I wrote this in January but waited to see if I'd resolve it somehow. Since it looks like I'll miss the deadline, better to share it and move on.

This is what Apple's kiss of death looks like:

Hello Rosano,

We've sent you a new message about your app, sonogrid, app Apple ID: 1409129549.

For details, visit the App Review page in App Store Connect.

Best regards,
App Review

Swift, bureaucratic, saying nothing.

According to their policies, it's been over three years since the last time I updated my apps, and there aren't "enough" downloads for them to keep it on the store, so Apple will remove all of them unless I update within ninety days.

To update means:

1. apply half a decade of iOS and App Store "innovations" just to exist or remain compliant, but
2. even then there's no guarantee it would be approved, and
3. even if it does, it only buys me three years

Naive to think I could just pay their $99 USD annual membership fee to keep projects up there.

It doesn't matter if you spent seven to ten years working on something in the Apple platform and it's meaningful to your niche: either you keep up with policies (stay updated, scale with them) or you'll get taken out in a fashion maximally automated to communicate how cheap and replaceable you are to the ecosystem.

I might look into alternative app stores like AltStore, but it's sort of like starting from scratch while my primary motivation was to let people who already paid have easy access on their other devices. I'm also kind of tired and lazy to deal with this genre of problems to be honest: with orders of magnitude less effort, I could ship something on the web today and make progress that the rest of the world and I can keep forever.

Maybe I'll find a way through it another day, but this definitely confirms most of my hesitations about the App Store in the first place and makes me glad the web exists: I can just do things there.

So once again, I'll say "get them while you can"; they'll be gone around April 27, 2026.

After bringing home lyrics and Vibrations, I've moved over 150 music recommendations from Tumblr to my journal.

I'm proud of having found these, written notes, and put them together in a way that's public and shareable. Even better that it's now in a more durable form and offers relatively distraction-free browsing across various music platforms.

They were originally part of my Ephemerata newsletter (2021–2022) and eventually published in a Tumblr blog, but this was either hard to browse as a collection or somehow detached from the rest of my universe. Now that I have a place for everything, it's nicely organized and even has an RSS feed.

Important lesson here that when links break, it's super helpful to have context saved somewhere and not rely on the platform to keep it around for you. For example, this video is currently no longer online, and I haven't tried to replace it yet, but I easily can because of the context that was written as part of my post.

Also nice to see detailed 'via' links crediting people in my community or named publications as the source for certain items.

This is how I would like to share things online: less on social media, more in places I control – at home.

If you're seeking eclectic sounds, you'll find plenty here.

I've reorganized my homepage a bit.

1. Much less scrolling is needed now.
2. Larger lists have been broken into smaller lists which are easier to orient.
3. Mixing writing into each section makes way more sense. (I learn more and more: don't sort by type).
4. It's deliberately a bit rough so that I can fix things later.

I had more grandiose ideas, but this will do for the moment. Feels good to improve so much without a big 'redesign'.

The last update in 2021 was quite dramatic for me, going from pure icons to text; slowly considering more the reader over 'aesthetic'.

This is part of some things I'm doing for the 20th anniversary of my domain. More to come this year.

I thought it would be fun to share a special public email address to feed hungry bots:

sayhi@rosano.ca

Anything sent there gets instantly reported as spam. To do this in Fastmail, you first make an alias, then a rule:

It only took a few clicks to create. Maybe if enough people did this, email spammers might flag themselves out of existence?

I imagine it might be better to:

• put it in source code or somewhere no human would look for contact information
• use your own domain, as plus addressing like +hello reveals your main address
• sound plausible (like dictionary words) and not random letters/numbers

Try to get creative so that it's hard to pattern match. Here's another one:

eatme@rosano.ca

I've been interested to understand my family history for some years now. I already put some effort into talking with relatives, taking notes from our conversations, finding old documents, and consolidating information from different places.

There are many platforms or apps that can visually represent your tree. Using my family as an example (with anonymized names), below are some visualizations in the form of:

1. an ancestor 'fan chart', starting with the subject and going back, omitting siblings

2. a descendant 'sun chart', radiating outward from a single 'root ancestor'

3. the traditional 'tree', representing more comprehensively

4. 3D force-directed graph

All of these look nice and are fun to explore but become harder to read as data accumulates. None of them help me orient to where people fit in the larger picture. So I made my own with the following characteristics:

1. radial layout to maximize space and group by generation;

2. lines to connect siblings, spouses, and children;

3. colour to roughly track lineage based on last names;

This finally gives me a sense of who my second and third cousins are, which I wasn't able to grasp before.

