ThatAlexGuy

Are Design Tools Still Relevant?

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I was a product designer for a few years. I had switched careers to design after suffering burn out as a software engineer. During those years, my entire day was spent in Figma, building high fidelity mockups, leading workshops and creating prototypes. While Figma helped me move quickly, rapidly iterating after receiving user feedback, the engineer part of me always felt it was a throwaway step. You build something, only to then have somebody else build it again in code.

I recently had to put on my design hat again, putting together interactive prototypes around a few redesign ideas. At first, I reached for Figma, but after fiddling around for an hour, decided to go a different route. While prototyping in Figma used to be faster than building in code, that’s no longer true. With Claude Code, building out frontend components is fast. Much faster than messing with layers, frames and symbols in Figma.

Let me explain.

Enterprise apps have well defined brand guidelines. Colors, type, scale. They are often built off an existing component library (think Bootstrap, shadcn). This means you can use Claude in a way that follows the look and feel of your application, and is constrained to the components the development team leverages. The rails help keep Claude from going off into the deep end.

Design then becomes focused on solving the user’s problem through UX, less fiddling around with UI. I can open Freeform on my iPad, sketch something out, and prompt Claude to leverage our foundation to make my sketch a reality. Then, I can dig into the code and tweak things to be just right.

The result is a more interactive, true to life prototype that gives your engineering team a head start with coded components. You get better feedback from users and stakeholders as it’s easier to visualize what the final product looks like. You discover pitfalls that might not have shown up until an engineer was halfway into the card. On top of all that, you move a lot faster, you’re designing and building in 1 step rather than 2, giving your engineering team a head start once designs are finalized.

So then, what’s the point of Figma and Sketch?

You can tell Figma is battling with this reality by pushing Figma make. The issue is, it’s too constrained and produces poor results. You can’t link it to existing coded components, Tailwind configs, etc.

On the other hand, usin my approach requires a technical background. You need to guide with framework suggestions, foundational setup and be able to takeover and tweak yourself.

That said, there in the shorter term there’s likely still a place for Figma and Sketch at the table. Designing using the method I talked about requires a technical background, otherwise your results will be all over the place, and small tweaks will be next to impossible.

As the technology gets better though, I’ll be surprised if Figma and Sketch survive the next couple of years.

Automated Capitalism

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

An email showing interest for a project but actually a automated sales pitch

Woke up to this email in my inbox. At first I though “ugh a sales pitch”, but then I saw the line at the bottom.

This company runs autonomously · polsia.com

This led me to visiting Polsia. It’s an entire platform for doing the minimal amount of work to try and sell slop to people. It vibe codes, spams people and provides “customer support” with just the help of your credit card.

Is this seriously the future? Cause I don’t want it.

Back to Palm OS

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Over the winter I was super into Palm Pilots, I even picked up a few new ones and swapped the batteries. My current collection includes a Tungsten E, Tungsten T3, Tungsten C and a Handspring Visor. I was daily driving the C for quite awhile, but fell off when I upgraded my phone.

A Palm Pilot Tungsten C showing a list of food items

Well, today I’m going back! I recently posted on Mastodon about my struggles trying to track calories. Everything on the iOS store is enshittificated garbage. I shouldn’t have to pay a monthly fee, see ads, have my data sold, create an account and agree to ToS to track freaking calories.

My Mastodon Rant

Palm Pilots are from an era when software was allowed to be complicated, and to that end there are a number of applications that allow you to essentially create your own applications! Using SmartList To Go, I was able to create a database with a form for entering and tracking daily calories. It’s not complex, but it doesn’t need to be.

Screenshot showing a list of food items on Palm OS

I have a screen for seeing my daily log, sorted by meal then calorie count. There’s a form for recording a new entry, and there’s a screen to sum up all the calories in the day. I also keep a running log in each entry of the daily calories (previous record total + current calories).

Screenshot showing a form to record a food item on Palm OS

I might expand the functionality by adding a second database that remembers food items and their calories, then join it in with the log view so I don’t have to lookup calories each time. The fact that it’s an option to do that is awesome.

I also love that there’s the ability to build logical evaluators in computed fields. Yeah, I had to download and read parts of the 136 page SmartList To Go 3.0 Handheld Reference Guide, but why is that such a bad thing? Why have we given up on making software that serves our needs, and instead just let companies shovel subscription based crap at us?

SmartList was not free back in the day (looks like it was $50 USD, which is $84 today), but quality software shouldn’t have to be free. What it should have to be is yours. Pay once, no ads, no data collection, no online requirement. Someone that paid for SmartList in 2005 can still get value out of it 21 years later.

Wish me luck as I restart my journey of weight loss, hopefully I can shed some pounds and get faster on the bike! I’ll also be using the Weight Tracker application I previously wrote for Palm OS.

The bike gods are against me

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I started cycling about 3 years ago. We were eating at a Pho restaurant and decided to stop in to the bike shop next door. One thing led to another and I walked out with a Vaast A/1 gravel bike a few weeks later.

I put over 2,000 miles on the gravel bike that year. It would have been more if not for the Vaast R/1 road bike that I got late that summer. Both of these bikes were made possible thanks to good old fashioned bartering. I did website work for the bike shop owner, he supplied me with bikes and gear.

My first year of cycling I put in a tad under 8,000 miles. My second year I started even stronger, but mechanical issues on my road bike put me out of commission. I went through 2 sets of spokes and eventually new wheels, not a cheap endeavor. I was relegated to the gravel bike for a majority of the year, which was demotivating.

This year is shaking out to be even worse. I’m having mechanical issues again with the road bike. A poor design decision means the seat post keeps slipping, and I’m out of options to combat it. To make matters worse, Vaast issued a recall on my gravel bike (I’m starting to see why Vaast went under).

That’s both my bikes retired.

I don’t fancy spending $5,000+ on a Cervelo/Canyon/Pinarello which means I’m throwing in the towel this year.

Not much point to this post, just my way of mourning a hobby I enjoyed.

Building With Intent

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’m working on a new application called TinyFeeds, it’s a native RSS feed reader. Sure there’s thousands of those, but this one is mine and as such I’m being extremely intentional about how it’s built.

I believe constraints breed innovation, and as such I’ve outlined a few constraints for myself in this project.

First off, the file size has to be 5MB or under for the shipped binary. This is inspired by Matt’s Fits on a Floppy manifesto. I’m also inspired by the Palm Pilot apps I use on a daily basis, many of which are under 5MB. Maintaining a small file size makes you second guess the need for features, libraries, graphics, etc. In a world where Google Chrome secretly downloads an extra 4GB for a local LLM, I feel like small apps are sorely needed.

Second, the application is to be built in Rust and Iced. This constraint has forced me to finally dig in and learn Rust. The result is a fast, native application that has a high level of stability thanks to the tools used to build it.

Finally, no LLM generated code is to be used. This again forces me to actually learn the language, focus on code structure, and de-scope feature bloat. It also makes me feel proud of what I’ve built, something I never feel when using LLMs.

So how’s it going? Great so far! As I mentioned, TinyFeeds is built intentionally for me and how I enjoy consuming RSS. With any feed reader I always filter by unread posts from today. I don’t use folders, tags, bookmarks, etc. So that’s exactly what TinyFeeds does:

Reads your feeds from a simple .txt file
Shows new stories from today
Only shows a single story at a time
Remembers what stories you’ve viewed so they aren’t shown again

The UI has been designed to facilitate this. It’s incredibly simple, but the layout is intentional.

Screenshot of TinyFeeds

TinyFeeds won’t be for everyone, heck it might only be something I want, but that’s the point! I find it a joy to use even in it’s early state.

While it isn’t ready yet, you can early trial it if you so desire by cloning from Codeberg and building it yourself (./build.sh). The app currently clocks in at 4MB when built with the build script!

After TinyFeeds, I plan to build similar apps focused on small size, performance and minimal feature sets. All hand coded. Possibly inspired by Palm OS apps :-P

Built for Distraction

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We have a rental car right now, our neighbors backed into one of our cars a few weeks ago (need a new door, thankfully that’s all). The rental is a Kia Telluride, not sure exactly what year but I’d say 2024 or so. It’s a fairly nice car, but it has one feature that really stuck out to me.

I was sitting at a red light contemplating the meaning of life (as one does) when the car beeped at me. The screen had the message “lead car pulling away”. Sure enough, the light had turned green, and traffic was moving.

