Open source was built upon the idea that anyone should be able to study, modify, replicate and share software. Free from the grasp of corporations and copyrights to prevent it.

In a strange way, I’m beginning to wonder if AI might end up fulfilling that vision more completely than open source ever did.

As recently as early last week, after an agentic coding session, I said (to myself) “Perhaps all software should be open source now”.

I’ve never been an open source zealot. I use it. I contribute to it. I write my own and release it freely. In fact, most of the code I write ends up in the open. But I’m totally ok with people or businesses keeping source completely closed. I think the choice is the author’s.

But, whether we like it or not, and whether we like how we got here or not, we’re about to have most source written by LLMs. Perhaps we’re already there? We’re very, very close either way. If effectively all new source is being written by LLMs, shouldn’t it be all open?

[…] what is going to make Acorn stand out?

I’m starting to think that’s going to be personality and feel and polish, but turned up a notch.

And:

I’ve got feelings because anyone can put an app together now, so what’s the point of me? But at the same time, I can focus on what I want to focus on and hopefully charge forward and maybe everyone else will get tired of little vibe coded apps because you still have to know exactly what you want to build. And you can’t build something you can’t think of. And I know how to think and I have ideas.

Be sure to go read the entire post.

I like Gus’ thinking. What value do we still bring in this new landscape? I personally feel that my value is being able to spend more time on the important and different parts of what I make. Soft of like the way frameworks were supposed to help with that – handle the mundane parts so I can build the exciting parts. But agents help to kick that up several hundred notches.

I do disagree with something I read in Gus’ post and also what I’m reading from many others; the idea that anyone can build an app now and ship it with little effort.

The “anyone” has always been able to build an app. I have long felt that my personal quality of being willing to push through really hard things is why I was able to make software, not because I was smarter than anyone else. Gus calls himself a middle-tier programmer (from what I hear, he’s selling himself short) but if that is true then I’m definitely on the lowest of tiers. And I still managed to make a living at it since I was ~14. My perseverance (interest? passion?) is my best quality for this job perhaps. So I don’t think that part is new.

How easy it is to create software is easier today than just a few months ago. True. However, shipping and profiting from that software is still not easy at all. You still have to have the fortitude to do it. Selling will continue to be difficult but even packaging it, making it work everywhere it needs to, supporting it, etc. All of these things may be easier but they are not for the faint of heart.

If you weren’t the type of person that was able to push through hard things prior to agentic coding you likely won’t be now that it exists.

Is the code any good? I don’t know. Who cares? Nobody looks at it anyway. AI produces a result, and results are what matter, and if you’re waiting for quality to factor significantly into that equation, I’ve got some bad news about the last 40 years of professional software development for you.

Be sure to read the entire post.

I can totally understand feeling this way. I enjoy programming but I’ve always disliked how long it took me to get from idea to result. I didn’t like the mundane parts of the craft. So this revolution that allows me to focus only on the interesting parts is pretty amazing. I don’t miss the grind, yet.

The anxiety is rational, which is why it sticks. Every week some new benchmark drops that makes last month’s workflow feel prehistoric. Codex ships overnight processing. Opus gets faster. Context windows double. None of it reduces the pressure. It multiplies it. You can do more now. And someone already is.

A technology that could give us more free time is having the opposite effect. I remember when I got my first computer; I was up all night for weeks figuring everything out. When I got my first Mac, I did the same thing. When I got the first iPhone, same. When I began my journey into film photography and darkroom printing, same. And many other pursuits.

This feeling isn’t new to those of us that have been around for these big jumps and shifts in our workflows. But it is important to step back and pace yourself. Be sure you’re getting a balanced view. Get outside away from computers. Take a break from the race, it will be there when you get back.

/via Kottke.

To my surprise, it didn’t take long to get an initial implementation of what I had in mind working and running on my own device. And from there it’s been fun to design the app iteratively in code. Swift UI is a blessing because it makes this fairly easy — allowing me to add new features and other improvements sometimes in just a matter of minutes.