I also learned that surnames aren't the ultimate indicator of 'where one comes from'. Even though I commonly think of my last name as representing family origins, it really just emphasizes those who passed on their name; feels cool to realize that as one person I actually come from people with thirteen unique last names!

Another interesting set of trivia has to do with the Mormon Church. I never paid much attention to them, but through this work I've learned that they contribute heavily to family tree technologies and to ordinary people learning about their own family histories:

• they invented the GEDCOM file format in 1984, which all these apps use to import and export genealogical data
• they probably run a 'FamilySearch Center' near you to provide research help and free access to paid platforms
• their FamilySearch wiki has about 150,000 articles to help you find vital records for family research in most countries
• they've helped archive and digitize birth, death, and other records from all over the world (accessible through their FamilySearch platform or local centers)

There's more I'd like to do with this, but for now I'm happy just to have my own tree and share it with family.

For anyone who's curious, here are some full-size PDFs where you can see details:

• mine
• the royal family
• presidents washington, lincoln, kennedy
• amelia earhart
• thomas edison
• alexander graham bell
• albert einstein

resources

If you're interested to explore deeper, I've compiled links from my research to save you some searching.

build family trees

• Genea (open-source, privacy-oriented)
• Family Chart (open-source, privacy-oriented)
• Visual Family Tree: Windows, macOS, Linux (open-source, privacy-oriented)
• obsidian-charted-roots: organize your tree inside Obsidian

visualize family trees

• Topola Genealogy Viewer (open-source, privacy-oriented)
• Family Tree Map: "Map the birthplaces of people in your family tree." (open-source, privacy-oriented)
• blood lines: 3D force-directed graph (open-source, privacy-oriented)
• tmcw/gedcom/live: 2D force-directed graph (open-source, privacy-oriented)
• Exploring Family Trees: tree layout on a timeline
• arbre: visualize GEDCOM data

self-hosted genealogy tools

• Gramps Web: collaborate with your family in a private space
• Betty: generate an encyclopedia-like website from Gramps or GEDCOM data
• Open Pedigree: draw genomic pedigrees
• Genealogy
• terrywbrady/TNG_Docker

hosted genealogy tools

• build family trees: Family Echo, Kintree, FamilyBushes
• make genograms: Genogram Creator, GenoFlow
• make pedigree charts: pedigreejs (open-source, privacy-oriented)

inspiration

Contents

1. now
2. iOS apps
3. memo
4. vlog
5. blog
6. book notes
7. link notes
8. chirps
9. sounds
10. closing

now

Comforting to be in Berlin again, even if it's the "worst weather of the year". I know lots of people here and feel it's more conducive than many places to the kind of life I enjoy.

After some months in Portugal of checking out places to settle long-term, my partner and I are seeking rest and familiarity. It was 'only' two cities but somehow felt like lots of moving around and figuring out how a new place works; I might be discovering that I now need at least three months in a place to feel relaxed. Still considering to try the same with France later.

Over the holidays, I rabbitholed on family tree data visualization and made some cool designs that I'll be proud to share soon.

I find myself reflecting on the connections between business, marketing, helping people, pedagogy, sustainable project work, and how I might incorporate these layers together in a way that's aligned with my values.

Last year, I might have spent half my time on private projects, so I'm looking forward to more public things. This year will mark twenty years of the rosano.ca domain name so I'd like to do some looking back as well as finally get to a newer homepage concept that reflects my current perspective.

iOS apps

memo

I released a notepad you can't edit and made it interoperable with some existing to-do apps. I'm really drawn to cultivating more of these 'bridges' with stuff that's already around.

vlog

blog

book notes

link notes

chirps

sounds

closing

Comforting to be in Berlin again, even if it's the "worst weather of the year". I know lots of people here and feel it's more conducive than many places to the kind of life I enjoy.

After some months in Portugal of checking out places to settle long-term, my partner and I are seeking rest and familiarity. It was 'only' two cities but somehow felt like lots of moving around and figuring out how a new place works; I might be discovering that I now need at least three months in a place to feel relaxed. Still considering to try the same with France later.