That got me thinking, what’s the “why” behind the feature? It seems pretty useless to me, of course you’ll know if the lead car is moving. Well, unless of course you’re sitting on your phone watching tickle tock.

My best guess is this feature exisits entirely for people using their phone while sitting at stop lights. Instead of ya know, expecting people to pay attention, the car industry has realized it’s better facilitate this behavior with supporting technology. Ugh. Maybe a better tech solution would be recognition of a phone in the driver’s hand that calls the local police department. One can dream.

Funny (depressingly) enough, as I wrote this I looked up out the window and saw somebody driving through the parking lot, phone in hand, head down. Maybe they should drive a Kia.

Deleting everything but this site

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I've made the decision to delete any personal online presence outside of this blog. My Mastodon & Strava accounts are gone, Tildes.net account is in process, public YouTube videos are permanently deleted. I unfortunately can't delete my LinkedIn account (turns out it's company managed), and Reddit's "delete my account" button is broken (surprise).

Going forward I'll only be reachable via email.

Fits on a Floppy

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I stumbled across Matt’s work via a post on Tildes. His “manifesto for small software” describes how he has targeted building applications that could fit on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. Most of his apps are either Mac OS or iOS, which honestly shocked me that you could bundle apps for those platforms at such a small size.

All this has got me thinking, and when I start thinking I typically end up changing my opinion on things. You see, I agree with Matt, “software has lost its way”. My recent post on using Palm OS for weight tracking proves that. The extremely powerful database software I talk about in that post is 758KB, heck you could almost fit two copies on a floppy. For comparison, Numbers (Apple’s spreadsheet software on iOS) is 617.2MB. You could fit 833 copies of the Palm OS app in that amount of space!

Here’s the thing, it’s going to get worse. Much worse. When everything is vibe coded and built on the backs of bloated frameworks, the size of applications will continue to grow. Optimization is an art of the past, and LLM driven development will further solidify it in carbonite. Instead of optimizing for software to better utilize our hardware, we’ve turned to constantly scaling hardware to fit the software. Buy, buy, buy! At the same time, the price of hardware is skyrocketing, which means it will become increasingly difficult for most to run increasingly bloated software.

I’m sure Microsoft will be happy to rent a cloud server running Copilot OS to you though…for a monthly fee of course.

All that to said, I’ve changed my mind (again) on using AI. Admittedly I had started to give in due to it being used heavily at work. What I’ve come to realize is that I don’t want to make software that way, it’s not meaningful to me. As @eniko said on Mastodon, it’s taking the artistry out of coding. The artistry of a well optimized system, of meaningful decisions, of re usability and composition.

I’ve been reading “Microinteractions: Designing with Details”” by Dan Saffer and it’s had me thinking a lot about the details that are getting missed in modern “software development”. When you stop optimizing and internalizing every piece of an application, how could you possibly focus on the microinteractions that compose it? The only thing that matters at that point is the list of features used in a sales pitch. The actual experience of using the app is left to Claude to figure out. Heck, the industry is rushing head first into letting AI take over everything human in the UX of applications.

Teams use AI to write the requirements documents. Then use AI to create work tickets. AI is brought in to build the design and user experience. AI writes the code and submits the PR. AI reviews the PR and tests the functionality.

What’s the point? You end up using software that had near zero human involvement. Sure, some engineers were needed to drive the AI and keep it on track, and they probably did a cursory glance at the PRs and some level of QA. Maybe. But when so many of the decisions are automated by the machine, what you’ve created is not something built for users.

So yeah, I’m done letting Claude create anything for me personally. I’ll still occasionally use these tools to solve issues, after all they are pattern matching engines which has advantages over simple web searches. But for coding, my opinion is now the same as what I stated in my post on using AI for writing, when you take the human out of the process you’re not producing art. And code is art.

Gas & Fonts

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I was at the gas station filling up the tank (unfortunately we still have 1 gas vehicle), when I noticed the numbers were in the typical 7-segment display style, but the screen was a modern LCD. It’s curious that they made this intentional choice to imitate an older technology on a modern display. I imagine it must be due either to familiarity (most gas pumps still use actual 7-segment displays), or readability.

I also wonder why they chose to use an LCD. The numbers only occupied a small corner of the screen. The only other active pixels were showing a tiny padlock icon. Maybe the screen facilitates maintenance operations not typically seen by a customer?

Unfortunately I didn’t snap a picture, still don’t feel comfortable pulling out my phone near a gas pump!

I Use Arch BTW

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In my previous post I talked about my frustration that the used Thinkpad I bought was crashing when unplugged in Linux. My conclusion at the end of the post was that I would return to Mac OS.

Well that lasted about 1 day. I’m back to Linux on the Thinkpad, here’s what happened (with added rants about Mac OS and Windows):

After using Linux on my System76 for a few months, Mac OS felt…old? Everything was laggy: the animation for switching spaces, launching apps, even typing. Sure, my Mac is a 5+ year old computer at this point (14” MacBook M1 Pro), but still, it shouldn’t feel that bad.

Then there’s how Apple treats you like a child. Want to install that app you downloaded? No, it’s too dangerous (aka the developer didn’t pay us)! We recommend you just throw it away.

In parallel to dealing with Mac OS, I went through the terrible process of installing Windows 11 on the Thinkpad with the idea of giving it to my wife. Seriously, I can’t properly articulate how awful Windows 11 is these days (but I can try).

First off, just getting a bootable ISO is a pain. You can’t just flash with any normal program, you’re expected to use another Windows computer to setup a USB. Thankfully I found a Mac app (WinDiskWriter) that could do it. It took 2 tries though, the first time I choose exFat and it wouldn’t boot, so I tried again with fat32.

Once you’re in the installer, the shit show truly begins. Off the bat, the installer has a completely different design language then Windows 11. The built-in disk practitioner is one of the worst I’ve used (compared to Linux installers). The install process takes forever and the computer has to reboot 3-4 times. Again, compared to Linux, this is so bizarre. Almost every distro out there has a live environment, an intuitive installer (not you Fedora), takes ~10 minutes and doesn’t reboot a single time.

Finally you get to the post-install setup wizard. It’s filled with laggy animations, how wonderful! Right off the bat it required me to be on the internet, but it didn’t recognize my WiFi. There was a “load driver” button though, so I downloaded the WiFi driver from Lenovo onto a USB drive. Nope, not recognized. I had to unplug one of my WiFi APs and use it’s ethernet to finish the install. While doing this, screen kept flashing as it tried to figure out the display drivers.

Again, Linux just works. WiFi, graphics, etc.

Once online I of course had to login to a Microsoft account. I also had to agree to sell my information to advertisers. Then I was presented with 7 pages of upsells. I’m not kidding! “Subscribe to Gamepass”, “How about Office 365?”, “You need Onedrive, right?”.

Buying a used car from a sketchy salesman is a better experience than installing Windows.

Once everything was finally installed, I had to “check updates” and reboot multiple times. It’s funny how installing all the available updates just leads to more updates after reboot. Why not, ya know, install them all at once?

But here’s where something good finally happened!

First, I verified that the Thinkpad worked perfectly in Windows, no crashing at all when unplugged. I also noticed a “Lenovo Updater” app got auto installed. After running the app, it found one “critical” firmware update for my SSD. This update wasn’t found by fwupdmgr in Linux, and there was no way to get the firmware on the Lenovo site beyond the Windows .exe.

The next day, I got fed up with Mac OS and decided I would bite the bullet and order a Framework. I could have gone back to the System76, but once you ride a Cervelo it’s hard to get back on a Huffy ya’ know?

In a last ditch effort, I flashed EndeavourOS to a USB to try one more time with the Thinkpad. My thought was Arch would be bleeding edge and have a higher chance of working.

Sure enough, no more crashes! I stress tested quite a bit across a few reboots and it was rock solid!

I’m 90% the issue was the SSD firmware, but it might be Arch. I’m honestly pretty happy with EndeavourOS so I didn’t try Ubuntu or Fedora, instead I happily wiped Windows with a EndeavourOS + GNOME install.

I’m overjoyed that the Thinkpad is rock solid now, it’s such a great little machine! I have a feeling my future laptops are going to be Thinkpads, but I expect this will last me quite awhile.

