Nate's Blog

There's been much discussion about scaling everyoneplaysthesamesong.com, and a necessary step on my part is process mapping out how the project itself works. I've had a lot of resistance toward this task, and I truly don't know why. My new years resolution was to lean into resistance with curiosity, and here is this in action.

Let's walk through the admin activities per each round.

Before round

• Open round for signups
• Reach out to potential participants to encourage them sign up for round

Round Start

• Create playlists
• Send welcome email

Voting Close - Covering starts

• Announce which song won
• Assign the winning song in the database
• Send checkin emails
• open song submission
• Send invitation to listening party
• Create playlist
• Host listening party

Thoughts on the list

I think the reason I still do most of these things by hand is -

1. No external pressure to put in the work and write the automation. Each action I need to take takes 10 minutes and then I'm done.
2. I enjoy injecting my personality into the comms.

That said, most of it is automate-able and should be automated. How to automate -

1. Create a new database table round specific communications. These events will be dependent on round dates. (aka, send signups announcement email 14 days before signups close). Table columns -
   1. slug
   2. days_count
   3. direction (from / since)
   4. roundEvent (Signups | voting close | signups open | listening party)
   5. email_id (fk email table below)
   6. population ("round-signed-up" | "mailing_list" )
2. and a new table for email templates to send out. Table columns
   1. id
   2. email_subject
   3. email_body_template
3. Write all the email templates & create all the email automation records
4. Write a script to check to see if any emails should be sent out today, and then uses Resend to send the email.
   1. Darn, I also probably need a sent_emails table.
5. Run a daily Github Action to run the script and send emails when necessary.