I am spending the first two weeks of August in northern Spain. It is nice to see family, sunbathe, and do more reading than I manage at any other point in the year.

Reading and watching

I just finished Masters of Doom. Great read. One takeaway was that the .plan files John Carmack used to write feel just like a /now page but for developers. It turns out history is repeating itself yet again.

I have started Snow Crash, the novel that coined the term "metaverse", and started watching X-Men '97. Pretty good!

LED screen

I took a little break from working on the screen after a period of crunch at work. Getting back into it now. I won't bore you with the dozens of hours of tests I have run, but here is the TL;DR of the coolest bits:

• I am calling it Raster 01, and it will ship in one piece.
• I have soldered on a rotary encoder for input, but I am having second thoughts. What about a touch sensor?
• I have decided against having an app.
• I have made more cool animations:

Timeline

A few days ago I published the /timeline post I have been working on. While showing it to a friend, they asked me how I had made the lines between the events and the labels, but I could not answer. It is the first feature on this website entirely AI-generated. Incredible times! Even using AI tools non-stop for work, it is incredibly impressive how capable they are in small codebases.

Stripe Sessions

Stripe Sessions just wrapped up, and it was very exciting to see some of my work on Stripe Treasury make it onto the stage.

I say exciting, but honestly, while watching the demos, a big part of me was just praying that nothing would break.

That week reminded me how much I like being at Stripe. Even in the final (stressful) days leading up to Sessions, UX and craft were at a very high level. I love this. Craft and beauty!

Still working on my LED screen

It started as a fun object for myself, but I am now wondering whether I could actually sell a few of them through this website. Maybe just made to order. Maybe just a small batch. Not sure yet.

The exciting part is that it would be my first physical product that people might actually want.

The hard part is... basically everything else.

• It is over 70cm long, thin, and fragile. How do I ship that without it arriving snapped in half?
• If something breaks, what happens? Replace it? Do they ship it back to me?
• Fires? Shorts? Heat dissipation?
• Could I support over-the-air updates?

At the moment I am designing a 3D printed case for the back of the screen and adding some I/O. I want the cables hidden, the mounting to feel solid, and the whole thing to look less like a prototype and more like a product.

If you might want one or you have experience that could be helpful, please get in touch!

Reading and watching

I am reading the third book in the Red Rising series. I did not expect to get this into it, but here we are. At some point I will probably finish all 7.

It is more about honour, families, loyalty, revenge, and friendship than I expected. If someone ever makes a TV show out of it, I think it could be huge.

I have also started watching The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. It is good, but I still prefer the original.

Small trips I am thinking about

I am planning to go to Stockholm for a weekend.

I am also thinking about going to Florida to see a rocket launch, although that is not planned yet. Seeing a rocket launch is one of those things I have wanted to do for years. It makes me hopeful about the future.