Thoughtful and talented designers like Scott should make more of their own apps and I’m happy to see more people doing so.

Where Now? definitely looks useful. I installed it on my phone today. It is simple. You can manually or automatically save your private location history and be able to use it later. I can think of 100 reasons I will be able to use this app in my photography, hiking, traveling, fishing, and recently four-wheeling adventures.

Google Maps has/had a feature like this but I turned it off long ago. It is nice to have a private app from someone I trust.

Here is Scott again:

I didn’t come into 2026 thinking that I’d make an app. In fact, I hadn’t considered such a thing in any serious way before, and yet, I managed to do it.

I can easily plug the data collected by Where Now? into my own remote and private API endpoint. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry, Scott didn’t know how to build an app and he did. So get playing.

It was a beautiful and predictable scheme. Once you knew how it worked, you could guess other URLs.

The del.icio.us and Flickr APIs and URL schemes were appropriately lauded as clean, predictable, and best-in-class.

This sort of predictability isn’t seen as often these days, especially by the behemoth platforms running on top of terrible frameworks.

Mastodon, however, has some nice URLs.

I wrote this for me.

For a long time now, my taste in software has outstripped my ability to execute (mostly as a function of hours-in-a-day), but now with tools like Claude Code, I’m finding execution and taste are aligning in astounding ways. It’s no exaggeration to say that using Claude Code to build The Good Place (and also a bunch of other small tools and projects) is one of the most astonishing computing experiences of my life. It’s difficult to articulate how utterly empowering a tool like Claude Code (paired with malleable software, open software, open systems (i.e., not iOS/iPadOS)) is for someone like me: someone with a strong technical background who can guide the LLM, knows which questions to ask, and knows how to keep it from going off on weird tangents. (It’s like working with an eight-year-old who has a thousand years of knowledge.)

I have so many thoughts about this. For years software ideas were bandied about as if that were the hard part. Self-described “non-technical founders” looking for technical ones to help them build their dream. Again, as if the idea were the hard part. Literally everyone has ideas!

It turns out the hard part is selling the idea. Building most software ideas was also a lot of work (hard, isn’t likely the right way to describe it). But for some people they just didn’t want to spend the time to learn how.

That has all changed now. As of this moment (and certainly as of the moment Craig wrote the above), a certain type of person has a huge advantage in being able to build their ideas when previously they didn’t have the skills or the time to do so. Knowing just enough about what is required to build software gives you a real leg up in using these tools. Additionally today, compared to when Craig wrote the above, even more so. I don’t even think you have to have the ability to “steer” the LLM anymore. They no longer go off on weird tangents as they used to.

The hard part will still be selling the idea (if that is your goal). But the exciting part is that you can build bespoke software just for yourself or your team. Like I am for myself. And at NerdPress we have several bespoke solutions that are purpose built for our needs that we never would have made if it weren’t for agentic coding.

For many film photographers, this bridges the gap between analogue shooting and digital organization. In this article, we’ll explore how that information is transferred to your scanned images as EXIF data—and how you can use it to search and organise your work in Adobe Lightroom.

Frames is a well considered app (on iOS and macOS) by Vincent Tantardini.

As an aside: I recently used Claude Cowork to add EXIF data to my film negative scans and it worked just fine. But using Frames would be much more precise and easily repeatable.

There’s no reason to take this, or to share it. […]

I’m always drawn to piles of things. I don’t know why. I’ve driven past this fence in this field all week and thought it’d make a photo that I’d like, but it was only yesterday afternoon when there was a pile-driver next to it that I thought I’d better make a plan to take this picture or the opportunity’s going to be gone and I’m going to regret that I didn’t make the effort. Surely that’s what this whole project has been about – re-framing myself as a photographer, and developing a willingness to interrupt my routine to get a photo.

I cannot count the number of photographs that I’ve regretted not pulling the car over to make. Jasper’s project of making a photo daily is pushing him to make the photos he’d otherwise pass by. An excellent photograph.