Over the holidays, I rabbitholed on family tree data visualization and made some cool designs that I'll be proud to share soon.

I find myself reflecting on the connections between business, marketing, helping people, pedagogy, sustainable project work, and how I might incorporate these layers together in a way that's aligned with my values.

Last year, I might have spent half my time on private projects, so I'm looking forward to more public things. This year will mark twenty years of the rosano.ca domain name so I'd like to do some looking back as well as finally get to a newer homepage concept that reflects my current perspective.

My iOS apps are on the App Store again; if you ever wanted to have sonogrid or the others, now might be a good time to get a copy.

AudioScrub

slow down music, change keys, loop.

essential tool for transcribers, improvisers, music students.

also available with a subset of those features as a PLAY Edition that remote controls Apple's Music app.

sonogrid

"drum machine on steroids".

make simple loops that overlap in complex ways, explore visually and playfully, send midi out if you to connect with other systems.

Quick Record

audio recorder with iCloud sync that can start on launch; select audio quality, add tags.

Ticker

fun scrolly metronome that shows classical music markings.

Carrot Price

"now you know which one is cheaper".

unit cost calculator with my beatboxing sounds.

I wrote in going fully web about my reasons to take them down and, although I continue to feel similarly, was recently convinced by Heddi to consider restoring them there.

Here's what motivated me:

1. People who previously paid for them could not get a copy for new or other devices. I thought this would be possible even when not officially on the store, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. After contacting those who had issues about this years ago, many quickly replied back with very visible gratitude to have access to AudioScrub again; seems it still fits their needs better than whatever else is available.

yes!!!!! Thank you🎉🎉🎉 Still the best one out there

Thanks so much for communicating this to me. I’ll pass the word on to friends and colleagues who I know will benefit greatly from these 2 apps.
I myself use these apps daily, as it helps the learning music process greatly!

That’s amazing, congratulations! And thank you for letting me know, I really appreciate it.

I will definitely try it today on my iPad. I love your app.

Hello, so great to see your music app again!

i have already bought it !! Thank you very much. A nice Christmas present.

2. I worked hard on these and remain quite proud of them; not sure if it accomplishes much to nuke my history in the way that I did. Even though they were built for another era, everything still works great and I've never stopped using them.

3. It's been quite a puzzle to create income from pure web apps with my ideal structure of no personal data stored or collected, no login or signup to start, ideally open-source. While I figure out how to make that sustainable, it's helpful to have some other income streams.

No plans to update these for the moment, but I think it's a good step to keep it available.

I made a small web app called memo to quickly jot down points, framing it as "a notepad you can't edit".

Similar to a piece of paper, you just note things down without editing or 'managing' much.

There are no buttons for each item: you can only add new things, and then copy or delete everything.

The interface supports routines I describe in work, then don't: capture points to deal with them later without distracting from whatever's happening at the moment.

Coming from other note taking apps like Simplenote, Apple Notes, or even Hyperdraft, it's nice to not manage conflict: "did I edit that already on another device?", "I synced but the changes aren't here yet", "I'd rather not think about that, let me make a new one and then copy/paste between later". Here, there's no need to trust in special sync — "just add and it will come together".

I find that 'not editing' also means 'not judging', thus allowing things to flow out as easily as possible—it can easily be cleaned up later; this is useful in brainstorming, writing long-form, and other modes.

So it's a little box to type in that's always ready when opening the app, and it syncronizes points to other devices, and none of the data is held hostage by me because you can bring your own storage. Great, but that's it?

Well, it's a 'real' app that I use everyday, but I think it's also a useful example of interoperability with other tools.

If you want to edit or delete individual items, you can connect the same data to this simple list app; the changes will sync back to memo.

If you like checking things off as 'done', use this todo app; they will show up completed (crossed out) in memo.

Some people want to keep everything forever, like a physical journal. Maybe someone could make another app that presents a nice 'archive'.

This is very primitive but it feels cool that separate apps work together pretty seamlessly. It's all possible because: 1) they each let you bring your own storage, and 2) they all share a similar format.

I think it would be nice if this was normal with apps and technology. The web is full of people making fun little tools but they're not connected to data in other places; I tend to imagine that by simply tweaking them to read and write data this way, we get some very cool new possibilities, and even give older projects new potential without much change.

Having different tools to deal with the same data is useful as an 'app user', but I love it as an 'app developer' because interop simplifies my life: I don't need to build all the features in my app — other apps can fill the gap, and together, we share one growing base of people who mix them in their workflows.