TL;DR for those facing the issues I did:

To fix AMD data fabric sync flood event in Linux when plugging in or unplugging the charger on a Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Generation 4 that leads to a full system reboot, install the NVMe Solid State Drive Firmware Update from the Lenovo Support website. You will need Windows 11 to install the driver, but can switch back to Linux after install.

I’m Glad I Enjoy Older Stuff

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before my daughter was born, I hosted a retro gaming night. I had recently acquired a PS2 and 32” Sony CRT and was looking forward to a night of fighting bots in Medal of Honor and chasing each other with RC helicopters in 007 Nightfire. I loaded up the 1TB HDD (total overkill I know) on the PS2 with every game from my childhood that had split screen.

When the night finally came around, we booted up the PS2 and started with Rising Sun. Immediately the comments were “wow these controls are clunky”, “how did we enjoy this as kids?”. Feeling bad, I suggested we switch games to Nightfire, which brought on the same comments.

A CRT TV with Nightfire on PS2

I get it, modern games have refined controls, faster frame rates, better graphics, etc. But to me, those older games had more charm. Mastering the controls is part of the competition when playing split screen.

We eventually landed on a copy of Worms we burnt to a CD-R and threw into the PS1. That stuck for the rest of the night and was a absolute blast. I guess Worms is timeless no matter who you are!

While I can’t blame others for not wanting to revisit the past, I’m glad that’s not me. I find a lot of joy in the same games I played as a kid. Last night I played Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast on PSP before bed, it was the perfect game and handheld to unwind after a day with the kids.

A CD Player

It’s not just games either. Browsing the shelves of thrift shops for CDs and DVDs, reading through the pamphlets in the case, finally placing the disc in the stereo or DVD player to discover if you got a treasure or a dud. It’s a great experience!

I’m glad these things bring me joy, because it means there’s a near infinite backlog of games, music, movies and books for me to discover. And the best part is, it’s much less expensive to discover media of old versus new releases. Games are a ROM file away. CDs typically cost $5-$15. DVDs can be found for $2-$15. Even better, the library has all of them for free. Compare that to games coming out at $80 these days, or the stack of streaming services most people pay monthly for.

I’m also glad my son seems to find the same joy in these things. A few days ago we were getting ready to go somewhere and he showed up with his hands full of “The Transformers” DVD cases (the original show) that he wanted to take. Yesterday he and I beat a new level in Sonic 3 on my Sega Genesis and 13” Toshiba CRT.

Installing JPilot on Arch

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Screenshot of JPilot

This post is a quick tip for anyone else running into issues installing the Palm Pilot desktop software, JPilot on Arch Linux. If you just try installing via yay -S jpilot, the build will fail as the dependency pilot-link no longer builds on modern systems. The solution is to first install pilot-link-git, then jpilot.

yay -S pilot-link-git
yay -S jpilot
Profit!

Laptop Upgrade

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been considering buying a new laptop. My daily driver has been a MacBook Pro with a M1 Pro and 16GiB of memory. It’s a good machine, but the RAM is limiting and I’ve been wanting to fully move to Linux. I tried Asahi on it for awhile, and while the project is incredibly impressive, there’s little things that make it not so suitable for me.

While I was looking at a Framework 13 or the upcoming Thinkpad T14 Gen7, the price of RAM made my eyes water. Thankfully I had one other option, a laptop I bought a few years ago that I barely use, the System76 Pang12.

tempimage85kyws

I bought this computer as a previous attempt to move to Linux, but honestly, the hardware was just plain bad. Terrible webcam, inconsistent trackpad and an awful screen. The webcam isn’t a huge deal, I’m not using the computer for my day job, and the trackpad is solved with a mouse. But the screen was a deal breaker. 1080p, washed out and horrible brightness.

But that got me thinking, can I replace it with a better panel? With a little research on Gemini and Panelook.com, I found a suitable replacement that matched the connector and exact dimensions of the factory LCD. $76 later and 15 minutes of install and this laptop is running a beautiful 2560x1440 165Hz display! The color is great, brightness feels a lot better, and it’s just overall a joy to use now! And while this computer doesn’t have the top end specs, it’s Ryzen 7 6800U and 32GiB of RAM are more than enough.

tempimagenbkxut

Linux Apps Starter Kit (Gnome Edition)

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I find beautiful, well-designed, native applications to be a source of inspiration when using my computer. I’ve posted on Mastodon about the native Mac applications that were hard to leave when switching to Linux. Now that I’ve fully made the switch, I figure it’s only fitting to do the reverse post on the Linux applications that I’ve fallen in love with.

For this post, I’ll be focusing on Gnome/GTK/Adwaita applications. Why? Two reasons. First off, I use Fedora with Gnome 49 so I’m most familiar with this territory. Second, Gnome has a very well defined HIG (Human Interface Guidelines), resulting in a strong visual identity. Applications enhance the operating system in a consistent, fluid way, rather than serving a jarring experience (ie an electron app with radically different UI/UX). This is key to me for finding inspiration and joy when using an application.

With all that said, let’s dig into the apps I consider essential!

Audio

Shortwave

somafm

Internet radio is awesome and Shortwave is the best application I’ve found on any platform for listening to it. Search for stations, add to your library and jam! It also has a DVR-like function (okay I get it, I’m getting old) so you can download tracks you’ve listened to. Finally, there’s an amazing skeuomorphic mini-player (I’m a sucker for skeuomorphic design).

somafmmini

📦 Shortwave on Flathub

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👤 Meet the Developer

Amberol

amberol

“Plays music, and nothing else” is the tagline of this beautiful audio player. For those of us still rocking local media collections, Amberol is the way to go. I mean, just look at it! Point it at a folder, play the music inside, easy! I have my NAS mounted as a bookmark in Nautilus, so I just point Amberol to my network music folder. Who needs streaming?!?

📦 Amberol on Flathub

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Blanket

blanket

I’ve been using Blanket longer than most apps on this list, long before I made the full switch to Linux (and heck, it’s probably one of the reasons I eventually made the switch). It’s a no-frills ambient noise machine. Comes with a large selection of high-quality samples that can individually be toggled and adjusted. You can save preset configurations (ie coffee shop in a thunder storm), and add your own audio samples. On any other platform this would cost $15 or more, but here it is on Linux, free and open-source.

📦 Blanket on Flathub

♥️ Support Blanket

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Pinta

pinta

Need to quickly edit an image or make a thumbnail? Pinta to the rescue! It’s fast and has a familiar UX. Sure, it’s not as powerful as GIMP, but I find myself reaching to it more often.

📦 Pinta on Flathub

👤 Meet the Developers

Gradia

gradia

This app right here should be a default Gnome app, it’s that good! Hands down the most powerful and user friendly screenshot tool I’ve used (and yeah, I’ve tried the popular Mac OS ones). Bind Gradia to a shortcut (I use Super + Shift + S) and it’ll open after you take a screenshot. Gradia lets you add arrows, drawings, blur text, perform OCR, crop, add backdrops and more. It’s honestly an essential application, and performs better than apps I paid $15+ for on Mac.

📦 Gradia on Flathub

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Switcheroo

switcheroo

There’s a lot of single purpose, well-built applications for Gnome, and Switcheroo is a great one I use daily. It takes an image in, and outputs in a different format. You can add on compression, resizing, strip metadata and replace transparency. I use it to optimize images for web.

📦 Switcheroo on Flathub

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Social

Tuba

tuba

I don’t use social media beyond Mastodon, but Tuba makes me glad I’m at least on that platform. Tuba is well designed, fast and filled with thoughtful features (like a custom emoji picker and the ability to schedule posts). I’ve tried the best on Mac (Ice Cubes), and it doesn’t get close to comparing with Tuba.

📦 Tuba on Flathub

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Newsflash

newsflash

Mmmm RSS, my favorite (and probably how you’re reading this article)! Newsflash is a ~~great~~ excellent, way to stay on top of your feeds. It’s got categories, tags, OPML import/export, themes, and more. My favorite feature is the “Today” tab filtered by unread, great to catch up on what’s new.

📦 Newsflash on Flathub

👤 Meet the Developer

Productivity

Planify

planify

Here it is, my top pick. You don’t even need to read this, just go download Planify, it’s incredible. Alain took todos and added a bucketload of thoughtfully designed microinteractions. Labels, scheduling, today view, sections, kanban board, natural text to date parsing, the list goes on. When you hover the “Add” button, it does a little animation. When you complete a task, it gives a little sound. There’s so many thoughtfully designed pieces in here!