Some pull quotes from the post officially announcing it (worst permalink ever?) are a bit staggering.

With launches every hour carrying 200 tons per flight, Starship will deliver millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year, enabling an exciting future where humanity is out exploring amongst the stars.

Again, Musk and Bezos have been speaking about this sort of future for many years. Bezos often said Amazon would have never happened if UPS and FedEX and USPS didn’t exist. SpaceX and Blue Origin are poised to be that foundational freight layer for moving mass to and from Earth to space. But SpaceX is also equipped to go far beyond just moving mass, it is now going to move data via Starlink, set up data-centers, and power AI all over the planet.

Spending ~$40B on Twitter is now a minuscule afterthought. Which is unfortunate because Twitter (and I’m talking about Twitter even pre-Dorsey CEO days) was a real special place. A new social network with the same feature set of Twitter could have been built (especially today) very quickly. But I have to stop even thinking about Twitter… it is very much long dead and will never return in any shape or form.

I’m writing this down for posterity. The next move is that SpaceX buys 1 million robots from Tesla, ensuring Musk’s payday there, and then SpaceX will buy Tesla to enable the solar and automation needs required to build data centers, bases, and cities in the harsh environment of space.

It’s perfectly ok to go to another country/city and just take it easy and enjoy oneself.

I completely agree with Darice’s take on traveling. Go somewhere, get comfy, and explore. That is exactly what we do also. As little an agenda as possible.

I’m struggling to find a balance that I like. My deepest self says post everything here, right on my own personal website. As broken and beautiful as it is (I’m constantly fiddling lately, sorry).

But if I do that should I take the time to share the same posts across some or all of the services I’m currently signed up for? Unfortunately, POSSE just isn’t for me. So that isn’t the answer.

There are two factors at play; friction and reach.

The friction (or, amount of work and time) to publish can be a good thing and a bad thing. It is good because it may slow me down just enough to not publish too much drivel. Then again, drivel can be fun. At least for me, publishing something silly online is fun. Publishing on my website has much more friction than quickly tapping out a toot.

Reach (and with it, engagement) are important too because I sometimes want feedback or replies from other humans. Because I don’t have comments on my blog I do not get many replies when I publish here. The replies I do get, however, are usually awesome and via email. I love it.

Why is this a struggle? No one else cares. Why do I care? Why do I even spend any time thinking about it? Why am I now writing about it? Should I delete this post?

I’m publishing it here on my blog and not sharing it anywhere else.

You might suggest that I spend less time on X, but I’m not inclined to look away just as the train gets up to full speed. Sure it’s a distorted reality, but it points to real ground truth: even if progress on language models slows this year, we are still far behind in using what already exists to reshape software design and engineering.

Her thoughts pair well with the aforelinked from Taranis. Even if progress slowed or stalled, we’d still have more than enough headroom to continue to reshape how we do what we do.

In fact, just this week I Slacked a colleague that I hoped OpenAI doesn’t change 5.2-Codex because I’m incredibly productive at the moment. It is a bit absurd.

I’m happy to see someone as thoughtful as Appleton on the GitHub Next team.

All photos shot on iPhone 17 Pro Max using Snapseed’s new camera feature in Kodak Portra 400 emulation mode.

I’ve turned off comments and other minor features to improve site performance here because I think AI bots are hogging things.

The scourge of internet traffic currently are data scraping bots slurping up the web. I don’t know why there are so many, why the requests are so often, or if there will ever be an effective way to block them. But it stinks that one must now live in fear and turn off features of one’s website to exist on the web. Sort of like installing bars on our windows or building tall fences to keep out the neighbors.

I don’t know if what Chris was experiencing was all data scraping bots… go look at his comments section for that post. Looks like he was also getting inundated with comment spam as well.

But hear me out.

These diversions aren’t the bad kind of diversions. I mean, my most recent post in this series talked about growing garlic for farmer’s sake.

