like to keep up with some weird internet stuff, give their Good Enough newsletter a try. Failing all of that, please go make a list of your favorite albums!
If you’d like to get in touch with Barry & the team at Good Enough use the form at the bottom of this post.
7 Questions with Barry Hess from Good Enough, makers of Pika
What’s the best music to write code to? Why?
For me it’s wordless music or music in a language in which I’m not fluent. Depending on the day, that could be electronic music, foreign language music, jazz, or classical. And, as with this playlist, I often break this rule!
What are you curious about at the moment? Why?
I’m curious about blogging and personal sites. Every day I discover more bloggers, running their sites on all sorts of different platforms. Getting to the central motivation for why all of these folks write blogs is quite interesting. I’m curious why folks share what they share, how they enable it on their sites, and how we might be able to creatively incorporate these ideas into Pika so that even more people have access to this blogging world.
If you had $25,000 to spend on marketing Pika – where would you spend it – why?
Free money makes thinking about this so much easier, doesn’t it?! I think I’d do a run of podcast saturation like some of the products that you can’t get out of your head have done over the years. I would sponsor some newsletters just because I like them. I would look for a few conferences to sponsor; conferences whose niche might overlap nicely with Pika.
What is a piece of music that has changed you?
I played the euphonium in symphonic bands through college, and the piece that has always stuck with me is The Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Leonard Duarte. It is a powerful, emotional score that showed me how musical themes can be passed from piece to piece, artist to artist, and become even more powerful.
Prior to that, playing American Guernica with an honor band in high school changed my brain in its ability to work with an ensemble to make something larger than its parts. “American Guernica was written in remembrance of the September 15, 1963, fire-bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a racially motivated bombing that killed four young girls attending Sunday school, and injured twenty-two others.” As you can imagine, it was an incredibly emotional experience. Led by the great Craig Kirchhoff, this music making experience has informed my music listening experience ever since.
I cannot find a link to The Horsemen, but here’s an outstanding performance of Adolphus Hailstork’s American Guernica. Good luck keeping your eyes dry.
What’s one of your favorite pieces of writing available on the internet?
I try to read popular internet writer Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness every year!
What is there to be hopeful about in this decade?
It feels like the people of the world are pushing back against corporations controlling internet discourse. More and more we are looking to own our own place online. Software teams like Good Enough and others are trying to build the tools to help people of all levels of technical ability get online. Since the nineties, I’ve had hope that the internet would become a place for people to connect across all geographies and backgrounds. I think there have been some hiccups along the way, but I continue to be hopeful that these positive connections will only get more frequent in the 2020s.
If you were granted a short audience with the omnipotent being and could play them one piece of music – so that they would know who you are – what track would that be?
Woah, that’s kind of heavy! I’m going to avoid spending the next week contemplating this and go with “Time” by Pink Floyd. Wait, maybe “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes. Or maybe…
Good Enough Links
- https://pika.page
- https://albumwhale.com
- https://goodenough.us
- https://letterbird.co
- https://goodenoughnews.substack.com
- https://mastodon.world/@goodenoughllc
- https://www.threads.net/@good.enough.llc
- https://x.com/goodenoughllc
If you’d like to get in touch with Barry & the team at Good Enough use the form below, they’d love to hear from you.
Track Listing
- La femme d’argent – Air
- Adagio For TRON – Daft Punk
- You & Me – MEUTE
- shibuya (feat. San Holo) – Covet
- Midnight Madness – The Chemical Brothers
- Technologic – Daft Punk
- Games You Can Win (Feat. Kenna) – RJD2
- Tricky Two – Röyksopp
- Dusk Till Dawn – Ladyhawke
- Colour of Moonlight (Antiochus) – Grimes
- Eyes on the Prize – Instrumental – Charles Bradley
- Battle Stick – The Jerry Douglas Band
- Passepied (Debussy) – Punch Brothers
- Plastic Love – Mariya Takeuchi
- Look – Red Velvet
- La Vida Es Un Carnaval – Angelique Kidjo
- Que Beleza – Tim Maia
- I Did It For You – Tom Misch
- Oh Daniel – Acoustic – Civil Twilight
- Love & Hate – Michael Kiwanuka
- The Last Day Of June – Steven Wilson
- Alone in Kyoto – Air
Playlist image is the Pika Logo!
About the Curators
Barry Hess
Barry longs for the internet of old, so he’s helping to keep the web weird with the team at Good Enough.