📦 Planify on Flathub

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Folio

folio

Markdown based note taking, done very well. Notes are organized into notebooks and paired with a pleasant, minimalist markdown editor.

📦 Folio on Flathub

👤 Meet the Developer

Apostrophe

apostrophe

Distraction free markdown editor for writing long form content. Basically, the Linux alternative to iA Writer on Mac. It’s beautiful, fast and has just enough features. I use it to write most of my blog posts!

📦 Apostrophe on Flathub

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Sessions

sessions

Another excellent, single-purpose application that I use on a daily basis. Sessions is an egg/pomodoro timer that beeps when time’s up. You just drag the slider and the timer starts. Great for keeping yourself focused!

📦 Sessions on Flathub

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Foliate

foliate

Holy crap this app looks good! John did an incredible job building the best ebook reader on Linux. You can bring your own books, or use the catalogs feature to discover public domain literature. There’s support for annotations (with import/export), bookmarks, text to voice and theming.

📦 Foliate on Flathub

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Development

Bobby

bobby

Got a sqlite database and want to know what’s inside? Bobby to the rescue! Drag and drop your database file in and see the data. Simple, well designed and useful!

📦 Bobby on Flathub

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Dev Toolbox

devtoolbox

There’s so much value packed into this app! Replace random sketchy websites you found on Google by using Dev Toolbox to generate a QR code, check contrast ratios, parse CRON strings and so much more. There’s too much in here to cover, but it’s become an essential part of my toolkit.

📦 Dev Toolbox on Flathub

👤 Meet the Developer

Other

Bazaar

bazaar

Bazaar is a faster, more reliable and visually more appealing alternative to the default Gnome Software application. It’s one of my first installs on a new system and another application that should be a default Gnome app.

📦 Bazaar on Flathub

♥️ Support Bazaar

👤 Meet the Developer

Extension Manager

extensionmanager

The absolute best way to discover, install and update Gnome shell extensions!

📦 Extension Manager on Flathub

♥️ Support Extension Manager

👤 Meet the Developer

Copyous

copyous

Copyous is a shell extension, and it’s the best clipboard manager out there. Visually browse and search your clipboard history. Supports image previews, syntax highlighting, color previews (ie copy a hex code and it shows the color) and so much more!

📦 Copyous on Gnome Extensions

What Did I Miss?

There’s so many amazing applications on Linux that I definitely missed some! Feel free to shoot me an email at hi@thatalexguy.dev with recommendations. I’ll do a separate post in the future for KDE applications!

Support The Applications You Love

I mentioned a few times in this article that some applications on Linux provide better value than alternatives I paid for on Mac OS. There’s not a single paid application on this list, but that does not mean you shouldn’t support the developers! These developers work hard to design, build, test and support the software that makes Linux great. If you like their work, show them some love!

Make Building Software Fun

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been writing software for a long time. When I was a kid, I loved making text adventures, spending countless hours planning the dungeons on pieces of paper. I wrote games and sold them to kids in the neighborhood on CDs. I built a stock market simulator (knowing nothing about the actual stock market) on a Palm Pilot during a family road trip. Back then, building software was fun.

My passion for building continued through college, where I released apps on Windows and Windows Phone. After college I built and launched my only app that’s ever made an actual profit, MetaShort.

But then, the fun stopped. As I advanced in my career as a developer, I lost interest in building. Anytime I sat down to build something, I’d be frozen with analysis paralysis. What stack should I use? What features should I add? Will this be profitable? How do I approach the design? Is this scalable? How do I optimize for SEO?

I’ve been stuck in this rut for years, but I think I’ve finally found the way out. The key to building, is to make it fun, and that’s a lot harder than it sounds.

As a kid, building games and apps was fun because I didn’t (couldn’t) over analyze it. I only knew BASIC and GOTO statements, so I made it work. My stack was Hotpaw BASIC, a Palm m105 and an infrared keyboard. That’s all I had, and I loved it. But now, I have too much experience, so I have to be intentional to let go of that.

I’m currently building BookLeaf, an open-source bookmark manager. I could have built it with Svelte or React, or maybe the TALL stack. I could spend countless days on the design, mobile responsiveness, etc. But this time, I intentionally didn’t.

I spun up a Laravel project and stuck with Blade templates, inline CSS and next to no design. I deployed with Forge + Digital Ocean so I don’t have to deal with devops. I’m building with what I’m most familiar with, so I can move fast. People talk about releasing an MVP ASAP to get user feedback, and while I agree on the quick MVP part, I have a different goal. An MVP gets me to a state of joy as quickly as possible, a MJP (most joyful product) if you will (sorry, had to).

The MJP is where I have something that proves to me “hey, you managed to build a thing, now time for the fun part”. Hacking on new features, using the app in my daily life, and occasionally hearing from other people that have discovered it. That’s the fun part.

But here’s the thing, my path to MJP is not your path. Your path to a joyful product might be creating a robust server infrastructure, or leveraging the latest frontend framework. And that’s okay. But make sure you’re not lying to yourself, not doing things because “well that’s best practice” or “what if a potential employer sees this repo” or even “how will I scale this”. Make sure your decisions are motivated by a MJP, not a MVP.

Meet People Where They’re At

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There’s a shopping center I sometimes walk to for lunch. It’s been there long enough that it doesn’t have a sidewalk (before city ordinances required sidewalks I imagine). A few years ago, a mixed-use complex was built next to it, complete with a sidewalk that ended right at the boundary of the old plaza. This new sidewalk has resulted in a path of trampled grass as people (like myself) walk to the restaurants in the old plaza.

Today on my way to get some “Italian food” (it’s America, nothing is authentic here), I was greeted with a new gravel path at the end of the sidewalk. The path had been placed to line up with the curve of dead grass and perfectly connected both plazas.

↑ I didn’t have a camera on me, so enjoy this detailed sketch done on my Palm Pilot

It seems like a small thing, but it surprised me. Just a week ago I remember wondering to myself how long it would be until a “stay off of grass” sign appeared. Instead, I was treated to a rare instance of people’s needs being directly addressed.

It reminded me of a similar story around Ohio State University (the university in my city). The sidewalks built across the campus green were made to follow the paths students trekked in the early days of the campus. A similar method, named Sneckdown, is used to determine where traffic calming measures are needed based on snow that has not been touched by traffic.

I wish this was more common, identifying pain points and improving the situation. Instead, we spend hours in meetings figuring out how to fight people’s goals because what they want isn’t “sticky enough” or “doesn’t meet business goals”.

Moving to Pure Blog

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Awhile back I built mdServer, a markdown based blogging engine. It was fun to build, but I’ve found I want to focus on other projects (and writing). With that, I’ve decided to move to Pure Blog, the excellent blogging platform created by Kev Quirk.

I choose Pure Blog for ease of setup and customization ability. I spun up a new site on Laravel Forge and dropped the files in via SFTP. Easy-peezy! I’ll continue tweaking the CSS (currently inspired by the lovely simple look of Kia Kamgar’s site) and add more pages in the future.

I’ve created an nginx redirect that should (🤞) keep the old RSS feed URL working, let me know if it broke!

Music discovery

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Recently stumbled upon a couple of artists that I've been enjoying, thought I'd share. It's no surprise I've been going down the rabbit hole of protest music...

On a side note, I wish more indie artists would offer CDs. Jesse Welles has vinyl on his store, but no CDs.

My Everyday Carry

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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Thought it would be fun to do a simple everyday carry post! Here’s what I typically have in my backpack.

Pictured

SnowSky Echo

This is a very recent addition and replaced the iPod Classic I was carrying. I’ll be honest, I really like this little guy. It’s a MP3/FLAC/AAC player themed like a tape player. It’s made of metal, super lightweight and has a good battery life. While I love the iPod, I haven’t had time to mod it beyond Rockbox, so it’s on the original HDD and battery. The Echo gives me a SD card slot, USB C charging, Bluetooth and a fresh battery. The UI is more clunky than an iPod, but it’s good enough.

SnowSky Wind Headphones

I added these to the cart when buying the Echo, not expecting much with the low price, but they have blown me away. Seriously, these sound way better than they should. They do feel super cheap and flimsy, reminiscent of the headphones we had in the computer lab during grade school, but that does mean they are very lightweight.

