You know those 4-box quadrant models consultants overcharge for? I made a little app to easily make one, and collect the ones I don’t want to forget. Which ones did I miss?
I made a new single-page app for fun. Cashkey is an easy way to visualize and share how money comes and where it goes. I made it because:
- Money is like water: it flows in and out of our lives. Many people don’t know how, though.
- Sankey diagrams are great for visualizing things that flow, but they’re not natively available in spreadsheets.
- Sankey-making apps like the awesome Sankeymatic still require math that’s easy to botch.
Cashkey doesn’t save any data on the server—there is no database involved. Try it and let me know what you think.
My favorite color is blue, but I can’t easily visualize or describe the differences between common shades of blue, like cornflower or cobalt or electric or navy. There are many different kinds of blue! So I built an interactive blue color palette to reference, that I can also quiz myself with to learn.
This was my first jaunt into coding a little tool with AI and it was both fun and frustrating. It didn’t take long to grab the wheel and get into “I’m just gonna finish this myself” mode. Worth the running start, and the world still needs programmers.
I’ve been preoccupied with how to make the most of what little time we get here in this life for as long as I can remember, and it’s only increased with age and brushes with illness. Over ten years ago, this Wait But Why piece by Tim Urban on visualizing the entirety of your life as a finite number of weeks (versus years or months) made a big impression on me.
A week is a short enough time to hold in your head, and long enough time for big things to happen. Then there are eras of your life that span collections of weeks.
At the end of 2024, I was inspired by a few year-end media roundups, like
Soderbergh’s extensive list and a friend who keeps a spreadsheet of every movie she’s ever watched. So I started writing very brief reviews of all the media I consume at
Media Menu. It’s been a rewarding—and sometimes difficult!—practice to write about what I like and what I don’t. I plan to keep this going.
Pay attention to the things that expand your heart. When a person, a work of art, an essay, a film, a song, a photograph intrigues you, makes your chest feel bigger, gives rise to a warm feeling in your body, take note.
I had these feelings earlier this fall, when I got to visit the Guggenheim for Jenny Holzer’s Light Line exhibit. I’ve loved Holzer’s truisms for years now. I barely felt my feet watching them scrolling across the edges of that gorgeous rotunda in person, the way they did in 1989, except at all 6 levels.