Try memo or the interop demo and let me know what comes to mind.

For my thirty-seventh year, I wanted to write a shorter annual reflection, so here are some important layers since last year, followed by something I'm currently sitting with that feels profound to me.

1. affirming experiences, celebrating myself, from scrolling to strolling.

2. love and relationship with my partner as we spent time in Germany, Dubai, India, Kenya, and Portugal.

3. food, cooking, eating, tasting; untold amounts of dosa, chaat, shredded cheese, fried sandwiches and crispy things; many days started with masala chai; happy to discover uji power

4. childhood, family, reconnecting

5. bureaucracy, admin, visas, stress

I'm immensely grateful to have found a sense of place again with my projects. My questions from last year have answers, and something is emerging, not sure what.

I find myself deeply in the zone.

Most days, all I want to do is get back to it.

It's abundantly satisfying even if I'm the only person I know that might consider it relevant.

Focus, reps, optimistic vortex, strong signal, ripple effects.

Just keep going, keep building.

I understand my technology toolset at a level higher than I've ever known; I no longer fear the docs, and it gives me greater control over my materials.

Looking ahead, I just want to put my head down and make progress. Let's see next year where it takes us.

All yearly reflections: 33, 34, 35, 36, 37.

Since 2020 I've developed a frequent day routine of 'work' followed by 'non-work', which looks like this:

• work intensely until a certain time, often lunch, then 'digress' for the rest of the day;
• "no messaging or social media before lunch"
• "no computing after lunch"
• log points that occur to me during the day
• the next day, spend a short moment going through previous day's points, then start the cycle again.

Of course, many days can't be shaped like this, but I enjoy when it's possible and often really look forward to this kind of plan. I could do it every day, and somehow the repetition doesn't get boring; life also conveniently interrupts with variation.

I think it came about because until 2019 I was regularly spending unlimited hours a day coding apps on iOS or the web, and, naturally, it started to cost my mind and body. So I started to seek ways to limit my computer time.

It's also a riff on my productivity trinity and 'writing without magic': allow time to work in your favour, enjoy the fruits of resting your mind from intense focus, and diversify ways of being.

My morning mind is sacred to me as it hasn't yet been bombarded by external distractions, so I often use it to make progress on important things and try to keep the world at bay until I'm ready; I usually feel at my highest capacity, very focused, and productive. I give my first self to whatever I feel called to do.

During the 'digress' part, I read, do nothing, take walks, listen to music or podcasts, call friends, focus on body things, hang out, run errands, correspond, cook, touch plants, etc… Ideas, improvements, and iterations come quite naturally because I'm not occupied with 'work'; it's like shower thoughts, but for the whole afternoon and evening. The goal is to ensure there's a process or modality happening different to "sitting and doing stuff on my screen".

I just note down whatever occurs to me, things like "fix typo", "contact them", "wash dishes", "lookup word", "clean shoes", "buy vegetables", "share cat video"; it's all captured quickly and without polish, just enough that my future self will understand. Then I get back to my digressions.

The next morning, whenever I'm ready to start, I skip notifications, social networks, emails, or any external communication that I can do later—"don't look at anything"—and start with what I captured the previous day. I dump it all somewhere, and try process everything without taking too long. Just grouping the mess of points into "what goes with what?" is helpful and a simple starting point if I lack clarity that day.

I try to distribute everything into other places where I collect related points, but similar to just capturing quickly, I don't stop to put it in the 'correct' part of those buckets: I just drop it at one end or the other and move on immediately; I will eventually sort it anyway whenever I end up doing something about a specific collection of points.

If there's something time-sensitive there, briefly scan for it and bump it to the top. Otherwise, go through linearly.

If there's something 'nice to have, but not practical right now', I throw it in my rabbithole list, where I can be revisit without pressure to 'get it done' or take any decisions.

It normally takes me under five to ten minutes to process everything. I mostly don't get too involved in any of the points and just function like a dispatch center putting things in a useful place as efficiently as possible. If something worthwhile takes a minute to complete, I might just do it instead of moving it, but generally I like making deliberate time to focus on specific things and letting the rest accumulate so that time works for me.

The goal is to maximize space for deep work on what feels meaningful and motivating.

Sometimes I even defer this review until after lunch so that my morning brain has more time to party.

