/now

(Updated May 2, 2026. This is a now page, and if you have your own site you might consider making one, too.)

About a year and a half ago I picked up a new hobby: 3d printing. As of late last summer you can add AI-assisted software development to the list. With an AI assistant like Cursor the barrier to getting started with a variety of technologies is much lower, so ideas are much closer to becoming reality than before. And I’ve got plenty of ideas.

Since getting started I’ve:

• converted this site from WordPress to 11ty, adding scads of tests, authoring helps, and other features (little link posts, collected wisdom repository, this page, etc.) and lowering its ahrefs error rate to zero and warnings only to those I don’t care about
• started a MacOS menu bar clock that counts down to your statistical life expectancy (memento mori) or up from your date of birth (memento vivere)
• started a project to build a site to showcase tee shirt designs
• started building an iOS app to fetch a single task from an iOS Reminders list to avoid the paradox of choice
• replaced my personal file pile site with a somewhat-vibed drop-in file/folder navigator in PHP, and refined it as I found more uses for it
• written a MacOS service that points out the words you’ve used in a selected passage of text that aren’t in the ten thousand most common English words
• started exploring pointing at space things by whipping up an iOS app that points at ISS, Hubble, Webb, celestial bodies, and the seven wonders of the world (which are all DOWN from here, of course)
• made a book map tool that my wife can edit and export to show on her personal website, and
• started my personal competitor alternative to a task-oriented editor that I use all the time. Too bad it’s not open-source, or I’d just wrench on it and offer the changes! editor’s note: this was a bad idea, getting the UX of an editor right is NOT easy or straightforward

More to come. The barrier between software itch and software scratch is narrowing all the time.

In each of these my long-lapsed front-end web coding experience has been helpful: I have a notion of how a thing could be implemented and I can notice several code smells, but lack facility with the most current frameworks. But a little instruction, a little negotiation, a little correction, and working software is the result. Most of the time.

Both of these hobbies are attractive because they bring design, already fun and interesting, quickly into reality where you can try it, use it, benefit from it, and improve it. Since this time last year I’ve designed and printed some 35 personal projects and printed innumerable other pre-designed items.

I have an idea for an eInk display that fetches the front page of today’s newspaper every morning. If I can find a display and a way to drive it this is now a project I can accomplish on my own, as a rank amateur. I have an idea for a physical pointer that points at the ISS all the time, no matter where it is. I have an idea for a thermal printer that prints the morning’s calendar, tasks, and when you get to work in the morning, based on a cheapo printer I scored second-hand. Interesting and exciting times.

At work I’m also experimenting:

• AI-powered design tools and working with our existing design system. It’s a fragmented space and changing daily, so this is a bit of “surfing the chaos,” a posture I don’t generally favor
• prototyping in code
• bringing AI “workflow agent” ideas to the Invoca platform
• theming React pages
• some information and data architecture challenges that deserve attention as we move from a technology-led to a more customer-centered product approach

It’s an exciting time. And things are changing too fast to keep up! So don’t keep up, just keep going.

May your summer be ICE-free.