blog/

Most of my projects start as "wouldn't it be funny if" and end as a GitHub repo with one commit and a TODO list longer than the code. People ask why I ship things that aren't finished. The answer is that "finished" is a spectrum and I'm on the "it compiles and didn't set anything on fire" end of it.

Building in public means failing in public. That's the deal. You get to see the messy middle, the half-baked ideas, the rewrites that are somehow messier than the original mess. I think that's more honest than a polished portfolio of things that pretend they sprung into existence fully formed. Nothing does. Everything was a disaster first.

It started, as these things do, with the sentence "this code is a mess, I should rewrite it." A sentence that has preceded every great disaster in software history.

Commit one: "start refactor." Commit two: "wip, things are worse now." Commit three: "going to bed, will figure it out later." It is now later. I have not figured it out. The rewrite is at 12%. The original code is still there, mocking me. Progress: 12%. Optimism: 4%.

The lesson, which I will not follow, is: never start a rewrite at 3am. The second lesson is: the rewrite will be just as messy, but in new and exciting ways. I consider this character development.

Existing markdown parsers are fine. That's the problem. "Fine" is the enemy of "I want one more feature that nobody else wants." So I built Remarker — a drop-in replacement for marked.js with the same call shape, but with a handful of extra features I personally needed.

Is this impressive or deeply unnecessary? Depends on who you ask. I ask "it was fun and I learned things," which is the correct answer when you're building for yourself and not for a VC pitch deck.

I currently have 94 tabs open. This is down from last week. I have a system. The system is: I'll read them later. I will not read them later. They will sit there, a monument to ambition, until the browser crashes and takes them all with it, and I will feel a brief, clean emptiness before immediately opening 60 new ones.

Some people use tab managers. I use denial. It works about as well.