DEV Community: Manuel Thunk

We're good at the work. We're bad at talking about it.

Manuel Thunk — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:07:05 +0000

We said something in the job description that I want to expand on: we've got quietly good at what we do, and we don't talk about it.

It's true. We've had some amazing projects and some amazing partners. But like most businesses over the last few years, we've spent a lot of that time just surviving. When the work comes in, we're heads-down doing the best job we possibly can. Partly because we want to produce work we're proud of. Mostly because we love doing it.

What we're not so good at is talking about what we've done. Every hour spent talking about the work is an hour not spent doing it, and given the choice, we'll pick the work every time.

But you can't run a business like that. Not one with ambitions to grow, and we've always had those.

Where AI fits in this

Don't get us wrong, we're technologists. We're a Digital Innovation & AI company. We have all the gadgets, all the subscriptions, different models for different jobs. We build our own tools. We watch what everyone else is doing.

But for us, AI plays an assistive role. Nearly everything we've done with it internally amounts to the same thing: getting the parts of the job out of the way that stop the human problem-solving. It's not a stand-in for creativity or thinking. It removes the burden around them, so we can spend more time doing the part we love. Which, conveniently, is also the part we're best at.

And that goes beyond the innovation work itself. It comes down to how we want to operate as a business too.

The content dilemma

Everyone's producing content with AI now. We've experimented, of course we have. But we never went whole hog in either direction.

We never had the time or headspace for fully human-crafted content. And we had reservations about fully machine-generated content that our experiments confirmed. Every time we read it back, something was missing. It didn't speak like us. We didn't feel proud of it. So we didn't publish it.

What we did instead

Over the past year or so, quietly, in between projects, we built the runway. A content strategy. Internal systems and documentation. A publishing engine. A way of working.

This isn't a case of "we tried AI, it didn't work, let's hire someone." This role has been part of our plans from the start. We just couldn’t fill it before we were ready, and now we are. We've matured as a business. We know our brand. We know our voice. Whoever takes this on won't be starting from scratch. There's more waiting for them than they'd probably expect.

Where it goes

The role starts small. But there's no limit to where it could go: how we grow a content team, how we shape the strategies around the way we talk about ourselves and what we do. We'd love to find someone with the ambition to take that on and help guide where it should go.

It's taken years to get to this point. That's the honest version of why we're hiring now.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, the job description has the details.

Auto-Link Smoke — Thinking Prod

Manuel Thunk — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:34:33 +0000

We should talk about Banana for the first time. Then we mention banana again — the second occurrence should NOT relink because of the first-occurrence rule.

Banana heading — should NOT be linked

A paragraph about Design Sprint and the leadership team. Both should be linked because they are first occurrences in body text.

Pre-existing anchor: we should talk — should NOT be relinked because it is already a link.

Case test: BANANA in all caps should NOT link (case rule allows exact title casing or all-lowercase only).

Stress Test 2026-04-24 — Thinking Lifecycle

Manuel Thunk — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:04:50 +0000

Overview

This page exists to exercise the complete Notion-to-WordPress lifecycle on Rick's Thunk pipeline. It will move through five statuses in sequence.

Initial body — v1

This paragraph is the initial content. If you see the exact phrase BASELINE_CONTENT_V1 in the rendered post, you are looking at the first publish.

Appended — v2

RESYNC_MARKER_V2 — if you see this phrase the resync-staging flow updated the existing staging post.

Testing an image

Manuel Thunk — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:37:46 +0000

Other text here

Smoke Test — Article — 2026-04-20

Manuel Thunk — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:08:52 +0000

Introduction

This is a smoke test of the Notion → n8n → WordPress pipeline on Rick's VPS. If you are reading this on staging10.thunk.co, the article content type is working.

The goal of this run is to verify: (1) Notion webhook fires into n8n, (2) the converter produces clean HTML, (3) WordPress creates the post, (4) the workflow writes back WP Post ID, WP Post URL, Publish Date, Slug, and Reading Time.

What to expect

A new post published on staging10.thunk.co
This Notion page updated with the WP post URL and Publish Date
A Slack notification in #content-pipeline