Craft By Zen

πŸ‘‹πŸ½ Hi! This is Jeremy's Craft by Zen


    • 2024 Week 41 and 42 - Weekly Notes
      Posted

      Strawberry debuts, Milton lands, as well as a Space X Rocket. We re-explore adult friendships, the northern lights, and how to love better.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    • The tool should confirm to your workflow, not the otherway around. When you let the tool dictate your workflow, you disrupt your own flow. Tools can teach us about new workflows, but it’s up to our own judgment if that works for or against us.

      Tools are not panaceas. They cannot solve all of our problems. The corollary advice about tools is when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

      A good tool is one that can do one thing very good. A multi-tool is great if you know it can do each task very well. When it fails at one of those things, you know it’s not a great tool, and you may need to make other tools interoperable with one another. Sometimes, your tools don’t play well. Don’t try to make them interoperable if they have no means to. These tools were never the solution to your problem in the first place.

      Filed: 🚰 Stream
      πŸ”– advice
    • 2024 Week 40 - Weekly Notes
      Posted

      OpenAI shake-ups and announcement for Canvas, Hurricane season with Helene and Milton, new Meta AR glasses, a AI regulatory blow, Stackblitz bolt, and RIP Kris Kristofferson.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    • Newsletter - The Sisyphean Task of Writing
      Posted

      Newsletter - Why writing can be so difficult and an exploration of streaks. We talk about the two latest books I read and end on a somber note about note-taking for books.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    • 2024 Week 39 - Weekly Notes
      Posted

      The Mom Test, making 50 things, 100 Days of Note-Taking, Crowdfunding a new country, WP Engine debacle, Duocon, Hyperkey, and surviving the misinformation age.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    • 2024 Week 38 - Weekly Notes
      Posted

      Light because of house hunting. Churn, o1 news, Founder Mode reviewed, so long ad support, designing for your appropriate user size, and surviving misinformation.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    • 2024 Week 37 - Weekly Notes
      Posted

      o1, Cursor, Townie, Software bookshelf, Senja, Postgres with Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, unexpected endorsements, heightened security, and Mystery celebrity number six. RIP James Earl Jones.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    • 2024 Week 36 - Weekly Notes
      Posted

      Seasonal Playlists, Margin, Latticework, how to say hello, AlphaProteo, and highlighting Amy Allen.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    • 2024 Week 35 - Weekly Notes
      Posted

      !!Con 2024 recap, DIY Zines, the two-shot, Following Crypto's issues, How Townie was built, Listeria outbreak in Boar's Head, and RFK Jr. being someone's drug dealer. Also, a bunch of book recommendations.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    • Newsletter - An Ode to the Seasonal Playlist
      Posted

      Newsletter - We dive into my decade long habit of creating seasonal music playlists and lament on how music streaming services have made it harder to find and create original mixtapes.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    • 2024 Week 34 - Weekly Notes
      Posted

      The Mike Lynch mystery, follow-ups from Burn Book, FLUX.1, doing the hard work instead of trusting AI, effective changelogs, and asteroid mining seeing the light of day.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    • Blockbuster SVG
      Posted
      Filed: 🚰 Stream
      πŸ”– video   vhs
    • 2024 Week 33 - Weekly Notes
      Posted

      Bye bye, Chromecast, creating a personal Data Pipeline, heed the warnings of joining AI research, the new AI image generation king - Flux, a map of all bookstores, quitting spotify and starting self-hosting, and RIP Gena Rowlands.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    • Enshittification
      Posted

      Enshittification is when your product degrades over time because the company has spent more time squeezing out of the competition and curbing regulation. The product is gradually becoming less self-service and the employees no longer care about the product better.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
      πŸ”– concept   TIL
    • Personal Data Pipeline
      Posted

      Josh Cunningham wrote a piece called Imagining a Personal Data Pipeline. I started exploring his project, pdpl-cli, which helps you download your personal data and pipe it out to your desired output. I’ve been thinking extensively about this problem for a number of weeks now since I’ve exported my Google Contacts into Obsidian. However, with the lack of database support, I thought about self hosting it. Enter the Personal Data Pipeline.

      Overview of the data pipeline
      Overview of the data pipeline

      It’s essentially ETL jobs with integrations to third party services to β€œrecipes” that you can write in yaml and customize to your desired outputs. I think this helps a lot more than determining data schemas for specific third party data integrations and having the raw data in a personal data lake. (Or really maybe a document store).

      The idea is to have it local-first and maybe include a sync-thing or cloud syncing as an optional add-on. There’s an emphasis on privacy, although my bigger fear is vendor lock-in. I’ve become so reliant on Google, Apple, and other services that I don’t feel like I own my personal data anymore. Also, as a web developer, the hardest part is grabbing my own data from the sticky hands of these cloud services. Also, this emphasis on files over apps makes a lot more sense to me than the walled garden approach we’ve become accustomed to.

      Filed: 🚰 Stream
    • 2024 Week 32 - Weekly Notes
      Posted

      Current reading notes on Burn Book and Frostbite. Gallery of concept visualizations, transforming national park maps, how others use AI, doing quests, not goals, Intel’s Immiseration, going back on the high wire, and the first fitbit.

      Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
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I'm currently leading application development at Clear Labs.

I write essays on eclectic topics, from programming, cooking, and strange habit of collecting obituaries.


πŸ”– Top 10 Tags


Newsletter Series

I have put back together my newsletter after years of absense! These are primarily updates on my blog, "Craft By Zen", and maybe some highlights to the new articles I've written. There might be some life updates as well. I'm doing away with the old format of weekly longform essays, and trying some new things with my newsletter.

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