I was speaking with a colleague today about publishing something every day, and they said that they’d struggle because they want things to be perfect. The funny thing is, the only way I can personally get past that feeling is precisely by publishing every day.

For me, now, publishing every day is the thing I’m perfecting. The daily practice is the thing I want to get right, rather than any one individual post. I still want any essays I write to be great, but knowing that there will be hundreds of other posts takes the pressure off.

I’m also champing at the bit to write an essay now. To publish something. To write something deeper and sit in it for a while, whilst still coming back to write in this journal every day. I got a bit burned by the daily non-journal posts, but it’s coming back.

After a few weeks not writing morning pages, I also want to bring that back into my practice. It had become a negative place for me and the positive stuff overlapped with this journal too much, but there’s something missing and I want to figure out what that is.

I stopped by South Park Commons this evening to see Rasmus Andersson in conversation with Soleio. In one of my favorite answers, he talked about MeWare, ThemWare and UsWare—the idea that you could make things for yourself, for others, or for both. Rasmus has mostly worked on UsWare, and that’s the kind of stuff I like working on, too. Interesting enough that you want to use it, useful enough to others that you have enough reasons to make it. I sometimes wonder what this (public) journal is.

After a brief-ish hiatus of publishing things other than these journal entries, I’m finally going to get back to it. I think one consequence will be that this journal gets even more scrappy and temporal. I sometimes drift into article-adjacent (which is fine) but I never end up satisfied. I get caught somewhere between a quick thought and a bigger thing that I don’t actually honor with the time it would take to articulate.

I should probably create some proper space for this stuff. My one massive page with hundreds of posts is starting to strain a bit, and now that I do have hundreds of posts I sort of want them to have a better home. There’s probably a post I could write about that, to be honest. I was re-watching Wilson Miner’s great talk from Build recently, and it was a good reminder that the spaces we create on the web are important.

It’s my birthday today—4/20, which in California means that everyone seems to be celebrating me. It was a quiet birthday, just like I wanted. Aneesah, as usual, made me feel loved, and I’m feeling grateful for this life of mine. For growing old together (and growing together) with my best friend. I’ve come further than I thought I would, and have farther still to go, but the best part is all of the unknowable stuff in between. I often feel like I’m not doing enough, but reading Aneesah’s thoughtful message today reminded me of just how much has happened in the past year. It’s easy to take things for granted. It’s nice to be reminded that we should not.

We looked after a good friend’s dog today, and Cacio loves him so much. They live a couple of streets away and she’ll try to drag us down the street to see him whenever we’re passing by. He’ll do the same on our street. He’s like a dog and Cacio is like a strange half-human, half-dog by comparison. If he jumps on the couch he looks alarmed that he’s there and jumps right back down. Cacio is pretty much half couch cushion I think.

In the evening we went to help another good friend move one of their stores next door. I like doing (light) physical work. So much of my work is sat in front of a glowing rectangle, but it’s pretty great to do some lifting and wield a screwdriver from time to time. It’s especially good, of course, to spend time with friends and to support them in some small way. Drinks and food after to reward ourselves for a job well done.

We got to experience some second-hand pride when folks in the community kept popping their head in to say “oh no, you’re closing?!” and got to reveal the good news: “just next door actually, bigger space, not going anywhere.” We felt so proud, actually, just to contribute some very small thing to this part of the community, and proud of our friends for making it such a meaningful part of the neighborhood.

A run in the hills with a friend. Great chat today. Talked about a publishing idea and asked what essay they’d contribute. “Patience.” I liked it before they explained further, because who doesn’t want more patience in the world. Who doesn’t want friends who value patience and want to write about it. Home, and then straight back out for an easy breakfast at a great little diner in Berkeley. Home, and then straight back out again for a drive and a talk and wine (and cheese, obviously) in Healdsburg.

I love driving in California because it’s beautiful and I normally end up having the best conversations with Aneesah. There’s something about being in a car. Something about this landscape. About being on any sort of adventure together. On the way there we listened to gentle music. On the way back we listened to chaotic music from our youth and screamed it loudly together. It’s so fucking great to have fun with the person you love more than anyone. Be goofy. Take yourself less seriously.

