~~~

I almost called this page “Notes”, in homage to Nadia’s Notes, but the semantics of that word are just too wide. Everything on this site is a note of some kind. The best description of this place is something like “Twitter of my own” and Nadia’s words:

I often scribble half-baked ideas, reactions to things I’ve read, or something useful I’ve heard. Sometimes they turn into longer blog posts or projects, but most of them sit in my notes app, unused. … (Please note: you are crawling my brain. These are rough notes, which means ideas are experimental and conviction level is highly variable!)

I still use my Stream for quick storage (capturing quotes, work screenshots, and throwaway ideas), my Twitter for reaction-posting, and Bluesky for…stuff. This page is another entry in the genre, but one that I own outright.

And where I have even less concern for quality, since nobody is subscribed to it. There isn’t even a special RSS feed for it; all readers arrive here intentionally.

2026

4 April • 6:17 PM

Immense scarcity of tacit-ish learning material in fields that are physical, where it’s not just about acquiring new abstractions. The closest you can come is by correcting easy to notice mistakes and using a variety of analogies, hoping they land for the learner.

3 April • 10:03 PM

Asked a friend “do you actually want to make apps?”, with the implication being apps were over/a solved problem. But the second I asked it I realised I still wanted to make them myself. Cool little self-realisation right there.

23 March • 5:03 AM

Animations on phones are fine because your figer is usually blocking the thing being tapped, so delayed feedback is good. On web you can clearly see, and also don’t want to wait. Re-clicking is more expensive than tapping (?)

21 March • 5:54 PM

How much of what I do everyday is “work”? I’m not confident enough to say “it all adds up”.

18 March • 12:16 AM

I might be wrong, but it feels like the approach that I’ve arrived at for SSSync might actually be the most generic sync solution one could have. It improves on Replicache by making use of named and versioned mutations, and a more efficient (but easier to get wrong?) server contract than the CVR tracking they require.

If done right, it will play well with systems like ATProto too, since the relay and PDS architecture is very similar to my snapshot and delta sync approach.

14 March • 12:28 AM

The internet is made up of links (not anymore, but bear with me here), but they are author-decided. At most, the few places that still have comment sections will allow the passing reader to make hypertext connections of their own. This is how Pagerank worked for a long while, I imagine. But now, why not a set of linked connections drawn on a layer above the sites themselves, by visitors who draw links between things? Like are.na, but for the web as a whole.

13 March • 1:15 AM

Thinking about app development frameworks again. Despite how terrible Apple have proven in recent years, Swift still looks like the best bet given:

  • No need to manage memory
  • Apple has a new Head of Design in Steve Lemay
  • Windows is going to continue to be horrible
  • Macbooks are more accessible thanks to the Neo

11 March • 12:12 AM

I am madder than I should be at the state of design in internet software, given that I’ve not made any serious contributions of my own yet. Shouldn’t have let myself lose momentum on Scatterpad work, even if the problems I’m stuck on are genuinely difficult ones.

04 March • 11:12 PM

Feels like a good time to define a bunch of file formats around things that all the personal software seems to wrap. Stuff like time tracking, metrics, lists of media, notes, etc. Apps don’t have to follow the schema exactly, but they should at least have a clear mapping from their schema to the standard.

But, to be honest, this is probably not a big deal, in the “just ask the LLM to look at the schema and write the migration script lmao” sense.

03 March • 11:12 PM

I should probably start selling a service like “why you don’t actually use your personal website” more explicitly with my Webcraft sites. Mostly because I’m annoyed at abondoned websites, and particularly annoyed when they’re websites I’ve made.

I’ve seen enough failure modes to have fixes for the most common ones, and am especially sensitive to things that are likely to be Ugh Field generators.

03 March • 9:20 PM

I’m bad at reading DD-MM-YYYY style dates because my brain doesn’t convert numbers into months fast enough. And almost every way to write the actual month name alongside a date just looks funny to me:

  • “14 March” reads as “one three march”
  • “14th March” is almost nice enough but semantically wrong
  • “March the 14th” is just too much

So DD • Month is my chosen compromise, it’s sufficiently quirky while remaining functional, with good whitespace to boot.

03 March • 7:32 PM

I just set up this page, and am already feeling the useful effects of it’s existence. In particular, each time I start typing here, I’m nudged into one of either:

  • tweeting out the thought
  • drafting a Riff instead
  • framing things in a way that’s slightly more polished than I would if writing to just myself (which usually takes the form of a lazy fragment)

The reason this is good is because putting in just a little extra effort seems to improve both my thinking and the verbal expression of said thinking. And this place is low effort enough that I actually start writing more often. If it graduates out of here to another place, all the better. If it doesn’t, it’s still somewhere and the stakes are low.