It’s the easiest it’s ever been to make software–especially simple apps, single-serving websites, and scripts. This year I’ve been having a blast programming again and I’ve really embraced the idea:
Software is useful even if it has just one user.
This year I put together a few small apps for a single user: myself. They’re not scalable or secure or written to run on public servers or pushed to GitHub or tested beyond my own use case or ready in any way for other users or other programmers. They are all comically simple but help me get something done. They are home-cooked apps, and you’ll just have to believe me when I say they’re delicious.
In the spirit of showing my work—and to remember how and why I made them—here are a few of the things I built just for me in 2025.
Tri Today: Told me whether and how far I needed run, bike, swim, lift, or rest today based on my personal triathlon training plan.
Inbox Cleaner: Charts my daily progress toward an empty inbox against a goal end date, with a leaderboard of most-ignored senders.
Cover Search: Finds high-resolution cover images for any given TV show, movie, album, book, or podcast.
Curator: Generates a digest of interesting links, given everything I’ve written about on this website.
I’ve added these to my Projects page, in the hope that others can take the ideas and methods and adapt and expand on them for their own purposes.
Did you make anything small and simple just for you this year? Tell me about it.
High achievers are perhaps the most insecure people among us. Competitive people behave the way they do because without those daily victories they struggle to accept themselves. They need constant reminders, promotions, or media attention to feel good about who they are.
Despite how much public praise they receive, for many, achievement is a way to mask self-loathing, depression, anxiety or shame. Perfectionism and ambition can be coping mechanisms, with the unusual bonus that other people reward them for coping in this way.
(via) Search and read Jeffrey Epstein’s email as if you were logged into his Google account with Jmail. Luke Igel and Riley Walz converted the House Oversight release PDFs to structured text using an LLM, and made the message threads available in this convincing Gmail clone. Be sure to check out starred messages, and click on the contact list in the sidebar to filter threads by person.
(via) Brian Moore’s Busy Simulator makes repeating app sounds that make you seem incredibly busy. Fun exercise: observe how your body feels when you hear these sounds. I have different reactions to different apps.
Tai Ericson is using donated Harry Potter books to make portraits of transgender people who have been murdered, including Sam Nordquist and Ra’Lasia Wright. “The author [of Harry Potter] has contributed purposefully and relentlessly to a culture that vilifies and endangers trans people around the world. The portrait destroys her work, replacing it with a memorial to someone that lost their life to the culture fostered by the author.”
(via) Artist Isabel Fish created a dozen animated horses using “unconventional methods” with her computer, including with smudges on her screen, Excel, Google Maps, and desktop icons. Inspect the website to see horse frames in the HTML comments.
Open a new account at Ally Bank using my referral link and you’ll get $100 (and I’ll get $50). I like how Ally reimburses ATM fees, helps you track specific goals with savings buckets, and sponsors women’s sports. Open your new Ally account now.
Like everyone else on the internet, I’m completely obsessed with Lily Allen’s newest album, West End Girl. Allen wrote and recorded all 14 devastating and detailed songs about her marriage’s breakdown in just 10 days. (Listen to them start to finish, with closed captioning on.)
“It was hard to make this record,” Allen said. “It was incredibly manic, and it was emotionally traumatic. But nothing felt forced. It just sort of fell out of me. That’s what happens when you’re writing from a place of truth, and without an agenda. This record was purely for me, and it was a way of processing things that I was going through in my private life.”
I haven’t made anything new in awhile and it doesn’t feel good. I’ve been looking after a family member who had surgery, so most of my time has been spent on doctor appointments, pharmacy runs, food prep, laundry, going to the gym, and making sure my middle-schooler is fed, getting her homework done, taking showers, wearing clean clothes, and getting to school on time.
Objectively I know that caring for the people I love in tangible ways is one of the best uses of my time and energy. Yet, I found myself telling a friend that I “lost the day” to the logistics of sustaining my family life. When I don’t make progress on creative projects, my internal judge decides it’s a less productive—and therefore less valuable—day, even if I’ve made a nutritious meal, shared a laugh with my kid, and lifted heavier weights at the gym.
This doesn’t make sense. Challenging beliefs like this is a major part of my personal productivity detox. The idea that building new things is more valuable than maintenance or care is some capitalist bullshit, and it’s worth deprogramming.
Why do coffeeshops, book covers, office buildings, and YouTube thumbnails all look the same? “People are less weird than they used to be. We’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline. Creativity is just deviance put to good use. It, too, seems to be decreasing.”
During the pandemic, Broadway legend Harvey Fierstein turned his quilting hobby into a full-time gig. (Check out his studio setup.) Today, he shows his work at museums and hosts “bitch and stitch” sessions with his quilting circle. “Being an artist is constantly trying to figure out who you are,” he says about his reinvention.
The extreme hype surrounding generative AI and technologies like LLMs has been exhausting over the last few years. Coupled with fear-based marketing against a backdrop of rolling layoffs—“if you’re not embracing AI you’ll be left behind”—it’s downright toxic. You can’t toss a rock on LinkedIn without hitting some thinkfluencer sharing the AI prompts and products that will solve all your problems, or celebrating the latest unicorn someone vibe-coded last week.
