Practiced generating PDFs and other printable artifacts — the product's actual output — but the round trip kept lengthening: large PDFs in a Drive-synced directory bogged down the sync, then the laptop, and the email list couldn't be used without an email provider or more product to announce.

Katy: "I could only really leverage my email list if I started writing emails which required an email provider, or if I built enough of the product to announce it. I practiced generating pdfs and other printable artifacts, but knew that I would get sucked into that too. I didn't have my tooling quite up to snuff yet and that round trip was getting longer."

Katy: "I ran into friction with my codebase around April and June too. I was developing in a synced directory with Google Drive, and generating large pdfs was starting to bog up the syncs and then my laptop."

gh: the practiced PDFs left no repo trace, but the era did: envelope-maker (cut-file printables) got a dev-environment setup in late April, and the Drive-synced code directory still holds an envelope-maker/node_modules-gdrive/ folder — the bog-down made physical.