This is almost certainly going to be the longest monthly update article I’ve ever written.
Last month, I wrote:
A lot of my attention this month was taken up by a really big project that I’m not allowed to talk about yet, but you’ll definitely hear a lot more about it in May’s post!
The papers were not yet signed when I wrote that, but since then, the deed transfer has been completed, and M and I now own a house! Same greater part of Richmond, different neighborhood, same general length of my walk to work. I’m writing this from my new home office, surrounded by boxes I’ve yet to unpack, a couple of days after our move. This has obviously been taking up a lot of bandwidth for me this month, and there’s still a lot of work to do, but the end result is and will continue to be worth it.
Funny enough, the day after we moved house, Mobius also moved to a new office — same building, just consolidating our two separate office rooms that were next door to each other into a single room. I haven’t spent a ton of time in the new space yet, but it’s something I’ve wanted to happen for quite a while, so it’s great to see it come to fruition.
projects
I started paying for an expensive LLM plan out of my own pocket. The justification for this is pretty tautological: I wanted pressure of needing to do enough stuff outside of my real job to justify the spend. I think I’ve come pretty close to hitting that goal.
Here’s some of the projects I worked on this month. First, some projects I’m considering failures:
the ones that didn’t land the way I wanted
parc à chiens
A tool to analyze songs for tempo and key for playlist generation. I played with the idea of putting together custom cross-fading as well, but I ultimately ended up punting on the idea altogether; all facets of this require the music files to be stored locally, and I don’t want to sacrifice the disk space or the portability of streaming. It was pretty cool to hack together the playback tools, though; modern JavaScript is great, web browsers in the 2010s just could not do this.
receipts
A home base for agentic code review. The idea is that you’d get LLMs to review “blocks” of code, and then store their assertions somewhere, and the human in the loop would review those assertions. This could be nice if I spent more time on the feedback loop and developer ergonomics, but it’s fallen out of my workflow for now.
poker trainer
Basically, I spent two days memorizing some math and heuristics for evaluating Hold ‘Em hands. Not really much to say here; the interface was nice, but it would take a lot more work to make it more useful for someone else.
photos app
I played around with building my idea of what a photo sharing site in ’26 should feel like. Ultimately set this one aside for other ideas. Speaking of which:
the ones that actually landed
calendar.city classification helper
Though calendar.city doesn’t amplify events that are purely about “AI,” getting some LLM help to annotate the queue that I’m the human in the loop for was a long time coming. This has made that queue more manageable, so I’m less likely to end up with a backlog of events to process.
This Week in Raycast
A weekly, LLM-generated newsletter which sums up new and updated Raycast plugins. This is how I summed up the project on LinkedIn:
Raycast is foundational to how I get stuff done.
The extension ecosystem, in particular, is a boon for my productivity; I want for everything I can do with my machine to be a small number of keypresses away. But my biggest issue here was always discovery: staying on top of new releases and updates to existing extensions.
So I built something: This Week in Raycast
the-wall
I’m in a groove with my two-monitor setup where the left monitor would displays a 3×2 grid of six Terminal.app instances, and the right monitor is where I do everything else. I wrote some Raycast scripts to help manage these terminals, but ultimately, I wanted better configuration and tooling than a handful of esoteric shell scripts could get me.
So I started hacking on my own custom tiling terminal multiplexer application using tauri under the hood. I’ve only added a handful of features so far, but it’s already coming in handy; I definitely plan to hack on it more in the future.
excitable.dev
As time goes on, social media has gotten less and less fun, less and less useful for me. So I’ve decided to renegotiate my relationship with the internet with yet another microblog framework and website: another little home on the internet for me, with tools to syndicate some of its content to other places.
There’s still some features I want to add, but this was exactly what I was looking for; I’m already really happy with how this has changed my habits.
music
This is almost-certainly the longest “new music this month” playlist ever featured in the over six years of these articles. I really love this one — I imagine I’ll be coming back to it often!
books
This month, I finished 4 books:
- Hyperion by Dan Simmons — ★★★★½
- A Sense of Urgency by John P. Kotter
- A Parade of Horribles by Matt Dinniman
- High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove — ★★★★★
I’ve carried my “have a non-fiction and fiction book going at the same time” habit all the way through this month; I learned quite a bit from the Kotter and Grove books.
I’m currently reading:
- Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris
- Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope
Billion Dollar Whale is non-fiction, but it falls into the “reading for entertainment” slot. I just started the Harris textbook; I’m predicting this one isn’t going to be marked as fully-read, but I might skim some chapters and do a deeper dive in others by putting it down.
photography
This month, I added 591 photos that I took to my photo library.
failbetter
This month, failbetter published:
- “Between the Head and the Heart Lines” by Alison Gadsby
- “//Glue” by Matthew Thomas Meade
stats
This month:
- I typed 981,793 keys and clicked 120,324 times.
- I listened to 1,326 songs.
