(2024) What am I thinking about this year?
For the past 6-ish months, I've mainly been heading iOS development at Shortwave, and mobile development has stayed very top-of-mind for me. Mobile interfaces are very different from desktop interfaces, and React native is a completely different platform to build for than the web: I have access to haptics, native UI elements, native-level code and performance. On the flip side, I have to deal with limited screen real estate, no hover feedback, the on-screen keyboard, and the worst of it all: flaky build-tooling.
Just like last year, I still want my career to focus on building software that empowers people to make their own solutions. But I've been gone on a bit of a detour, and I'm learning to really develop my product intuition. Although I do think well-designed products and building human-empowerment platforms go hand-in-hand: the most impactful inventions are simple to use but enable people to do things they couldn't before: light bulbs, bikes, Excel.
I've also developed a weird fascination with databases. I spent a long time building a database I thought would be the perfect API, but I ended up feeling meh about it. I'm still chasing the dream of building my own local-first database and sync engine, but I haven't yet done it in a way I'm happy with.
I guess the general theme of this year is interfaces, whether they are for engineers or end-users.
(2023) What am I thinking about this year?
I've been thinking a lot about computers and people. I decided a year ago that I want to focus my career on building software that empowers people to make their own solutions. Programming is a super power but it's too hard; there is an opportunity to make it 1000s of times easier.
So I've been working on a novel programming interface that can make this a lot easier. I haven't fleshed out all the technical details yet, but it will probably eventually use something I'm calling event-driven combinators, in a mix of nodes & wires and textual program interfaces. If you are building something in this space too and want to share ideas, please reach out!
Other things I've been working on (in the realm of computers) is increasing my knowledge and comfort with Rust. I feel like having Typescript and Rust under my belt makes me a flexible and powerful programmer; I can spin up new web prototypes in minutes while also being able to work on performance-critical low-level software.
Along that vein, I want to eventually culminate my Rust learnings into a database. I want the semantics to be similar to tuple-database or FoundationDb, but I've been looking into different kinds of trees like GiST (Generalized Search Tree) and Bkd-tree.
Personal
I'm focusing this next year on becoming more healthy and athletic. Working remote has not been great in that regard, and I want to reverse that. Part of this is daily exercise and just in general going out more (to parks, or walk around cities or whatever), but another part of this is being able to cook healthy meals quickly (which I'm really bad at). I'm also going to get an electric bike soon, which will hopefully entice me to go out and explore more.
Another thing I'm focusing on is learning to build more physical things. Like furniture or knick-knacks. Learning to crochet would be cool too.