System76 Pangolin 12

My current primary machine, recently replacing my MacBook Pro M1 as I’ve gone full in on Linux. I absolutely wouldn’t recommend this laptop due to the horrible webcam/microphone/speakers, nearly unusable trackpad (hence the next item), USB C port that barely works and overall poor build quality. I did make it slightly more bearable by upgrading the screen.

Specs below for those interested!

specs

Logitech Performance MX

Old mouse that I’ve had for ages but I love it. Feels great, battery lasts awhile, perfect substitute for my awful trackpad!

Wallet With AirTag holder

Got this wallet on Amazon, honestly don’t know the brand (probably one of those popup brands that disappears in a week). It’s decent enough quality, has a money clip and a feature where you push a lever and your cards fan out. The best feature though is the AirTag holder, no more searching the house for my wallet!

Miyoo Mini Plus

I’ve had this guy for awhile, but it’s just recently dethroned my heavily modded GBA SP thanks to Allium OS. Allium provides a simple UI that gets out of the way. The killer feature for me is the “Guides” functionality. While playing a game, you can quickly pop up a walk through on screen. It remembers where you’ve scrolled through play sessions, making it perfect for RPGs. The battery and AUX jack are nice enhancements over my GBA SP as well (who knew adding a bright display and underglow to the SP would kill battery life??).

Supernote Nomad

I bought the Nomad on preorder before it released, and have loved it since. I use it to sketch designs, take notes and read books. I love the design (I have the crystal clear one) and the fact that it’s repairable

offline + subscription free.

Palm Pilot Tungsten C

I love my Palm Pilots, and the C is the one I most use as a everyday carry. The keyboard is absolutely a killer feature. I use this guy to track calories, store reminders, manage my calendar and write a journal. The OS is fast and just works. Man I wish they made modern Palm Pilots!

Not Pictured

Apple Watch Ultra 3

It’s overkill and honestly I probably didn’t need it, but I love the bigger design of the Ultra. I use it for swimming, running and cycling.

iPhone 17 Pro Max

I tried switching to Android for awhile with a Pixel 9 Pro and I just hated it. To me, Android feels like KDE: super powerful, full of features, customizable and ugly. I wish I could love it, but I care a lot about good/consistent design and GNOME+iOS are clear winners in this category (in my opinion).

That’s it for me, would love to know what everyone else deems worthy of carrying on their back!

My Love of Email

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

My (personal) email has become something that I look forward to checking every morning, thanks mostly to the small web. I make it a point to reach out to people after reading their blogs, and often times I’ll get a response after a few days. It’s refreshing to have actual conversations online with people at a slow pace. Conversations where people take time to respond, rather than just shoot out a few words in an IM. Email has led me to meet some really cool people from around the world! But the thing is, you have to be very purposeful in how you use email, otherwise it’s a terrible tool.

Email Is Bad by Default

Just like snail mail, capitalism has destroyed email. What used to be a method for having meaningful discussions, has had ads crammed into every single possible spot. Companies actually believe sending yet another sales newsletter filled with AI generated slop will make you part with your hard earned cash. It’s a damn shame, but it’s par for the course. We get something nice, a small amount of people enjoy it, it becomes more popular, companies ruin it.

That’s where being meaningful with your usage of email comes in. I personally use and pay for Hey Email from 37Signals. This isn’t a sponsored post or some nonsense like that, and I’m sure there are similar services (such as Proton Mail), but I do really like this service. First off, since I pay for it, there are no ads in the UI. I’m someone that will go completely out of my way to avoid being advertised to. They also don’t sell your data to make a quick buck, train LLMs, or just in general make the world a worst place.

But the biggest reason I love Hey is that senders are blocked by default. You have to purposely screen and whitelist a sender. So any company sending me an ad? Blocked. Somebody actually having a conversation? Whitelisted. This means that everytime I check my inbox, I only see meaningful messages, which makes checking your email a joy. If only the USPS would let me do the same to my mailbox…

Anyways, that’s the post! As always, feel free to shoot me an email below!

New Thinkpad Means Back to Mac OS

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On Wednesday I picked up a new (to me) Thinkpad P14s Gen 4. I was excited to finally get off my System76 Pang12, a computer that works, but has a long list of hardware and reliability issues.

Thinkpad P14S G4

Thinkpad in hand, I installed Ubuntu 25.10 and immediately put it to work with a night of trimming down my client request backlog. The computer was incredible! Amazing keyboard, vastly better trackpad, perfect 14” form factor and everything worked out of the box on Ubuntu. Heck, it even had a usable webcam!

Mastodon Post

But like a majority of things in my life, something always goes wrong. I knew it was too perfect, and wondered what I was going to find that ruined the joy.

How about complete system crashes when you plug/unplug the system? Yep, that’ll do it. I spent all of yesterday and this morning debugging. Multiple distress, a long list of kernel params, different chargers and tweaking bios settings. Nada. About 50% of the time when you unplug, Gnome will slowly start to lock up, then the system restarts. Looking at logs it’s caused by a data fabric sync flood event.

At first I thought it might be related to the WiFi chips (based on pre-crash logs). Disabled via bios and still crashes. I’ve tested RAM, SSD and battery, all good. I have a new battery coming Monday just in case, but fully expect it won’t help.

I’m out $500 USD, and honestly, I’m done with Linux for now. I love Gnome and Fedora+Ubuntu, but it’ll be a few years before I buy a new laptop after throwing away money on the Thinkpad (and the Pang12 2 years ago).

Back to Mac OS Tahoe it is. Liquid ass and all.

I’m hopeful that the Thinkpad problems are just on Linux. My wife has been wanting a laptop and she’s not ready to jump off Windows making it the perfect computer for her.

Deleting everything but this site

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This site has suddenly undergone a large amount of changes! It looks different, it's built differently, it has more (non-blog) content, and it runs on freedom (by that I mean OpenBSD servers located in Amsterdam). Let's pretend you have questions and here are my answers:

How is this site built?

By hand! This site is now built through manual typing of HTML files, no generators or blog engines involved. Now I want to be clear, Pure Blog is freaking amazing, Kev has done some great work on it (and heck, I even contributed a tiny change to it), but you know me (well maybe you don't). I change my mind often, and this is just one of those cases. I might even end up back on Pure Blog someday!
What runs this site?

This site has gone from a Laravel Forge VPS to a OpenBSD server from OpenBSD Amsterdam. I don't love the way Laravel and co have been heading (AI bros to say the least), but I do love the way OpenBSD Amsterdam operates. Talk with your wallet folks!
Hand coding everything? Surely you can't be serious!

I am serious, and don't call me Surely!

I can't explain it, but having complete and total control, as well as total ownership over every line of code is a nice feeling. Yeah, it's clunky. There's rsync, Sublime Text, and a whole lotta copy+paste involved. But I love it.
But like....you don't hand type the RSS feed, right?

Um. Of course not. That would be silly. Imagine opening the RSS XML file in Sublime and copy+pasting all the metadata from the article into it. Haha.

Please help me.
Where are the old posts?

I'll be slowly converting over my old posts in the coming weeks!

If you dig the new vibes around these parts, let me know!

Photo Journal: Day 1

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been wanting to get out and take more photos, so here’s day 1 of a personal challenge to do so!

These were taken while on my lunch break. There’s a beautiful trail next to the coworking place.

If you want full resolution versions of any image, just send me an email!

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Photo Journal - Day 2

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Realized I issued myself a challenge, but failed to define any parameters! My goal is to post at least 1 photo taken with my Sony A7IV per day. Let’s see how it goes!

Today’s photos are from a short e-bike ride my wife and I did along the trail near our home.

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I want to give some serious kudos to RapidRaw, it’s a seriously fast Lightroom alternative that runs on Linux. I’ve been loving it!

Photo Journal - Day 3

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Life has been busy and I missed the past 2 days, but thankfully I remembered to bring the camera with me today! I snuck out in the brief calm between rain storms, don’t particularly want to test how waterproof my camera is.

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↑ This is the side of the building I’m coworking in today.

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↑ Sometimes I really wish I had a macro lens!

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↑ I love how this one turned out.

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Photo Journal - Day 4

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Took my soon to a park near our house. He had his kid’s camera and had a blast taking photos with me.

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↑ One of my son’s photos of me.

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Photo Journal - Day 5

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

An Analogue Pocket with a Gameboy Camera cartridge next to a ThinkPad

Thought I would try something different for this entry! Each of these photos were taken with my Gameboy Camera attached to an Analogue Pocket (since it allows easy exporting). I’ve had this cartridge since I was a kid (I included 2 photos from back then for fun)!