So what have I been filling my time with?

I started building an all-new static site generator for WordPress, of course.

You may recall I built Tuff, an SSG that gobbled up directories full of Markdown files and spewed out a website in just a few seconds. But then, I decided to switch back to WordPress (in part, because I build a product within it, but also in part because I do like the Gutenberg editing experience).

When I jumped back into WordPress I very quickly wished I was serving my site statically and so I found Simply Static, a plugin that turns a WordPress website into a bunch of static files. I use it for Good Migrations and The Watercolor Gallery. But when I tried to use it for my website, it choked. I made do for a while, but it took well over an hour to build my website even for very small updates that should have taken seconds. I emailed them, several times, sent in log files, explained the situation — I even read their code… but, they were borderline unwilling to try to help.

I know how hard it is to provide support for a WordPress product. The ecosystem is so vast, the environments across all installs so diverse, it is nearly impossible. So I do not blame them for pretty much leaving me on my own to figure it out.

But that led me to wonder if I should port Tuff to WordPress? I didn’t. I ultimately started over from scratch and, in a few quick sessions, and admittedly, with the assistance of an LLM, I had my own plugin that built my website in… wait for it… seconds. Not my whole site (that still takes a few minutes, and I hope to improve this) but only the parts that need to be updated when publishing a single post.

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader or on my website, you’re reading a file that was created by this new plugin.

I’ve also been drawing up plans for a pretty extensive renovation of our basement to upgrade our laundry area and to build a better darkroom. After a year of construction on our home, adding a mother-in-law apartment, decks, new porch, roof, etc. I’m not too eager to have more work being done. But, at the same time, once you’ve done these larger projects smaller ones do seem easier.

In #6 I mentioned making grape jelly in the fall of 2024. Well, we made a batch again this year and it is some of the best jelly I’ve ever had. Long story very short; we picked our grapes on the same date in 2025 as we did in 2024. But the grapes were very different. Less sweet than 2024, more tart. This gives the jelly much more character and a tart finish that I really love. I’ll be aiming for this same profile in 2026.

• Signboard – A bit of a shameless plug for a project I’m working on in my spare time here and there. I use this app every single day to manage my side business. I love it.
• Immich – I’m giving strong consideration to moving to Immich for all of my personal photo management. If you have experience with it, please let me know. Via Jack Baty.
• Hopewood Baskets – Gorgeous handmade willow baskets.
• Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers on Tiny Desk – I don’t think I need to say anything more.
• Adrianne Lenker and David Byrne – Two artists I’ve been diving into recently.

When we’re bored, we think. We get ideas. We let our mind wander. We ask ourselves; what if? We remember. We imagine. We relive. We learn. We reprioritize. We plan. We decide.

People of times past wished they could have spent as much time being bored as we now have the opportunity to.

And yet… so many are wasting valuable boredom time on countless hours of video entertainment. Have you watched the latest popular streaming episodic content?!? The first 3 hours are boring but if you stick with it the next 12 are amazing. How about that famous TV series from a decade ago? You have to watch that! It is only an 81-hour epic that you’ll want to watch twice. Have you scrolled through 72 hours of people dancing to a song from the 90s in the palm of your hand this week? Oh, and don’t forget your favorite sport has 9 games this weekend that you must watch every minute of. The broadcasting for which starts 2 hours earlier than the game.

Lately, I’ve been prioritizing boredom. I’m still learning how to do this but one way that has had an impact has been to do boring tasks without media playing.

Usually, if I’m mowing the lawn, showering, shoveling snow, working in the garden, driving, doing the dishes, etc. I’ll have a podcast on. I listen to podcasts and watch YouTube videos that I learn from, so I thought that would be a net positive use of my time. But that only goes so far. I kept shoving new information in without letting myself have the time to use the information that I already collected. So, for now, I’ve been doing these tasks in relative silence… allowing my mind time to work, to distill, to create.

