J

WORKBENCH

I try not to do too much.

But that never works, so I juggle a dozen projects instead. This page is mostly dedicated to the ones that involve fighting the computer.

Reminders

“You download a single binary executable. You run it. There’s no step three.” Computers as I used to love them

“Sublime fights this by being developed by just two people who don’t have much free time on their hands. As a result, every detail in ST is essential, and everything that is not is just not there.” The most important feature of Sublime Text

“It’s hard to build painless products in general. But it’s especially hard for programmers to build painless products because in order to become a programmer we all had to endure suffering consistently. This is the unfortunate reality: you have to eat lots of shit to become a software developer. So we have a higher tolerance to UX pain, and this affects the way we design products and interfaces.” Products aren’t for people yet

“The problem is that software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to.”

APRIL 2024

Queuests – iykyk.

A bunch of client projects.

NEXT

I have no deadlines, I just ship as much as I can in order to stave off the unrelenting ennui. This list is for personal reference more than anything else.

▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ - Yet another publishing tool.

Squareplace – Information density done well.

Blogdown – I want to fix static sites. [whitepaper]

Vigil – Simple analytics for hobby websites. [tldraw]

Yearly – Personal history management.

Latent Surf – Explorations and recommendations in the blogosphere.

Streams v3 – Focused on web editing, and a better API.

Where Should I Host? – Comparing hosting and storage providers.

Pro Tips – A guest-authored blog.

STACK

Static site builder: index.html | Hugo

JS Framework: Sveltekit | Express.js

ORM: Drizzle

Hosting: Cloudflare | Digital Ocean | Netlify

DAW: Garageband

Design: This sketchbook | tldraw

Writing: Bear | Sublime Text | Bike

IDEAS

A new web publishing platform?

We need a Wordpress competitor that's made for static sites.

Think about formats. Think about "posts", and "collections", and "updates". Think about creative freedom and power alongside simplicity.

Maps for the Internet

This is not a complicated idea. I will solve part of it with Papertown, but I want to see more creativity thrown at this one.

Truly personal timetables

A plan that sync to your actual waking hours. Starts when you wake up, not at arbitary hour marks.

rotime claims to be a version of this. See also: Superlocal

Human-scale maps

Use accelerometers and motion sensors to get highly accurate positional data, and use it to record the paths a person has taken.

The hard part will probably be combining this with GPS to place it on an actual map.

A Digital Workbench

This very page is a step towards what I want it to be, but it's missing a bunch of stuff.

The Workshop and the Storefront

It felt like people were offering us display cabinets when we were looking for a sturdy workbench. Building a Design System Workbench

This makes more sense in AR, but I would like one in 2D too. Let me arrange folders on a canvas, with icons that open the folder in Finder when clicked on. Let me place things over or under other things, let me stack trash in a corner.

Preserving the Web

Preserving the web is still an unsolved problem. You can't trust Internet Archive. Most pages are not Designed to Last