Starting a substack
Why?
Hi all.
Jack Conte, of Patreon and Pomplamoose fame, recently stated that “we might be witnessing the death of the follower”. Where from 2019-2023 you would have had a good time on social media by gaining a large following you now need to make sure that you get picked up by the algorithm of whatever platform you are on. In short, that means that the fact that you follow me no longer guarantees that you’ll be able to hear me anymore. It’s a good interview, I can recommend a listen!
Fact of the matter is that a few people started pointing this out to me, asking me if I stopped posting ever since I became a dad, which is not the case. The discovery mechanism of the internet has changed and it seems to favor content that is willing to adapt to the platform. You may have noticed this on YouTube and on LinkedIn. Thumbnails and titles really matter more and posts that share links get downvotes by the algorithm because it leads people off the platform.
In short: it seems like maintaining an email list is pretty much the only way for me to really guarantee that folks can be kept up to date with stuff that I do.
Just to name a few things that I’ve done in the past few weeks.
I revamped my personal blog by vibe-coding a personal editor in Flask. Details can be found here. It also features a basic RSS feed that people can follow.
I learned about some CSS tricks while implementing the santorini board game for HTML. Details, and the live game, are on my blog.
I built a “newspaper” that make summaries of popular hackernews discussions. You can find it on thedailybin.com and you can learn all about how it’s made on YouTube or on my blog. It’s been an entertaining way for me to keep up to date without getting distracted/sucked into a lot of threads.
I made a new tool that I pretty much use daily called `mohtml`. It’s a library with 50 lines of Python that can generate most of HTML in a functional style. There’s a calmcode course for it and a YouTube deep dive.
I also made a Python notebook widget called mopaint that allows you to draw images in a MSPaint themed drawing utility. Once drawn, you can use the drawing to pass it forward to other tools. This includes vision models!
And this is just my personal stuff, not even mentioning some of the things that I am doing over at marimo. So I guess there’s plenty of material for me to share.
The goal of my newsletter will be to keep folks in the loop via email. That way you should hear a signal from me even if I cannot reach you over social media anymore. Substack seems like the simplest provider to set this up, but I might switch in the future. Time will tell if I like the platform.
Hope you like it!