It's very satisfying for me to record little thoughts today and trust that they will be seen at the right moment; to have space to be present, yet not miss details that could be useful later. I often don't feel overwhelmed because there's a simple process for dealing with whatever comes up, and it helps me get a sense for what's potent.

A larger aspiration here is to switch modes at healthy intervals: do focused work but avoid several hours or more of the same body posture, instead trying to alternate and stagger contrasting activities; ideally, I even look forward to break because it's a chance to let the previous thing ferment.

Lately I've found that it also gives me direction with bad things happening in the world, as the more I learn about what's broken, the more I want to simply move the needle and do something useful: this framework helps me focus on those things.

I hope that sharing my concept might give you some ideas but also act as a prompt to consider which ways of working would help you flourish. May we all have clearer paths forward.

My new memo app is a "notepad you can't edit" specifically built for this work/digress cycle.

High off the fumes from bringing Vibrations home, I made a "room" for all the lyrics I've accumulated over the years from capoeira classes, deep listening albums, and learning languages, motivated because there were too many mixed into my notes and other stuff to find anything when I needed it.

informal to structured, automatically

Each song lives in a collection, which is a text file representing my personal tie to where it came from: maybe the year or place or group or album.

The lyrics in a collection are just separated by one # character, which represents a Markdown heading. New heading, new song; no need to "make one file per thing" and manage it.

…

quem ama mesmo prefere o ofício de amar.

# Joyce: Mistérios

você chegou feito um silêncio

…

With just this one semantic unit to divide the information, each song can get it's own page automatically. But I can still easily move things around if I change my mind. This fulfills my principle of "presenting things consistently regardless of how I organize the files".

Adding a topic to collections lets me combine collections from a certain context (such as my Brazilian popular music). As it shows recent items first, I have a list roughly in order of discovery without any 'blog post' system; time is somewhat relevant but it doesn't need to be super precise.

I had tried to do this with my non-chronological garden, but it was too much effort to manage pages and ended up crowding other stuff without being easier to find. Reverse chronological order is much more relevant here to me than other ways I've tried, as I often want to revisit newer things first; the order is a helpful reminder of where I got it from and orients me to other details I may have forgotten.

cool benefits

About 150 individual song notes were purged from my Simplenote and condensed into 21 collections. I no longer need to carry them around in my notes, and they're also 'liberated' as public data that anyone can benefit from as text or through my site's web interface.

Collections are presented without pagination so I can just scroll, with sticky headings for orientation, using the browser to search when needed: this way I can easily save one page offline with the Reading List in Safari and have lyrics with me even without internet access.

The page for any song has links to search the title via YouTube, or translate text via DeepL, or a 'Source' link so that anyone can edit things on GitHub.

There are bidirectional links between lyric and Vibrations pages, connecting published songs from my personal history to the lyrics.

other reflections

I'm generally not using my blog brain when I deal with music and don't always know very specifically what I'm looking for when it comes to songs I may want to reconnect with. It's nice to browse through what I've gathered as easily as physical albums or photo collections—an example of how technology can support more 'fuzzy' approaches.

I have another less public collection somewhere with compilations of more lyrics than I will ever use in my lifetime, but those are more like a large 'dataset' and not personally meaningful. The songs I've encountered along my way have more significance to me, and it's nice to express that through files, markdown, and some rough technical transformation.

My endeavour in writing this is not really to focus on the technology but an attempt to share why I do things a certain way, which can be applicable to other things.

Hugo gives me the rush of making apps, but applied to organizing information—something that disproportionately seems to satisfy me.

I would close with a quote from Heddi that describes what it's like for me to have a personal website or corner of the Internet where I can do niche things like this without some company's blessing:

"Having a platform profile is like living in a single-room apartment, whereas having your own site is a castle with unlimited rooms."

I'm motivated to start a newsletter again, after being out of it for some years, and mix the approaches I've tried so far.

Currently feels fun to try quarterly (Occasion-al) updates about things I've experienced, published, or encountered; it's inspired by a private one from Nathan Hewitt, as his seems to be about connection and a kind of life and online digest.

From publishing Ephemerata, I learned that I enjoyed the sharing, ritual, and weirdness—as did other people—but weekly is too much for me, and maybe monthly too.

My posture has shifted from "I should take as little space as possible because I'm probably not worth your time" to "I'd like to connect regularly with people who like what I'm doing, want more, and expect the unexpected".

