Projects, and why I built them.
Scroll to bring the sun up.
Nothing has gone wrong yet.
6:24 am,
There's a quiet at six in the morning that belongs to whoever shows up first. It isn't productive quiet. It's permissive quiet: nothing has asked for you yet, and nothing has broken. Most of what I like about my days, I can trace back to protecting about forty minutes of it.
7:45 am,
The software I love most does one thing and forgets me the moment I close it. A timer. A notepad that opens before I finish thinking. A unit converter with no account. Somewhere along the way we decided every tool should grow up to be a platform. I'd like to un-decide that.
10:12 am,
Almost everything I've made, I made in the gaps: lunch breaks, the hour after the house goes quiet, the ten minutes a build takes. Margins are underrated real estate. The rent is cheap and nobody checks on you.
Shadows tuck themselves under everything.
1:24 pm,
Every drop falling behind this page is one line: a start point, a length, a speed, and a little wind. A few hundred of them, recycled forever. Weather, it turns out, is mostly a lot of small, simple things agreeing to fall at the same time.
3:30 pm,
I used to treat three o'clock as a character flaw. Now I treat it like a load case. You don't blame a beam for deflecting; you size it for the load it actually sees. So: hard thinking before lunch, easy wins after, and nothing important on the calendar at 3:15.
Everything looks like it means something.
6:12 pm,
A running list, updated whenever.
7:24 pm,
The best air of the day comes right after the rain quits. Everything drips, the road steams, and the frogs start up like someone flipped a breaker. I've stopped trying to be useful in those ten minutes. I just go stand in them.
Porch lights, crickets, one more chapter.
9:10 pm,
The field is computed once: four sine waves per pixel, folded into a byte. After that, the only thing that moves is a 256-color lookup table. Your eye sees flowing liquid; the pixels never change.
9:20 pm,
The bright ripples on the bottom of a pool are light squeezed together by a wavy surface. This one computes them instead of painting them on, and runs the whole refraction three times so the edges pick up a rainbow.
9:30 pm,
Let every photon bounce exactly once and a cloud renders as dirty gray smoke. Everything white about a cloud is light that bounced more than once. Drag the first slider to zero and watch.
9:54 pm,
Most websites look the same at noon and at midnight. That always felt a little dishonest for something that's supposed to be a journal. People have weather. So does this. Sometimes it rains while you read, and that isn't a bug.
9:56 pm,
Are logical pixels and physical pixels so infuriating.
1:10 am,
Nothing good has ever been committed at one in the morning. I say this as someone who has committed a great deal at one in the morning.
2:16 am,
Thy name is humidity.