I almost always end up coming back to a work session or my bullet journal with tons of ideas for something new or something I’m working on.

Quoting Jeffrey Davis in a 2022 post in Psychology Today:

In a series of studies, researchers found that subjects who were asked to do mundane, boredom-inducing tasks were more creative afterward. Boredom is a “variety-driving emotion,” meaning that it primes us to seek out new and different — therefore creative — experiences and solutions.

I can say from first-hand experience, this is definitely true.

I plan to write more about boredom in 2026. Until then, stop reading this and go get yourself bored.

I believe it is always good to read both sides of debates. If I find myself overly positive or negative about a topic or technology, I seek out those that disagree. Hopefully, this has helped me to have a more balanced opinion. I don’t know.

There are many parts of this post I agree with and a few I do not. Here is one I agree with:

A good example is transformers used to assist in programming, or to generate code from scratch. This has convinced many non-programmers that they can program, but the results are consistently disastrous, because it still requires genuine expertise to spot the hallucinations. Plausible hallucinations in code often result in really horrible bugs, security holes, etc., and can be incredibly difficult to find and fix. My own suspicion is that this might get you close to what you think is finished, but actually getting over the line to real production code still requires real engineering, and it’s a horrible liability to have to maintain a codebase that nobody on the team actually authored.

I agree with the above and wrote something similar recently. This is what I wrote:

In my experience, LLMs are very good at helping me with my job but they aren’t very good (yet) at doing my job. Most code written by agents (meaning, LLM tools that have a bit more autonomy to do more than just suggest code updates) takes nearly the same amount of work to fix than it would have been if you wrote it yourself. It also has the added drawback of the programmer not being intimately familiar with the codebase. Which, in the longterm, could be a real issue. But perhaps this will be improved upon and go away and we’ll never need to see code again? I’m not sure.

Taranis post largely makes the case that the underlying technology of modern LLMs (transformers, primarily) are a dead end. That the initial progress made by throwing enormous amounts of compute at the problem has stalled and won’t improve even if, somehow, you could throw ten times as much compute at it again.

I’m not an expert enough in this field to know if that is true or not. But, I think progress may come from areas yet unexplored. It is really hard to say that something will never make progress. Never say never, they say. So while it could be true that the current technology for LLMs has already peaked, we may very well see an entirely different approach emerge soon enough.

Driven by the creative tooling we’ve cut our teeth on and drawing on our product and imaging experience, we’re making a product for Mac.

His partners are Ryan Carver and Julio Pablo Zambrano. I’ve exchanged many a message with Carver while he was building Series.

When a new company is formed by someone you admire, it is exciting. When they say they’ll be building something for the Mac it is doubly so. When you mix in that it is related to photography, my ears pop off the side of my head with excitement.

I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square where there are not particularly rigorous laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face. Before social media, if someone wanted to engage with you, they had to come to your house and be civil before you’d give them the time of day or let them in. And if they wanted you to engage with them, they’d have to make their own house compelling enough that you’d want to visit.

Getting a toot boosted on Mastodon is good. Getting your blog linked to by a fellow blogger? The best.

Note: Spiers writes about blogging in the past tense. I have to remind myself not to do that. Blogging is alive and well. Like the old forests, blogging will still be here when the social media landscape has withered and died.

The small web persists not because it’s winning any battle against platform dominance, but because some things are worth doing regardless of scale. These independent voices, scattered across their own domains, linked through blogrolls and RSS feeds and word of mouth, create a version of the internet that still feels human.

This is both the most powerful part of the web and the part that is currently most at risk.

This series lives on my blog but has nothing to do with me. It exists to connect you, the human who’s reading this, with all the other wonderful humans that are still out there, spending their time making sure the old school web, the one made by the people, for the people, is not dying. And see that bump on Nic’s analytics made me so happy. Because it means the series is working and doing its job. And it’s all because people like you are taking the time to read these interviews and click on those links to visit those blogs. And maybe you’re also taking time to reach out to those people and connect with them. This is the web many people are missing, a web that is, in fact, still here, very much alive.