Would also be nice to have one newsletter for a change and not several. Perhaps the nature of a secular church is that it serves many interests unevenly at different times, but remains worthwhile for all.

If you'd like to try this with me, see the most recent edition or just jump in and subscribe.

Contents

1. welcome to Occasion
2. now
3. Strolling
4. Vibrations
5. blog
6. own your data
7. book notes
8. link notes
9. chirps
10. sounds
11. closing

welcome to Occasion

now

Strolling

Vibrations

blog

own your data

book notes

link notes

chirps

sounds

closing

I'm currently in Portugal with my partner to research affordable places to settle in Europe. Portugal seems to have many places that could fit our street rat backpacker lifestyle, but France or Germany are also interesting, as I have more friends and connections there.

After spending too much time this year concentrated on administrative things, I'm finally able to make some much-needed progress on my projects.

I've been waiting for years to make a better homepage, as I increasingly sense the present one doesn't sufficiently represent what I do. Currently doing some very satisfying work to put all my publishing together inside Journal.

There are Strolling conversations from 2023 that I wasn't able to edit in 2024. I want to get to each of them at some point, but it's a slow process as I still haven't managed to delegate this or get other people involved. I might accept that it's my work to do and be content that it takes the time it does.

Still meeting people along my way but noticing a new satisfaction in the last year with solitude, and not seeking so much activity or external interaction. I think it's healthy and not coming from a place of sadness or repression—I just feel comfortable with myself.

I have lots of dreams about what lies ahead, mostly technical but some not. It's fun to imagine accumulating the various threads and skills in my life so that they come together into something powerful or just fun. Definitely pulled into the future at the moment, rather than pushed.

Sometime in the last months, I seem to have overcome my long-standing fear of reading another project's documentation in order to understand how it works and solve whatever coding block I'm facing at the moment.

In the past, I would resort to flailing around on search engines or Stack Overflow, hoping that someone would have a simple solution for me to copy and integrate so I could continue on with my "real" work.

"There's probably an elegant answer that someone has already tried to figure out, and I just need to craft the right search query to find it."

I'm often good at finding those, but equally often I tend to do things that nobody would do, and therefore it would stop me. "Why do I have to read all that just to accomplish this little side goal in my project?"

I assumed that because I had no idea where to start, and because documentation is often poorly organized, and because I couldn't search quickly for the answer, I therefore would have to read every single page from beginning to end and hope that it wouldn't be for nothing.

But I've learned from spending time with the excellent, readable, up-to-date, and maintained documentation for Hugo that I can just open a bunch of tabs with potentially relevant sections, skim or read deeply as necessary, and I will often find my answer.

Might not be so easy with projects where the information landscape is more chaotic or cryptic; command-line "man" pages, for example, were maybe good in their era, but still a challenge for me as my expectations are from the current century. But now that my capacity has increased, I might still try anyway.

This seems time-consuming initially, but sifting through those pages frequently is now actually the point for me; that's the skill/rep/practice. It's quite functional to let the docs wash over you multiple times while approaching them with different questions, intentions, or reading speeds:

1. It gives you a sense of the layout of where things are.
2. You're likely to stumble upon things along the way that weren't part of your search but are interesting and might be useful for future possibilities.
3. Over time, you can familiarize yourself with many subconcepts and how they fit into the larger structure.

All this builds strength, confidence, resilience, capacity, and understanding, which pays dividends the more you exercise it.

I used to throw my hands up and say it's a design problem if a beginner doesn't know where to start or can't find the answer quickly. Even if that's true (although I'm not sure whether I believe it now), it's been very rewarding to deal with it anyway.

I feel powerful, as if I can tackle anything. I can get answers by simply reading. I can just look at the code.

I'm no longer afraid to try and understand.

My fear may have also been because it's a challenge for me to focus while reading in general, but that too has gotten better with practice.

It surprises me how this applies to open source code and making sense of it. The first time I saw someone do this was in 2018, sitting beside Émile and watching him casually open the source of Ruby on Rails to understand and then describe to me how some ORM method worked; I never thought to do that in the almost 10–15 years of programming language experience prior, and it still took me some years afterward to try it myself and get over my fear in the process.

Code is also a kind of documentation of how something works, usually messy, but it's also possible to skim through or read deeply to make sense over time—and your capacity increases the more you do it.

