A Brief Status Update

After a few unpleasant weeks, there is a backlog of videos to post, and some news about future directions for Computer Enhance.

Well, that went poorly.

For the past few weeks I have been working with a third party platform to try to get some feature improvements for Computer Enhance. As many of you already know, despite my (and your) frequent requests, Substack has thus far declined to move forward with any of the improvements we’ve asked for. They haven’t improved video playback on low-bandwidth devices, they still prohibit attaching ZIP files with source code for convenient downloading, they still don’t support one-time purchases, they haven’t added a centralized place to ask questions - they haven’t even changed code snippets to be horizontal scrolling instead of wrapping!

In fact, in two and half years, the only thing they’ve added that we’ve asked for was video subtitle support¹.

As a result, I have been actively looking for services we could use to improve your experience when visiting Computer Enhance. Based on initial talks with a third party², we thought we had a reasonable option, and we spent the last few weeks working with their system.

Sadly, it did not pan out. Overall, I was not convinced that the service quality would improve. There were some aspects that were better, but others were worse, and I did not expect this equation to change dramatically in the short term.

Yesterday, I officially pulled the plug. I’d rather not go into the details, but suffice to say, Computer Enhance will not be using the aforementioned third-party platform.

Taking More Responsibility Moving Forward

I created Computer Enhance to see if it was possible to serialize educational programming videos using a third-party service. Nobody here at Molly Rocket - especially me - wanted to run a web business. The goal from the beginning was to ensure that the only thing I would be spending my time on for Computer Enhance was creating high-quality videos and source code.

At the time, Substack was one of the few services offering subscription-based video delivery, so we gave it a try. Surprisingly, in the two-and-a-half years since then, we have grown to be one of the most popular technology Substacks in the world. We currently rank #6 globally, which is kind of nuts:

With so much interest from programmers all over the world, it has become increasingly difficult to live with Substack’s anemic featureset. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I have been unable to find a third-party option that strictly improves upon the existing site with no regressions.

So, at long last, I’ve finally made the decision to invest in some first-party hosting for Computer Enhance.

This will not be anything drastic, and hopefully most of you will barely notice a difference as changes roll out. The goal will be to slowly move portions of the service to our own infrastructure, improving your experience incrementally, until all of the Substack pain points have been removed.

You won’t have to do anything - you can keep using Computer Enhance in exactly the same way you have been. Your existing subscription will remain, and it will work the same way it has been. You’ll still get new videos emailed to your inbox, and you’ll still go to computerenhance.com to access the table of contents. We’ll just be remapping some things behind the scenes to use our own platform to improve your experience.

In the Meantime, More Videos Incoming

Improving the infrastructure for serving Computer Enhance will take a while. But now that I know for certain we will not migrate to another third-party platform, I can “un-pause” posting on the site.

There’s a bit of a backlog. My collaboration with Marco Behler launched during the pause, so I will be posting more about that tomorrow to catch everyone up. I also have a series on the research papers from The Big OOPs, a video on the history of “Premature Optimization”, more videos from Part 5 of the Performance Aware Programming Series, and of course we are overdue for a Q&A session. I also have upcoming appearances on The Life Engineered and ThePrimeagen’s week-long “tower livestream event” which I’ll post more about soon.

I apologize for the delay in getting all this stuff out. I’ll be trying to work through the backlog over the next few weeks, and I will try to space things out enough for it to not be clumpy³!

That’s all the news for now. Thank you for subscribing to Computer Enhance, and I look forward to bringing you a lot of cool programming stuff here in the back third of 2025!

Best wishes,

— Casey

1. Subtitles are actually a built-in feature of HTML video playback, but the original Substack video implementation did not allow you to upload a subtitle file to their servers, so the end result was that Substack videos could not have subtitles, even though the player would have played them automatically.

2. Who shall remain nameless.

3. I’m not sure what the right term is here, but “clumpy” seemed reasonable for conveying a “too many emails from Computer Enhance in my inbox all at once” kind of feeling.