My former colleague Lisa Woodley recounts her 20-year path from designer to corporate sales leader and back. Like so many who shift their focus in the second half of their career, a health crisis that gave her lots of time to think was her catalyst. Some great, thoughtful guidance here for anyone also on their way back home to their true work.
Run by and for trans people, Trans Lifeline is a grassroots hotline offering direct emotional and financial support to trans people in crisis. Donate today.
There’s a profound difference between 3 seemingly similar ways to spend time:
sitting around and making things, either alone or with people you want to be around, which is a fundamentally human experience
sitting/standing around and making things with people you’ve been ordered to work with, on things you’ve been ordered to make, on a full-time work schedule set by someone else
performing all the capitalist ceremonies of the previous bullet point, but you’re not even making anything yourself
All 3 get muddled together in discussions and in subjective experience, and in any case most people only experience the 2nd or 3rd one for large swaths of their lives.
It takes a while, post-retirement, to let go of all the nonsense from those ways of being, and instead to return to the simpler and more human acts of chopping wood, carrying water, and making things for their own sake.
— Redditer ScoobyDoobyGazebo on how deeply “people don’t understand the grasp work and productivity has on their lives.”
Molly Graham shares a useful exercise for anyone deciding on a path: Visualize your inner voices as passengers in a car. One of them is driving, the other is in the front seat navigating, a couple are in the backseat, and someone’s stuffed in the trunk. When you want to go in a certain direction, ask yourself: Which part of me has the wheel? Who’s in the trunk? What would happen if they switched spots?
A couple of weeks ago I turned 50 years old, which is a sentence my fingers feel strange typing because in my mind I’m still somewhere in my late 20s. Age perception is weird like that. There’s a polite assumption your loved ones (and your financial planner) like to make, which is that you will live to be 100 years old. Actuarial tables tell a more likely story, but I don’t care: I’m going to try to reach centenarian status.
Working back from there, I think of this 50th birthday as halftime—that pause mid-game when players get to run off the field, take a breather, review what’s happened so far, and strategize what’s next (ideally while Shakira and J. Lo do this show).
(via) An all-time great story of creative release: It’s 1995, and Mariah Carey is recording her fifth album Daydream. She’s also in a terrible marriage, longing to be free from it and her pristine pop image. To blow off steam, she writes a grunge rock album inspired by alt-rock bands like Garbage, Hole, and Sleater-Kinney. She records it at night with the band after the Daydream sessions, channeling her frustrations into the music, and picks the most perfect name for such a project: Someone’s Ugly Daughter. When you’re feeling one-dimensional, never forget: Mariah Carey recorded Always Be My Baby at the same time as Demented.
Completing tasks, no matter how inane, made me feel productive—and through the years I’d convinced myself that I needed to be productive at all times in order to achieve broader life goals. Never you mind the fact that most of those tasks have no real importance and frequently represent phony work.
—This wonderful, first-person account on Living a FI describes what it takes to deprogram the stay-busy mindset that plagues ambitious people who crush their todo list (but miss out on life). Anyone else give yourself a nightly performance review of whether or not you got enough done that day? Yeah. This one’s for us.
For months I worked toward being ready to flip the switch from private to public on this blog. When I finally did it, it felt great. For a couple of days, I rode a launch high, helped along by likes, comments, kind emails, newsletter subscribers, and bug reports (true gifts). Then I got very self-conscious and clammed up. What am I ever going to write about again? With people watching??
In the meantime, a lot happened. I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, a masterclass in vulnerability and sharing one’s inner life. My kid leveled up from a pre-teen to a teen. My spouse got Covid. The political situation in the U.S. continued to become more unhinged by the day. I turned 50 and went on a fabulous trip to another world to celebrate.
I’m back at my desk now, ready to thaw out. Thank you for being here.
I asked Mike Monteiro how he thinks about his creative practice, and he wrote about how much he loves folding socks. Life’s most mundane and creative activities are interconnected.
Hello world. This is my new blog. I’ve been writing it in private for awhile now, so I’m glad you’re here. Check out what it’s all about, then I hope you’ll explore and find something interesting.
I usually post something new a couple times a week. If you’d like a monthly roundup via email, subscribe to the newsletter.
A lot has changed since I started writing on the web half a lifetime ago, but I believe one thing hasn’t: sharing what’s on your mind brings you closer to finding your people and yourself. I’m glad to be back at it. What are you working on? I’d love to hear about it—get in touch.
Singer-songwriter EJAE recorded a couple of voice notes on her way to the dentist which became the mega-hit earworm Golden. EJAE was the voice of lead singer Rumi in KPop Demon Hunters, Netflix’s most popular movie of all time, and my favorite movie of the year. For the fans!
When you focus on maximizing productivity, you inhibit creativity. In many ways, productivity and creativity are at odds.
Productivity is all about getting stuff done more efficiently: completing tasks and projects to meet your obligations and be successful. Capitalism relies on ever-increasing levels of human productivity. It always asks: What is the most value you can bring with the least amount of time and effort?