I dropped by a friend’s studio today for an “afternoon work party”—a few folks from the internet co-working together—and it was so nice. I love working remotely, but I miss the energy of being around humans in a shared space. I forgot how much fun it can be to just... be around fun. To laugh, and to make others laugh. To listen to music together, eat together, and occasionally fall into silence as everyone gets very focused.

I was an internet stranger to this friend a few months ago, and I feel fortunate now to call them a friend. They were the first person to make me feel truly welcome in this new place that we now call home. They helped me to start building a community here, helped me to understand more about my brain, and have been unendingly open and generous. It’s such a gift to connect with kind, creative folks. I’ve been lucky over the years.

I keep reflecting on the fact that I started keeping this blog by writing about wanting to build community, and that less than a year later I really feel like I’m building one. Writing has helped, actually, just as I hoped it would. It’s helped by literally connecting me with folks through writing, but also helped by giving me space to articulate, every day, what it is that I’m actually looking for, whether right here or in morning pages.

I don’t know where the evening has gone, but it has. I’m deep into it and have little to show for it. That’s okay I guess, but I like it when evenings go by slowly. I’m sat here writing and I like writing, but I sometimes feel guilty. I feel like I should be doing something else. Anything else. The million things that I haven’t gotten around to and really need to get around to. That’s all of us maybe. I have to believe that it’s most of us.

I’m in a funny enough mood that I’ll probably stop writing, because I’ve been trying to keep this public journal pretty neutral. A side-effect of writing something journal-like here is that I’ve fallen off morning pages for a while. I sort of half-write morning pages here, but I don’t write some stuff. I keep it to myself. It’s important not to give all of yourself away, I think, lest you have nothing left for yourself. What a tragedy that would be.

So, swinging it back up: I could do whatever I wanted with the rest of my evening, really. I’ll walk the dog. I could read. I could write. I could make art. I could just sit and think, which is such a rare thing these days—for any of us, not only for me. People used to simply sit and think, as far as I know? Whatever I do, I think I’ll just try to enjoy it, and to feel grateful for it.

Aneesah’s birthday. Up early to pick up some flowers, coffee and pastries on the way back, gifts, and then both of us at work. As we get older it becomes harder to buy gifts for one another. We get the things we want when we need them, and we don’t really need gifts. Still, we get gifts. I tried to focus on time and effort this year. Finding just the right things. Making things by hand. Making things for the people you love feels good.

During lockdown in 2020, Aneesah created an at-home cinema experience for me based on our favorite movie theatre, the Everyman. She called it the Everybug after our (adorable) nicknames for one another. Snacks, tickets, even took me to my seat. I loved it, and I love her for doing it. Thousands of miles from London, I opened the Oakland location for her birthday this year. Snacks, tickets, even took her to her seat.

There’s something about being hunched over, cutting ticket after ticket—and perforating the edges until you’ve got two that feel perfect—that just feels like time well spent. I don’t think I’ve ever truly regretted making something, because making something is sort of the point. It’s the act of making. The time spent. When you’re doing it for someone else, it’s even better I think. We should all make things for one another.

I’ve been making software for over a decade, and I taught myself programming in college (I was a design major), so this current moment in the arc of technology hasn’t made something impossible possible, but it has made the “takes a while, maybe I’ll get to it” more like “will probably take minutes, why not.” I’m making things I just wouldn’t have found the time for before, and it feels great. I just like making things, period.

When I first started using large language models and tools like Claude Code or Codex to help me make things, I first did so only if I was looking at all of the code along the way, even for goofy stuff. I wanted to bring them into code-centric spaces, where they played the supporting role rather than the lead. I thought that I’d do that for a long time, but it’s shifted for me pretty quickly, at least for the goofy, transient stuff.

I was making something over the past couple of days, and I haven’t looked at the code at all really. I glanced at a couple of diffs out of curiosity, but otherwise I worked in an agent-centric tool (this time, Codex) and just expressed the thing that I wanted. It was frustrating during a couple of moments, but it was mostly great. It was a super simple project, but still, I noticed that this behavior had changed in me.

I have a sense of pride (or maybe just ego) at having taught myself some hard things over the years, and I’m still going to cling on to it for a little while longer, but it feels good to lean into this new thing a little more and take myself less seriously. I still think that writing code is fun, and that thinking in code is useful (because thinking logically is useful) but it’s also fun to just get floopy and do the thing from time to time.