A tree and rock next to a path

Leaves

Benches in a forest

The end of a truck

The bays of a loading dock

The ThinkPad logo on a laptop

The following photos are from when I was a kid and have been sitting on the cartridge for 20+ years.

A cat’s head

↑ This was one of the cats we had when I was a kid, his name was Benthem. He had massive cheeks!

A chicken

↑ I imagine this was one of my friend’s chickens that lived in the countryside.

Photo Journal - Day 6

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today I returned to the park from day 4 armed with a macro lens I remembered I have. It’s for a Nikon camera, and it’s all manual (aperture ring and focus ring), but with an adapter it worked just fine with my Sony. I had some trouble with focusing, but I think a few of them turned out decently.

A flower macro

A spiky seed pod

Flowers macro

Water and rocks

A fly on a mushroom

Mushroom

A bee gathering nectar from a flower

Macro shot of wood

Macro of a leaf with a arrow pattern on it

Photo Journal - Day 7

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I really enjoyed doing macro shots last time, so I did it again! To switch things up though, I swapped my Sony aIV frame with an old Nikon D5100 (my first DSLR). It was kind of a beast to work with. I used the same lens as last time, but the D5100 doesn’t have focus peaking. It was an additional challenge going back to a crop sensor.

The shots are from the same park as day 6, but during a rainstorm this time. There are very few things as wonderful as hiking through a forest at the end of a rain. The smells, the sound of birds coming out of hiding…it’s magical.

I ended up walking just over 3 miles and it was the most relaxed I’ve been in awhile.

Leaf with a raindrop on it

Flower with raindrops

Flower

Spider on a web

Spider web in a tree

A branch

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Mushrooms I think

Snake skin

Moss on a tree

Field macro photography is a fun challenge, it forces you to focus on the small, easily missed details around you. You have to balance apeture and light a lot more than usual. Capturing anything more than a tiny slice of detail requires more light, which is hard in the woods. Slowing shutter speed to compensate makes it near impossible to capture something like a spider web swaying in the breeze.

When you do get the camera dialed in, the viewfinder reveals a minitature world ready for you to capture.

Photo journal - day 8

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Spider warning!

Had some time with the wife away from the kids this weekend that allowed us to go hiking!

Don't fall off little guy!

I think my ISO was cranked up, unforutnately a lot of the photos turned out grainy.

This guy was so freaking fast!

This was one of my wife's shots, I think she might slowly be getting into photography!

I used to be deathly terrified of bees...now I'm shoving a camera lens up their backside!

And their frontside.

I really love this shot, just wish it wasn't so noisy.

Photo journal day 9

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I took a much needed day off yesterday and spent time outside. The day started with processing photos and posting the photos for day 8. After I drove out to one of my favorite small towns and grabbed a sandwich that a small deli. Sandwich in hand, I drove to a metro park to eat and go hiking. I followed that up with swimming and eventually cycling, my version of a triathlon haha.

I'm not super product of this batch of photos, but hey some of them are alright.

I love the exposed roots, there was a log I sat on (out of frame) and took in the view for quite awhile.

This was very cool to see in person, the tree splits into two halves.

A creek running through the trees.

Slightly slower shutter speed.

I'm the bridge troll!

The best type of playground.

According to the historical sign, this railroad bridge was lifted at one point to accommodate steam engines. It's still in use today by trains transporting grain from one side of the city to another.

Playing with Astro

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A few weeks back I switched to a hand-written HTML site. It was a cool experience, going back to the absolute basics and having complete creative control. It was also a painful experience, any updates to the template meant a find/replace across 50+ HTML files!

This month I’m hopping on the Astro train! I’m building off the minimalistic Astro Sienna theme. It includes awesome integrations with web mentions and Giscus (comments powered by Github discussions). I’ll be hacking on a lot of tweaks in the coming days, but I’m happy so far!

The RSS feed should be unaffected, I have a ridiculous amount of redirects in my httpd config due to how often I keep changing platforms.

re: Hey you, start communicating!

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

David writes about the importance of reaching out to the author of blog posts and starting a conversation, I 100% agree! I love when something I write resonates with somebody, and more often than not it turns into a continuing conversation. I see this blog-o-sphere as it’s own little world filled with friends across the world.

I recently ran across a blog that belonged to a Youtuber. On the “about me” section they stated the following:

NOTE: I don’t answer any personal questions - Please don’t send me emails.

This does not sit well with me. What’s the point of creating if not to spark conversation and meet others? At that point, it feels like you’re just in it for the adsense revenue. The internet doesn’t need that, it needs community (now more than ever). I don’t have a problem with people making money off of their work, but it shouldn’t be the only motivation.

So reach out, send an email, even if it’s just a “hello”. I promise, you’ll make the other person’s day!

re: The commodification of travel

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I relate a lot to Herman’s recent post, in more ways then one. His thoughts on travel are very similar to mine, and the fact that he’s writing from Kyoto is even better.

You see, I spent a semester studying in Japan 14 years ago (good grief has it been that long?). I went to a business school in Tokyo (武蔵大学), despite being a computer science major. I honestly had never been interested in traveling until then. The only reason I found myself in Japan was having been lured into the International Studies office by a sign saying “Free Pizza (Learn About Exchange Programs)”, and hey, my college town did have good pizza!

While in Japan, I visited Kyoto during the freezing cold of November. I went with another American in my program, we stayed in a hostel, hit the 銭湯 (public bathhouse) every night and hopped around on bus to each destination. We had little plan outside of a small list of things we wanted to see. Most of what we ended up doing was the result of recommendations from our hostel host.

And we had a blast.

Kyoto was near empty at that time. For example, when we visited 伏見稲荷大社 (the fox shrine that consists of thousands of Torii Gates leading up a mountain), we hiked for hours and saw only a handful of people. To escape from the crisp air, we stepped into a tea house and had a wonderful conversation with the owner (who was just happy to have company).

Standing infront of Torri Gates

It’s one of the most memorable times of my life.

I absolutely love Japan. I’ve been twice, a second time in 2017. But now, like Herman, I don’t know if I would return. At least not to Kyoto.

To explain why, let’s switch countries. The first time in Taiwan, my wife and I went to a famous museum. We went by city bus and a whole lotta walking. Most people arrived by chartered tour busses.

As we browsed the isles at a leisurely pace, we were constantly interrupted. First would be a person wearing a speaker, holding a little flag and talking in a microphone. Then, the herd of tourists would follow, each cramming their bodies infront of whatever object so as to get a selfie. They’d stay just long enough at each object to grab a picture, then shuttle off to the next. Not a person read the plaques or admired the details.

It ruined the experience, I remember leaving that museum very frustrated.

Unfortunately, I’ve heard that’s the state of Kyoto these days. For example, the Geisha district my friend and I randomly found ourselves walking through while looking for dinner was closed due to unruly tourists.

People travel for the photo, the checkbox, the badge of honor. They don’t dare do or eat as the locals, they instead are pin-balled between selfie spots, only to end the day at a buffet of their home cuisine. When they get home, they post their photos, rake in the likes and forget the whole experience.

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And look, I’ve been part of these groups before. My wife is Chinese, and this is the normal way Chinese travel. A big reason for this is visas, a lot of countries (Japan included) don’t allow Chinese tourists that are not part of a tour group.

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The first time I saw the Great Wall was as part of a tour group, the same with the China/Mongolia border. They shuttled us from selfie spot to selfie spot. We had very little time to explore. Each meal was a buffet. Most of my memories are of the inside of the charter bus, not the attractions themselves.

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I hated it.

People are surprised when I mention I’m a repeat visitor to a small set of countries. I’ve visited Taiwan twice, Japan twice, China twice and Mexico 5 times. I’ll get comments of “you really should do X country instead of places you’ve already done”.

The face of a guy getting married in a foreign country

I fall in love with cultures. And food (same thing). The last time I was in Taiwan, I was there for a month living in an Airbnb working out of a cowork spot. I met so many amazing people. There was the guy who designed the paint for subway cars that took me to a local noodle shop. The American that asked to join me for a day of temple adventures. And the guy who’s wife insisted he invite me to sit with them at the theater and share the beer they snuck in.

I tend to explore alleys

The second time in Japan I stayed in the same suburb as my dorm from my student days. In Mexico, I worked remotely from cafes and explored the incredible food malls of Mérida.

