Building things, obsessing over good DX, and figuring out how AI agents change everything (or don’t).

New York
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#NewProfilePic at @resend Forward this week excited to hang out with the folks behind one of my favorite dev tool, and some of my favorite people in this racket @cpenned @aarondfrancis @zenorocha @philnash
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really fun AI trivia night at @MuxHQ Round 1: Pokémon or Python package Round 2: tech leader or philosopher Round 3: therapy or AI term Round 4: who’s bug is it anyway Round 5: don’t remember the name lol so fun, and harder than you might think. expect the most fun from @lizziepika @hey_amandam of course 😊 thank you @EntireHQ @Vapi_AI and @MuxHQ
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Funny timing man. Just an hour ago, while walking around San Francisco, I was thinking about all my old Foursquare check-ins and the badges😐 Made me wonder if I should build a personal, private version of Foursquare. No social features, no sharing. Just a little diary of places I’ve been and the memories attached to them. Just because….
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
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thinking more about this I wonder how much of this comes down to the person choosing or designing a product not being the person actually using it? We see this a lot with developer tools too. The PMs designing them might go through the quickstart, try a few things, and think they’ve experienced the product. But that’s very different from actually using it every day. And I wonder how much of what we call bad DX comes down to this disconnect?
I think about this shampoo holder often (or at least every time I’m traveling, like I am now). We came across it at a hotel in Munich couple years ago, and it’s perhaps the best-designed shampoo dispenser I’ve seen at a hotel. You just squeeze the bottle to dispense shampoo into your hands. No pumping, no separate bottles, etc. I wonder why we don’t see these more often in hotels?
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I think about this shampoo holder often (or at least every time I’m traveling, like I am now). We came across it at a hotel in Munich couple years ago, and it’s perhaps the best-designed shampoo dispenser I’ve seen at a hotel. You just squeeze the bottle to dispense shampoo into your hands. No pumping, no separate bottles, etc. I wonder why we don’t see these more often in hotels?
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Meanwhile, here’s the one in my hotel room right now 🤷🏽‍♂️
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have a fair bit of travel coming up, and finally paid for @Flighty app on iOS. it’s gotta be one of the most thoughtful and beautifully designed apps. moved all my data from Tripit too, and now have this gorgeous “passport” view. that’s a lot of flying hours, and hours lost to delays in the last 15 years lol
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not surprisingly, 2016 was a busy year with 24 flights, and close to 80k flying miles. I had just joined @alexadevs, and this was peak travel season preaching the voice skills. side note: that hasn’t turned out the way we all had hoped lol
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but the busiest year so far was 2024 - the year I took a sabbatical and we traveled with the then 2 y/o - across Asia, and Europe. 35 flights. Almost 90k flying miles. with a toddler. pretty proud of that tbh 😊
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being able to iterate on this while on a flight without opening a computer is pretty liberating just added a new module that tracks my domains!
one of the first things i built on my private server was an amazon shopping dashboard. with a four-year-old, keeping track of clothing orders, returns, and refunds can get surprisingly messy. so i built something that reconciles our amazon purchases with credit card transactions. I like it.
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one of the first things i built on my private server was an amazon shopping dashboard. with a four-year-old, keeping track of clothing orders, returns, and refunds can get surprisingly messy. so i built something that reconciles our amazon purchases with credit card transactions. I like it.
tbh, you could use any linux distro for this but @omarchy makes it ridiculously easy even as a droplet claude code, codex, tailscale, etc are all a few clicks away less time configuring linux, more time building stuff
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two skills i use the most to keep my agent’s responses short and easy to understand: “bro” and “i have adhd”
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tbh, you could use any linux distro for this but @omarchy makes it ridiculously easy even as a droplet claude code, codex, tailscale, etc are all a few clicks away less time configuring linux, more time building stuff
I’ve been building a bunch of little tools for myself lately. Dashboards, automations, experiments with personal data. Most of these will never be public. But I still want to access them from anywhere, without keeping my laptop running. So I spent some time over the weekend setting up my own little private cloud. Combination of @Tailscale @omarchy on a @digitalocean droplet. It’s been surprisingly useful.
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I’ve been building a bunch of little tools for myself lately. Dashboards, automations, experiments with personal data. Most of these will never be public. But I still want to access them from anywhere, without keeping my laptop running. So I spent some time over the weekend setting up my own little private cloud. Combination of @Tailscale @omarchy on a @digitalocean droplet. It’s been surprisingly useful.
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Reminder to self: Napkins don’t fix everything, but they fix a lot.
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accidentally bumped into this abomination of a webpage, and it reminded me how awesome it is that we don't have to deal with this crap on a daily basis anymore. travel bloggers and cooking recipe websites really ruined the internet. not every ounce of our existence on this planet needs to be monetized.
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we seem to be spending way more time admiring our tools than thinking about what we want to make with them. we’ve got a better hammer. what are we going to build?
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new domain acquired. how's your Thursday?
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this kind thing should honestly be the default offering for developer tools: free trial no credit card required free credits (if applicable)
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