joodaloop.com v4.6
Around a year ago, I wrote about how the current design of my site had proved undislodgable. You can see today that it has survived yet another year. Congratulations, site!

JOODALOOP
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Latest posts
My site has a Makefile now, also offline browsing
For the longest time, I lived in a terrific awe at the magic of the build step. Parsing, compiling, transpiling, and everything else that goes into the process of bundling web stuff was an arcane ritual that I crossed my fingers, closed my eyes, and hoped to never see a failure from. As a result, I have never written a build script, nor configured Webpack.

An ontology of microblogging
I’ve added a new top-level page to this site. It’s called ~~~ and can be found at joodaloop.com/~ or in the nav bar. The name is a big quirky, I admit, but format is simple:

Bad Tech
In the before times (pre-enslopification of Twitter, and pre-LLMs (some would say they’re the same thing)), I had an exchange with Imp that produced the list you see below.

The Great Realtime Collaboration Misdirection
If I had stats and figures to back this up, I’d turn it into a proper post. As it stands, I only have anecdotes and gossip to speak from:

Databases
Talks “Transactions: myths, surprises and opportunities”: The best explanation of the various consistency and isolation levels in database I’ve ever seen.

Clocks as progress bars, please
From an information design standpoint, the analog 3-handed clock is pretty terrible, needing a glance at three disparate points and multiple spatial calculations to arrive at a few numbers. But we forgive this inefficiency because they look rather nice.

Software Design Ideas I Dislike
Obviously, many of these opinions are more personal than objective. But that’s true for all the software we use everyday. Most design decisions can be traced back to one man’s (yeah, usually a man) strong preference. We live with their consequences decades later.

Better design through calibration
If you haven’t heard of calibration cases, you should read Commoncog’s introduction to them. A brief definition:

Better Blog Design
It’s been over two decades since Wordpress first launched. As it grew to power a majority of the internet, it set certain patterns of usage and design that have remain mostly unchanged in the years since.

The new MacOS menus could be better
This is not an uncommon sentiment – you may have seen this graphic floating around the internet as a dunk on the Apple design team. Their own Human Interface Principles used to warn against overuse of icons next to menu items.

Things I Do To Procrastinate
We all have our own suboptimal behaviours, which are usually as instructive as they are load-bearing. These are some of mine, in no particular order.

Versioning joodaloop.com redesigns
I spent a couple hours yesterday cleaning up my Github repos for all the versions of this site I’ve created over time. You can go to v1.joodaloop.com to see the first version, and change the version number to go all the way up to v6. My personal favorite was v2, which honestly deserves to be resurrected in some way.

Hugoloop, a super-minimal starter site
I make at least 2 sites a month, most of them are static and written in plain HTML and CSS as much as possible. In fact, a few of my minisites (like map.joodaloop.com) are just a single HTML file written by hand. I really like keeping things as simple as they can be.

Useful Programming Ideas
The majority of these come from my dabbling in the local-first ecosystem for the past 2–3 years. I would like this page to act both as a useful resource and a personal history through these ideas, so I point to the sources of these ideas in the order that I found them instead of attempting any long explanation of my own.

Chat quotes debut on joodaloop.com
I’m trying out a new format on this site: conversations. You can expect to see it in different places/pages over time.

Gift Culture
I don’t have much to say here yet, the point of this post is to link you to Innovation depends on Gift Culture.

joodaloop.com v4.5
It will only go live in June, July, August September (!!!), but I just finished a partial redesign for this site, and I’m rather proud of it. I’ve arrived at a place where every kind of post format or type has a place here – from this tiny post you’re currently reading, to frequently updated lists like Twitter Bookmarks.

Ontological Engineering
I accept that real world is hopelessly intertwingled, everything is related to everything, etc, etc. But I see ontology as a tool to prune those connections down to purposeful buckets and helpful categories instead of “true” ones. Ontology should start from a well-defined, pragmatic purpose.

You should make a Telegram bot
Shipped a starter template for Telegram bots on Cloudflare Workers, using much of the code from Ellipsis, but making the D1 database optional. It creates a bot that acts as an interface to Claude, using the Anthropic API.

Ellipsis
I just put together Telegram bot called Ellipsis, acts as a chat interface to Claude. Currently only accessible to me, and a couple friends.

PDFs
Why Childhood is Bad for Children Sarah Hannan
The Water Falls but the Waterfall does not Fall: New perspectives on Objects, Processes and Events Antony Galton and Riichiro Mizoguchi

Actually Useful Design Commentary
Philosophy design is the second derivative of just plain doing stuff Christopher Alexander: A Primer A computer is a general-purpose machine: it can do pretty much anything — or at least, software could be created to make it do pretty much anything. Therefore, in theory, a user “entering” an application for the first time must assume that they can do anything in it but then learn very quickly…
Revstar
I am now the proud owner of what is the most beautiful guitar I’ve ever seen or played.

How I Use Hugo
I’ll be honest, Hugo is not the simplest tool in the world. I have spent hours digging through forum posts and documentation pages.

Mac app studios
Mikkel Malmberg
Objective Development
Many Tricks
Low Tech Guys
Panic

My Inventions
Ideas and implementations that I arrived at independently. Since it is impossible to claim true novelty, I can only make a softer claim of newness: when I came up with these things, I hadn’t seen them before.

Computing Without the Courses
These are not a substitute for proper study, or writing lots of code.

Anti-library
A Perfect Vacuum
Brideshead Revisited
Axiomatic
The Everything Music Composition Book

Bret Victor’s bookshelf
This is a transcription of (almost) all the books on Bret’s shelf (circa 2015). I will try to add all the author names and purchase links someday in the future.