I’ve directly connected with many people Manuel has interviewed for his series and they’ve reached out to me (presumably because they’ve come back to my website and read my posts or subscribed to my feed).

I’m really, really worried about the web. The combination of AI web browsers and agentic coding may just change the entire model of how the internet works. And I’m struggling to see how the parts of the web we love the most will even be accessible in the future. For example, web browsers are very difficult to build and I’m worried they won’t all ditch the document model for the agent model soon. I’m likely overthinking it but I’m super worried.

So yes, please, click all the links, read all the blogs, tell each other that you’re doing so. Keep the web alive and filled with human thought. And, whether you use AI or not, be sure to keep a copy of a version of your favorite web browser software without AI built in handy, you may need it in the future.

My hunch is that existing LLMs make it easier to build a new programming language in a way that captures new developers.

My take? Likely an unpopular one. Most modern programming languages were made to be human readable; yet, LLMs don’t need us to make new languages human readable at all. In fact, much of the features, structures, and methods built into them could likely be removed all together.

I know Simon’s comment wasn’t on how LLMs could make all-new LLM-only programming languages — but I think we’re going to start to see that happening at some point.

This was also the last trip I took with the iPhone 12 Pro Max. It served me well (these images, were _very_ quick snaps while on the run, but I did manage to take some very nice images with the iPhone 12 over the years).

I understand why some are choosing to boycott the use of AI due to how the information to train the models was gathered … which is that much of it was most definitely stolen. There are models, such as Common Pile, and others that have only been trained on openly licensed and public data … but even then, what is public data?

I think a lot also about the profound amount of energy and other resources needed to create all of these model training datacenters.

So it leaves me in a spot in my career so far that feels unique. I can’t remember a time that aligns with this one. The licensing, piracy, DRM, and crypto periods that the web has seen all had their challenges but this feels different because, so far at least, it feels like LLMs and the skills to use them deftly might become vital for what I do.

I don’t think I could write it better than Frank Chimero said in a recent talk he gave in Brooklyn.

The believers demand devotion, the critics demand abstinence, and to see AI as just another technology is to be a heretic twice over.

So, with hesitation, doubt, confusion, and also intrigue and excitement, here are some random thoughts about AI as I see it in the fall of 2025.

I’m going to focus mostly on AI use as it relates to programming. But I will say this; I believe this technology is going to be applied to every single thing we can imagine from our refrigerators, water pumps, cars, lights, healthcare, yard tools, and every piece of software we use. Whether we like that or not. (I’m personally not a fan of the “add AI to everything” moment we’re having.)

In early 2023 I was using ChatGPT to make me quicker at doing things I was already doing. It was a shortcut. It saved me from typing something mundane that I already knew what I was going to type but ChatGPT could “type” it faster. It wasn’t long after that I began to use models locally, rather than relying on cloud services like ChatGPT, to both keep my data more private but also to be less reliant on a paid service. It also allowed me to test many different models that were created in a variety of different ways and with different goals.

It is my hope that there is a model or set of models that everyone agrees was ethically sourced, trained, and distributed. It is arguable some of those already exist. Even if it isn’t as good at some things as the leading models, I would use that in a heartbeat.

The rate of updates to the models, tooling, features, etc. to LLMs between my post in 2023 and somewhat recently was neck break. Agents, MCP, CLI, APIs, all improved rapidly. And I tried just about everything.

In my experience, LLMs are very good at helping me with my job but they aren’t very good (yet) at doing my job. Most code written by agents (meaning, LLM tools that have a bit more autonomy to do more than just suggest code updates) takes nearly the same amount of work to fix than it would have been if you wrote it yourself. It also has the added drawback of the programmer not being intimately familiar with the codebase. Which, in the longterm, could be a real issue. But perhaps this will be improved upon and go away and we’ll never need to see code again? I’m not sure.