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I’m not into tourist spots, I’m into finding out what stores are in the alley, discovering what small town is at the end of the Tobu Tojo line, going behind the scenes on a TV show set at the top of a skyscraper, or discovering where the random boat I found that accepts my transit card takes me (it was an island with a bar on the beach, awesome night).

The mystery boat

That’s what travel should be. Stepping into the unknown, excited, and a little afraid. Discovering the local culture, food and people. Making connections and memories that last a lifetime, so when things get tough you can sit in the shower, remembering the water in the public bath house washing over you.

Cat village

14 years ago I sat on a futon, resting my worn luggage against the wall. After 20+ hours of travel I had made it to my new home in Saitama, Japan (さいたま市). As I sat there, I had a panic attack. Where the fuck was I? What was I doing in a country I knew nothing about. Hell, I didn’t even speak a single word of the language, how could I possibly survive on my own for the next semester?

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An hour or so later I calmed myself down and went on a walk to a department store with a few of the other exchange students. I marveled at how similar, but different, everything was. I also gawked at the insane price of fruit.

Three hours later I unexpectedly found myself in a public bath. Talk about culture shock!

The next day was the start of the best 4 months of my life.

That’s what travel is.

re: Who knows that you blog?

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

David talked about their reluctance to share their blog with others in the real world. I have much the same reluctance, I definitely don’t want a coworker on my blog, or even one of my IRL friends. I do occasionally share links to my articles with my wife, but that’s infrequent, and I know she forgets the link between pings.

For me, the reluctance is similar to David’s. This blog is my space to write what’s on my mind in my own little vacuum. It’s disconnected from the expectations of real life, and a more real reflection of myself versus the “masks” I wear IRL. It’s a playground, a place to rant and a place to nerd out.

Sometimes I wish my blog was even more private, disconnected from my IRL identity. There’s a lot I would like to rant about around corporate America, but I dare not publicly when it’s linked to my professional identity. Gotta pay the bills after all.

To forward David’s ending question: “Do you tell people you blog?”.

Recall on My Vaast A/1

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A couple of years ago I started my journey into cycling with a Vaast A/1 gravel bike. It features a magnesium frame, which touts being nearly as light as carbon for a fraction of the cost. I’ve put nearly 2,000 miles on that bike between road and gravel rides (after I got a road bike I rode the A/1 a lot less). I had plans of turning the A/1 into a commuter bike, but unfortunately I instead have to retire my trusty gravel friend.

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During a group ride last night, another rider informed me Vaast had issued a recall on my gravel bike. An issue with the welds can cause the frame to crack at the seat post, resulting in a not so fun time. Vaast advises to immediately stop using the bike

After reaching out, I’ve learned Vaast are offering 1 of 2 remedies. First option, I can get a Niner RLT 9 frame. The RLT 9 is aluminum, meaning it’s significantly heavier and less comfortable to ride, a major downgrade compared to that A/1. Additionally, Vaast are having issues sourcing bottom brackets, with no ETA available.

Option 2 is $700 refunded on a credit card. For those of you unfamiliar with bikes, $700 doesn’t get you a frame, not even close. Heck, Vaast lists the A/1 frame (a fixed version of the one being recalled) for $1,300 on their site.

So basically, I have to destroy the frame and either get a downgraded product at some point in the future, or half the cash needed to buy a new frame. Pretty terrible options.

I think I’ll end up taking the $700, selling my road bike (which is also a Vaast that I’ve had issues with), and upgrade to a more reputable brand. I guess I could hold out and wait for the inevitable class-action lawsuit, but those takes years and usually result in everyone getting $10.

re:My Fear of Flying

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is in reply to Kev writing about his fears of flying.

The first time I flew was also the first time I left the country. In September of 2012 my mother dropped me off at Columbus International Airport for a morning flight destined to Narita International Airport. I was fucking terrified.

I was so inside of my own head with fears of flying I nearly missed my flight. The loudspeakers called out my name for a final boarding call…I was sitting right in front of the gate, completely oblivious to the fact that the whole plane had boarded. Once I was in the air, my fears started to ease as the excitement at experiencing air travel started to take over. It also helped that I had my first (and second) legal beer (after the stewardess confirmed we were safely over Canada).

I flew semi frequently after that, yearly trips to Mexico, visiting family (and getting married) in China, etc. Flying became normal, and my fears were mostly gone. But after my son was born nearly 4 years ago, we stopped traveling.

Last year, my wife and I were lucky enough to visit family in Australia for 2-weeks. That flight was terrifying for me. I’m not sure what changed, but I could not stop thinking of how high and vulnerable one is when flying. I calmed my nerves a bit with bad in-flight movies, but was still extremely relieved when we finally landed.

During our 2 weeks in Australia, the D.C. AA 5342 disaster occurred, which was in addition to reduced/overworked ATC staffing due to “government efficiency”. That was an extremely terrifying flight home, my hands were completely covered in sweat as we finally landed.

I haven’t flown since, admittedly less due to fear and more due to having a second kid now keeping us even busier. I did opt-out of attending a conference that would require air travel though.

I’m sure I’ll have to fly again within the next year or so, potentially to China. I’m curious where my comfort level will sit, if I had to guess I would say somewhere in the middle of calm and terrified.

re:On AI-Enhanced Writing

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pablo posted a very well put together reaction to another post regarding the use of LLMs in the writing process.

Pablo did an excellent job of conveying the thoughts I’ve had around this subject. I’ve often felt “if you didn’t bother writing it, why would I bother reading it?”, and while Arun argues in their post that they enhance their writing with AI, I don’t feel it’s truly their thoughts at that point. It’s devoid of what makes writing worthwhile.

In software development, the code is not the artifact, it’s the user facing piece the code builds that provides value. The code is a means to an end, a no-code built tool can provide just as much value as if it was coded in C++. This is something that’s taken awhile for me to realize as I’ve come to terms with using AI to assist in development.

Writing is not the same as coding. The words you type are not a means to an end, they are the direct product. Words are a reflection of you and how you think. The exact words you choose, the structure you assemble, even the mistakes you make are uniquely you. To outsource this to a tool that generates based on how other people think is to give up what makes your writing a unique fingerprint of your mind.

If you’re writing a corporate blog, landing page copy, LinkedIn posts etc then sure, go ahead and use AI. That writing is meant to be bland, and let’s be honest, nobody but machines is reading it anyway. But if you’re writing something meaningful like a personal blog post, an academic paper or a book, that should reflect you, otherwise what’s the point?

Ride Leaders & Team Leaders

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The Ride Leader

One of my favorite things in cycling is being a part of group rides. A group ride involves a number of cyclists riding together, typically in a pace line (either a single or double column formation of riders). Group riding requires more coordination and precision than a non-cyclist might expect. A rider’s front tire is centimeters away from the rider in-front of them. Pacelines rotate the riders at the front regularly to ensure everyone gets to benefit from drafting behind someone else. Upcoming turns, hazards and passing cars are communicated and relayed up and down the line. Orchestrating all of this is one or more ride leaders.

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The ride leader is the one responsible for planning the routes, ensuring the safety of riders, controlling the pace, assisting with mechanical problems and helping those that fall behind (in a no-drop ride). A good ride leader is not someone that sprints out ahead of the group to show off their strength, instead they cycle through the back and front of the line checking on the riders. When a new cyclist joins a ride, the leader welcomes them to the group, gets them up to speed on route, paceline expectations and overall group norms. Ride leaders need to know where everyone is at all times, and fallback to help those that can’t keep up.

The Good vs the Bad

I’ve done a number of group rides in my few years as a cyclist, and I’ve experienced both bad and good ride leaders. A recent example of a great ride leader comes from this week, where temperatures were in the “extreme heat” category. One of our ride leaders made the decision that he didn’t feel comfortable riding in the heat. Knowing that he couldn’t stop the rest of us from riding, he instead took on the role of SAG (support & gear). Throughout our 30 mile ride, he would meet us at various stops to hand out ice cold water while checking on the status of all riders. He also had bike racks ready to go in-case someone needed to drop and get a lift back into town.

On the opposite end, I’ve seen ride leaders that are only interested in proving their own strength to the group. Ones that regularly break the paceline to sprint off, resulting in the paceline becoming fragmented (and eventually abandoned). These ride leaders don’t check on those at the back, and usually leave the mechanicals to others. What starts as a no-drop ride, becomes a free-for-all where those left behind are excluded from the group.

