Last month, I took a little break from all the hustle and bustle of the Internets and decided to focus on trying to get a better handle on my daily life. It included eating right, working out and, …
Five Years of Being A Full-Time Indie
Wow, it’s been a while. Figured passing another milestone is worth at least some sort of update. Looking back at my 1 year milestone has been amusing. My initial thought was that almost all the points brought up 4 years ago would no longer apply. A lot of the insights back then are strangely still quite applicable. So what’s happened in the 4 years since? On a more personal level, I’ve improved my eating and exercising habits to stay healthier.
Going for the 5 hour workday
Update: it's been a month since my proposal was approved - details at the end. Before my month long vacation I was in a crisis. Now I'm back at work and regardless of the great team and awesome project - I'm feeling the crisis creeping back. It's not the job,
My startup failed, and this is what it feels like…
We had users and traction, then we fell off a cliff. My 4 year emotional rollercoaster just came to an end.
Changing the web is hard, and for good reasons. But it should not be impossible, or the web itself cannot grow and change with the needs of the people who use it.
Post-alpha plans
Hey folks 👋 We’re about a month into the spaces alpha! From what I can tell, it’s going along pretty nicely. We pushed out one breaking change about two weeks back, but it’s been pretty stable apart from that. I wanted to share a list of some of the open questions we’re still noodling on. Many of these will likely involve breaking changes. Most of these are not truly “open”, we have opinions on them and need to just nail it down. However, if anything is important to you, please sha...
Low on energy? A new understanding of rest could help revitalise you
There is a state of relaxation that few of us spend much time in, but which comes with profound well-being benefits. With healthier ageing, reduced risk of disease and feeling more energised all on offer, here's how to get there
The Internet Is a Net Negative
I'm usually an optimist about things. That outlook has served me well in life. It's helped me build open source projects that millions of people use. It's...
go live a life you're actually interested in
Never Forgive Them
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
Repair Culture: Learning to Fix Instead of Replace – Wayfinders Now – Living small to gain abundance.
Repair culture is the growing mindset of choosing to fix what’s broken instead of immediately replacing it. It challenges a habit that has become almost automatic in modern life: when something stops working, we discard it. A new phone, a new appliance, a new chair, a new everything. Repair culture asks a quieter question: What […]
My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file
The biggest transition for me when I started college was learning to get organized. There was a point when I couldn't just remember everything in my head. And having to constantly keep track of things was distracting me from whatever task I was doing at the moment.
Resistance Is Futile. To Change Habits, Try Replacement Instead. (Published 2018)
An inconvenient bit of neuroscience: The more you try not to think about a bad habit, the harder it gets to resist. So think about something else.
There are two theories-of-change emerging: displace vs. integrate They are by no means mutually exclusive, but much more effort has gone into spinning up brand new atproto apps with the goal to displace existing apps than has gone into embedding the protocol into every nook and cranny of the web.
patak
adding social features to our websites will accelerate atproto adoption faster than building pure atproto apps
I got into tech six years ago because I figured I could have an outsized impact on making a less harmful, more empowering world for workers and marginalised people. Only this year, I started connecting IRL with people who think this way. Here I tried to write about the ways that's transformed me.
DWeb, Culture and Resistance
meri.garden