Let’s say you were going to build a weather app against an API of weather data. You asked an agent to show various bits of data in an app view; temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. But let’s say the API you’re using doesn’t support humidity levels it may just plop in what looks to be correct code to do so — even though you knew that it wasn’t supported. I see this all the time.

For APIs I know well, it isn’t too big of a deal. But for those I don’t, it is a huge time suck. Again, something that will no doubt improve until it no longer happens… but it is still very much happening.

Summarization, translation, transcription… these seem like solved problems at this point? They are incredibly useful.

My muscle memory has changed a bit (which is something I mentioned in that original post). I do use an LLM very early on in the process now where before I used it only after I got stuck on something. However, because of the setbacks and inconsistencies, I’m still reading the docs, doing the research, etc. before I jump into an LLM.

Recently we’re seeing AI browsers, like Dua and Atlas and others, pop up. I have no intention of ever installing these. In fact, I think the web browser landscape is dire. Mozilla seems lost, Safari is great (I use it daily) but locked on Apple platforms, and everything else is a version of Chromium which is supported by an ad-based business. Bleh! I think this is going to be a real problem.

One last thing, I think the hype and speed of improvement is about to ebb on the text-based solutions and perhaps flow on the video-based solutions for awhile. The tooling and communication across all of the platforms will likely improve greatly, agents likely will, and other things… but I think the text-based models and chats are going to stagnate for a little while. The focus is going to shift to image and video generation.

Kyle Ruane and I have been keeping the lights on the hosted version of Unmark at Unmark.it for years. To be able to continue to do so, we’re going to remove the free tier (you can use the open source version for free, of course) and increase the yearly plan to $30 per year.

Unmark is far from a successful product but we both love it and plan to keep it around for as long as we can. If you’d like to support its development as an open source alternative, you can donate or submit some code, or sign up for the paid service.

Sometimes I put in more time and effort, sometimes I neglect it for a bit, depending on the season and other pressures on my life. However, I always come back to it because it’s a space that is occasionally helpful or entertaining to others but always nourishing to me. Tinkering just for the fun of it, even when it’s cognitively challenging, is a meditative experience. It gets me into flow. I always learn something new.

I’ve wanted this for a long time – a kanban style productivity desktop app that writes Markdown files to disk. And that is what Signboard is.

It looks like this.

And here is this board represented on disk as directories and files.

You can grab a copy for macOS or Windows today and give it a try. Or, you can download the source and modify it if you’d like.

I have tried a few apps like this; such as the Obsidian Kanban Plugin. Which works but is fairly limited and doesn’t do exactly what I’d like. Also, it is inside Obsidian and I’d prefer a standalone app.

So a few weeks ago, after thinking about it for far too long, I decided to give it a try. But I had a few goals in mind.

• Be open source
• Be fast
• Write pretty good Markdown (meaning, as little “front matter” as possible)
• Use web languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Don’t use an enormous framework like React (in fact, I’d like to not use a framework at all)
• Use as few dependencies as possible

I realize how ironic that last one might seem. Signboard is an Electron app, so right out of the gate it has that as a dependency. That also requires code signing for desktop apps (which come with their own needs). It reads and writes Markdown, and of course I’m not going to rewrite ways do that in JavaScript, since it has already been done by better programmers than me. So, it has some dependencies, but – where possible – Signboard has those built right in as static files.

In fact, the Signboard app makes zero requests to the web. It runs locally and privately.

This app is also very early and basic. It doesn’t even have an icon yet! I figured that the less I build before making it public allows for more people to shape the app. I still hope the app stays opinionated, but that it may include things that I would have never thought of.

I’m already using the app everyday and I’m looking forward to seeing more people give it a try.

Allea Grummert, of Duett, and I cover the topic of being ok with constant change, a never-ending to-do list, and finding peace even though publishing online can be hard work.

Of course, I found a way to work in an illustration about gardening and a plug for Hubbub.

My thanks to Allea for the invite.