Hi!
It’s been an absurdly busy month. So busy that, as I write this near the end of the month, many of my habits are bending to absorb a bit of the chaos. But that’s how it tends to go — this is a regular pattern for me, and, once the dust settles a bit, it should be a good opportunity to critically evaluate these habits and make them more delightful and/or efficient.
The Premier League season is finally back in action, and I’m (perhaps unwisely) playing Fantasy Premier League again this year. This means I am, of course, putting matches on in the background which I wouldn’t otherwise be watching. I’m having fun, but also thinking about how I’m going to make sure it stays fun.
There’s not much else to report, honestly; a few exciting things have happened this month that aren’t quite ready to print here, but the “projects” section below is absurdly long, so I don’t feel bad about not making this post even longer.
projects
There’s a lot here this month. I’ve taken my systems for getting work done and raised them up a layer by creating a set of tooling:
workflow management tools
conveyor
The Conveyor is my local tool for creating tasks associated with projects, which LLMs work on, review, and generate artifacts like screenshots for me to review.
This allows me to break down work into good-sized chunks, and, more importantly, just write down a lot of things to do in a place where they’ll get automatically programmatically advanced.
This means that I’m continuously improving my tools as I use them. I’ve also kicked a few recurring tasks over to be processed by this tool as well, freeing up some more mental space.
This was the foundation that begot a lot of the updates below:
meteor
Meteor was the v0 of Conveyor for my work at Mobius. We have a semi-standardized set of queues, and how those queues get processed; just like Conveyor, I built a tool using Conveyor to reflect these queues specifically.
This was immediately a boon for me, but it wasn’t quite right in a few ways, which meant that I decided to supersede this with a new tool:
polish
Polish is the v1, built off of what I learned from Meteor. The point is to automate the stuff that is more rote so that I can spend my human attention on the things that matter. Still early days, but this is working quite well, and I’m looking forward to where I can take it from here.
scripts, and other miscellaneous tooling
last.fm history fix-up
Last month, I wrote:
Spotify made a change that made last.fm silently stop logging my scrobbles!
Which is incredibly frustrating. My last.fm history is pretty important to me! The way I fixed this was to request an export of all of my Spotify account data, parse that, and push the missing plays into last.fm. Annoying to deal with, but now it’s sorted out.
RVADev Slack Bot
The RVA Dev Slack has a channel for job postings, and some questions came up around how the rules for these job postings are applied. I wrote a Slack bot inspired by the bot in the Rands Leadership Slack; it parses new job listings, requests any missing detail, and, if it’s all provided, awards the job poster a gold star.
ssh-agent-nag
I need to manually run some configuration each time I start my computer, this just sends me a notification when it’s not yet done.
Other projects
instigation.club
I started hacking on an idea for a service where you essentially get instigated to follow your cool ideas twice a day. I spent a lot of time thinking about this one: how to market it, how to price it; but, ultimately, I don’t see a path to making it work. I’m going to drop this one for now, but I definitely learned a lot of useful things I can carry on to my next projects.
OpenLaunch
I’m mildly unhappy with the direction that Raycast is going; they’re understandably making moves to make their business more profitable, but these are a bit antithetical to the way I actually want to use the application. I started hacking on a personal replacement near the beginning of the month, but have a few more things to polish up about it before I can turn it into my daily driver.
The Gauntlet
I briefly mentioned that I’d put together wireframes for this last month; I’m very happy with how it turned out!
The Gauntlet is a custom UI over Spotify that acts as a kanban board for listening to albums five times, as part of my over-engineered music listening philosophy.
This project is completely open source — you can hack on it here: https://github.com/tjwds/the-gauntlet
hyperspace notecards
hyperspace notecards is a bespoke writing app, which I’m currently using to draft this post:
It’s centered around the way I approach jotting down thoughts. It has arbitrary, zettelkasten-like relations between cards. It tracks a daily writing goal of 833 words per day, inspired by the NaNoWriMo (RIP) writing goal, but cut in half.
Ultimately, I didn’t end up using this application to do the type of writing that I thought I would do; it’s been really useful for organizing my thoughts, but I just don’t think I can make time for writing articles at this point. I broke my 20-day streak near the end of the month on accident, and need to figure out what this habit actually looks like in the future.
Updates to existing projects
excitable.dev
A few more improvements to what Grayson referred to as my Joecial media:
- I added a bit more tooling to manage email subscriptions
- I can now post spoiler tags
- I added Instagram as a syndication target, which combines the images I post with the associated text.
the-wall
One new feature for my custom tiling terminal multiplexer: a dock mode for long-running processes.
Other project planning
A little more hacking happened on:
- A site that’s effectively like HackerNews with a hardware focus.
- Improvements to my newsletter tooling, hopefully to bring a lot of disparate projects under one unified banner.
Whew!
music
A relatively-short playlist this month:
films
This month, I watched 7 films:
- Spider-Man: No Way Home
- Iron Man (rewatch)
- The Amateur
- The Dink
- Spider-Man: Brand New Day
- The Martian (rewatch)
- Iron Man 2
Have I mentioned that I love Letterboxd? You can follow me there.
books
This month, I finished 2 books:
- Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks (reread)
- Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead
I’m currently reading Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey.
photography
This month, I added 125 photos that I took to my photo library.
failbetter
This month, failbetter published:
- “Grandma Orinka” by Yurii Tokar
- “Only the End of the World” by Jean-Luke Swanepoel
stats
This month:
- I typed 950,874 keys and clicked 121,118 times.
- I listened to 1,271 songs.
- I posted 35 times on excitable.dev.
