Weekly Notes #17

Meta

Reminder: this site is an iterative experiment, so let's put on the school (of fish) janitor hat:

This week's summary

Sit.

You have no idea how lucky I feel, getting messages like this from strangers who found my work helpful, and still being able to pay the rent at the same time. You're wonderful, and Jeff Bridges wants to have a word with you.

After finally fixing my analytics, I also learned that Sit. has a consistent number of daily users, and 70% of sessions reach 10 minutes! This is way above my initial expectations for Sit.: being able to sit down and do sweet nothing for 10 minutes sounds plain impressive given the femtosecond, tiktok-slop-fuelled attention spans of 2024 AD.

Speaking of analytics, I don't collect any personalised data (details: How I Use Analytics With My Indie Projects), but I do get info about session lengths. Here's a GH repo for the curious and suspicious (as you should be.)

Ensō

I can't share more details but someone is using Ensō to write:

  1. a musical based on a German legend
  2. a novel about squirrels

I want to read this so badly (not only because Eichhörnchen is one of my favourite German words.)

Protip if you live in a country with squirrels: next time you're in a park, find a quiet spot and observe them from a distance imagining the theme song from Mission: Impossible is playing in background.

Feigenspiel?

If you wanna make the space ghost laugh, make plans file taxes. I didn't have enough time to do any meaningful work on Fig, which turned out to be a blessing as I had a chance to play with and learn about generative Sandboxes instead.

Next week

Favourite project(s)

Every Ant on Earth - R74n – Browse every individual ant and meet them in antperson.

You can also attend their funerals and decide their fate, "democratically".

NYT First Said– a Twitter account listing every word in NYT as it appears for the first time. Ages like wine. Or milk. Or kumis. Work by Max Bittker.

love me or not– a visual poem by Alicia Guo. Here's the song I hear when I play with it.

Favourite site(s)

R74n – R74n are a website collective focussed on little web-based tools, lists, games, playthings. I stumbled upon them when I was reviewing my notes for Sandboxes, Games, and Play and playing with their Sandboxels.

Nobody Here– a web of interconnected stories, expressed through code, words, poetry and drawings. If you liked love me or not mentioned earlier or rooster kind from my previous notes, you'll have a good time there. Someone made a mini documentary about it.

Cemetery Club – Museums of People – curated by Sheldon K. Goodman– a blog for taphophiles. Sharing, because I'm one myself and because I recognised many of the places mentioned there.

Silent London– listings, reviews, essays about silent cinema events in London.

It's getting warmer, so if you live in that neck of the woods, I recommend looking for outdoor silent cinema screenings. I made some beautiful memories, (and lost some beautiful valuables) with my ass on the grass while watching Murnau's Nosferatu.

AntiKrist – this one's a bit more niche. It's a personal site of a marine biologist I stumbled upon by sheer accident.

Sharing because:

Favourite piece of tech

disco – a delightfully simple, no-fuss, open source way to host and deploy your web projects, created by Greg and Antoine. Think of it as a mini-heroku or mini-vercel, but without being tied to a single big vendor.

You're free to use a VPS if you like, but you can also deploy your apps to a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop.

Honestly, looking at disco, party.kit, or even val.town I'm hyped about the new wave of smaller (PaaS? IaaS?) tools like this we're seeing right now. That is: anything that removes the initial friction to share our ideas, prototypes and toys.

I wish I had known about this 1+ years ago. I had a bunch of ML projects in python I eventually decided to rewrite to node or abandon because dealing with infra was just too much hassle for me, esp. compared to Vercel (Web and Feedback Loops).

application.garden– a platform for deploying backend apps written in Clojure. It's still in private beta, but you can message the authors for access. The people behind it worked on Nextjournal which is an impressive piece of software itself.

Interesting articles

Going to the cinema is a data visualization problem @ tonsky.me– Niki Tonsky (the author of Fira Code and Grumpy.website) decided to build an aggregator for cinema tickets.

Reasons to read, besides the subject matter: it's an excellent study of an engineer approaching a real-world user problem and working through it. If that's something you want to get better at, and generally prefer learning through examples and stories, this is a good place to start.

Things I wrote last week that people liked

Thanks for reading! See you on Monday!

P.S. Recently I decided to advance from being a meek 0.1x developer to 0.01x engineer, so naturally I started learning VIM to become slower. It's going well, as this entire post was written using a modal editor. My wrists and neck feel so much bejjjjjkkkkkjlkjj now!

See you next week! :wq!

P.P.S You scrolled so far, have this doodle

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a giant foot-shaped snail with a house on its back. the house is still in construction, with a big crane towering above it The image is a stylized black-and-white illustration. In the lower left corner, there is a small, cozy-looking house with smoke rising from its chimney. The smoke, however, does not dissipate into the air but instead forms a dark, looming cloud. Within the cloud, the silhouette of a large, menacing face is visible, with its eyes and nose peeking through the darkness. The creature, perhaps a cat, appears to be watching over the house ominously, creating a sense of foreboding or unease.