Ride Leader vs Team Leader

My recent experience with the ride leader helping us in the hot weather got me thinking about the ways in which leading a ride is similar to leading a team.

The Servant Leader

I strongly believe the best managers are ones that will do everything they can to help and support their team, rather than those that bark orders and dish out punishment. Like a ride leader, the manager helps to ensure everyone is supported so that the team can move towards their goal. If somebody falls behind, the manager doesn’t charge ahead, instead they fallback to help and find out what they can do to unblock the teammate. While a bad manager might sprint to the finish and take the credit, a good manager supports the team through the journey and recognizes each individual effort.

Keeping the Group Together

When a paceline starts to fracture, it has a negative impact on the group. When riders sprint ahead, there’s less people to rotate through at the front, meaning the drafting benefit is reduced for everyone. It’s the same with a team, if you can’t keep everyone marching together towards the same goal, silos will develop, people will be left behind and become frustrated, and the team will suffer as a result. It’s up to the leader to ensure this doesn’t happen, and to identify and assist when gaps start to develop.

It could be as simple as slowing the pace so people aren’t left behind, or it could take a conversation with those that purposely sprint ahead and disrupt the team dynamic.

Becoming a Better Leader

In both cycling and management, leadership isn’t something that you can just step into and master (and I absolutely don’t claim to be a master as either). But it is something that you can be intentional about. It’s easy to sprint ahead, trying to capture that KOM on Strava, but it takes a different frame of mind to realize that doing so comes at the detriment of your group.

Think back on the good and bad leaders you’ve had throughout your life and identify what contributed to your opinion of them. Being intentional on the traits you want to practice, and those you want to avoid, along with regular self-reflection is a step in the right direction.

And the next time it’s >90F outside, consider bringing some ice cold water for any cyclists you see ;-)

Test Pure Blog <-> Mastodon

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Testing a custom hook that auto posts to Mastodon from Pure Blog.

The bike gods are against me

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

That’s both my bikes retired.

I don’t fancy spending $5,000+ on a Cervelo/Canyon/Pinarello which means I’m throwing in the towel this year.

Not much point to this post, just my way of mourning a hobby I enjoyed.

Tiny Visitor Counter

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I created a tiny script for counting per-page visitors on your site. It’s as simple as uploading the PHP file to your server and pointing a <img /> tag to it. Leveraging the script as an image is an attempt to seed out bots (since they typically don’t render images).

Here’s a live version of the script:

You can grab the script on my Codeberg.

To setup with Pure Blog, upload the PHP file to your public folder and add the following HTML to your page and post footer HTML under Settings->Site (this assumes the script was uploaded to /visitors/index.php):

<figure class="visitor-count"><figcaption>Page View Count</figcaption><img src="/visitors/index.php" width="78" height="20" alt="view count number" /></figure>

What Time Is It?

Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On Palm OS, the interface for picking the start and end time of an event is represented as two columns, hour and minutes. The hours list either starts at 8AM and shows until 7PM (covering a full business day, or it starts at the next hour (if creating an event for today). Minutes are represented for every 5 minute interval, allowing every option to be shown at once.

A time picking interface on Palm OS

This interface is simple and requires an extremely low cognitive load to use. It’s scannable and adaptive to the current situation (today vs another day). It limits options (ie you can’t set a time of 12:33) to drive simplicity.

If we compare to the time picker on Android, we can see it’s significantly more complex.

Time picker on Android showing hours

One must first tap the hour, then tap AM/PM, then tap the minutes section and tap the minute they need.

Time picker on Android showing minutes

While minute intervals of 5 are shown on the screen, the user is able to select specific minutes, if they know how (one must drag the circle to get a specific minute). The interface has many more taps, states and cognitive load.

How about iOS?

Time picker on iOS

Like Palm OS, iOS limits you to 5-minute intervals. Similar to Android though, an additional interaction is needed to pick AM/PM. Picking hour and minutes is more involved as well, you must scroll the picker to the desired value.

The Palm OS UI might not be the prettiest, but it’s the fastest for most use-cases. The most common options (business hours and 5-minute intervals) are presented without the need for multiple states or scrolling. Setting the time is 2 taps away!

Why I Find Writing So Hard

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve had blogs on and off since I was a kid, but I typically never stick with them. I’ll write a few articles, then give up once my drafts folder becomes larger than my published. So I figured I’d write about my issues with writing!

Overthinking It

As a developer, one of the biggest killer of side projects is overthinking the tech stack. Should I use the latest JavaScript framework? What about backend framework? How do I approach hosting and CI/CD for deployment? Relational database or non-relational? Etc, etc, etc. By the time you think through all the options, you’re too tired to actually build the project. Writing is the same for me.

What topic should I address? Did I do enough research? Is my writing too formal, or too casual? What’s the structure of my article? Is it too long, or too short? Writing typically becomes a chore for me, rather than a casual way to get my ideas onto paper. Just like programming side projects, the only articles that see the light of day are the ones where I just say “fuck it, let’s just get something out there”.

Maybe that’s what I need to keep doing, just writing my thoughts with no regard for who will read it. Because, let’s be honest, nobody is reading my articles at this point. So I should focus on learning how to get my ideas out there, and naturally my ability to do so will improve.

Why Do I Overthink Writing?

If I had to guess, my struggle with writing stems from the fact that when I’ve had to write, it’s typically going to be graded or judged. Nearly all of my writing has been for school assignments, client proposals, emails to coworkers or applications for jobs/visas/etc. In my life (and I’m guessing most people’s lives), writing is not something you do for fun. It’s a chore where you have to be perfect, or you’ll be punished. And honestly that’s a shame, and something I only see as getting worse as we get further and further away from the personal/small web due to the downfall of blogs and text based communication.

Going Forward

I’m going to put forth more effort to write more, and overthink less. Easier said than done I know. I’m also going to stop caring who the audience is, both for my writing and side projects. What’s important is that I express my creative side, build projects/articles that are meaningful to me. I think that change of focus will lead to less drafts and more published paragraphs/lines of code.

Will AI Kill Software?

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Yes (to a degree).

I’ve always dreamt of running my own software company, something akin to Panic, 37Signals, Beagle Bros (from back in the day). Recently, I’ve been struggling a with the thought that my dream is no longer possible (there’s a difference between realistic and possible) thanks to AI.

On the news you’ll constantly find articles heralding the death of SaaS. Why pay a third-party software vendor if you can have a few employees internally replicate their product with your exact business needs? No legal or IT reviews, no subscriptions, no demos or sales calls, no trusting data to another company. Sounds like an easy choice.

If SaaS is out, then what about desktop software? Platforms like “Computer” (stupid name) from Perplexity threaten to replace computing as a whole with a LLM conversation. Heck, in my day to day nearly everyone is using Claude over traditional tools. Need a document? Forget Excel or Word, Claude can do it. Design mockups? Figma and Sketch are old-news, Claude can mock something up. Need a banner graphic or chart? Who uses Photoshop when there’s Claude.

And that’s where my dreams lay, seemingly crushed by the death of SaaS and desktop software. But…I don’t think that’s true. You see, my personal experience and the news are based on one environment: corporate.

I do believe that B2B SaaS and software is dead. Why? Because nobody wants to use it in the first place. Corporate software does not bring you joy. It’s sterile, boring and compliant. Your mindset is not in a position of joy. You don’t want to make that presentation or spreadsheet, you have to otherwise your family starves. If you’re given the opportunity for “someone else” (aka an LLM) to do your bidding, you’ll take it. You never truly cared about the output in the first place, so let Perplexity/Claude/Gemini/etc take the wheel.

Here’s the thing though, when you clock out for the day, the software you interact with can instill joy. Suddenly you’re using Acorn to support your photography hobby. You fire up ia Writer to update your blog (what I’m typing with right now). You use Nova to build the website for your cycling club. Personal software has the opportunity to be fun.

Creative workflows are meaningful, exciting and joyful. The process is part of the art, not something that can outsourced to an LLM. Sure, “business creative” can be handled by Claude. Who gives a shit how your “Black Friday Sale” poster was made, you sure as hell don’t. “Human creative” on the other hand is yours, it’s personal, it’s meaningful.

“Human creative” is what will save software. High quality tools that instill joy by supporting the creative processes that make life meaningful.

And honestly? Good riddance to “business creative”. I’m all for the death of corporate software.