So I'm no longer afraid, and it makes "open source" mean something new and powerful to me that, although probably obvious to many people, I perhaps only understood intellectually but never experienced.

Most of my open source contributions have been fixing documentation while trying to understand another project and discovering a 'bug' in the text. That's also worth celebrating, but I'm happy to now feel capable enough to do this with code too; somehow it's possible for me because I started reading the docs.

With my current understanding of the value in documenting things well, I've started doing more in my READMEs, CHANGELOGs, and even higher level in a blog; I do this even if the project is "just for myself" at the moment, because I want to work my empathy muscles and be useful to anyone who may ever try to understand what's going on.

Writing things down is powerful and means that someone else can skip the work you did, so I want to improve documentation wherever I see it.

If I had taken this approach from the start, I'd be levitating right now, so I wish someone had shown me 20 years ago. Maybe it could have happened if someone had guided me or told me I was capable of it. Could I do that for you? Perhaps you can take the chance to practice on something small, and maybe soon enough you too shall levitate.

If you enjoyed that, I also wrote about 'figuring it out much later' with respect to iOS programming and playing the guitar.

I'm starting a process to collect my online publishing across various platforms into one 'home'.

Music was the easiest to setup because it doesn't involve dealing with existing systems of mine.

You can see what it's like at rosano.ca/vibrations.

Vibrations

It's hard to have an overview on YouTube as they only order things by date upload, and also separate some videos into 'Shorts'.

By contrast:

1. I now have everything on one page,
2. videos are ordered based on my actual chronology,
3. and some even show the recording date.

It's crazy to perceive the psychological impact of no platform, no ads, and no random obfuscation of my work: I can browse and experience in peace.

metadata details

One thing I find cool is how I can derive the local time and place of any post with my travel data.

Every page also has a "Source" link to view the original file (like the one for this post). A reader can easily correct something, or add tags if it makes sense.

And the there are direct social media links saved from crossposting with n8n or manually.

One last detail is that I've mixed these with log entries to see them in a richer time context; see 2024 for an example of how this mixes together.

vibes

My inner librarian really gets excited by this sort of thing. I love information density, organizing things a certain way, and the potential to fill in more details as time goes on; I would like this site to become a very precise opinion about how that should be.

Might be worth mentioning that this is powered by Hugo, which seems to always have an elegant place for things to rest; I described some of the features I used on their forum.

It feels cool to see so many parts of fragmented systems coming together. With search engines becoming increasingly hostile toward finding things, these approaches remind me of older internetting ways: links that don't break, having multiple ways to discover things, openly accessible without ads, and maybe owning more of your data.

I'm starting to train capoeira again with some new groups and thought to reflect on how many different places I've done this.

My accountant brain enjoys a good spreadsheet, so it naturally manifested in this list:

I'm not sure how to make sense of time versus experience.

My first class was on December 13, 2021, which amounts to about 4 years ago at time of writing, but regular training in groups and solo during that time probably amounts to about a year and a half.

But also some training is more impactful than others, so what is the best measure of experience here?

I think about two quotes.

One is "Do you have ten years of experience? or ten of the same year?" which I heard from Jess Martin.

It can certainly be valuable to have a broader perspective from diversity of experiences, but, also…

when it comes to the body, maybe there's more potency to practice Bruce Lee's single kick 10,000 times.

I'm far from good at this, and as with other aspects of my life, my skills would be deeper if I stuck around and solidified a kind of 'base'.

I do like how this shows an aspect of how I travel to connect with people rather than tourist attractions, more-so than my list of cities; Mestre Mago told me it shares the idea that capoeira lets you feel familiar in unfamiliar places.

I definitely value meeting so many great people, and feel grateful for being welcomed into so many places to be part of the movement, music, and camaraderie.

Someday I'll have a nice game I can share. For now here's me practicing and singing on my own.

If you're interested to learn more or try capoeira, there's probably a group near you even though it's invisible to most people. Here are some games I like:

My video about scrolling meme platforms talks about how random unrelated bits and pieces can leave you confused.

Here I wanted to talk about the scrolling aspect, as I have my own interpretation of this and am trying to become more aware as I do it.

If 'memes' are the content, 'scrolling' is the permission you give to be subjected to one unrelated thing after another without much choice.

'Scrolling' is constantly changing the channel: useful to have an end point, not sure it's conducive as a default mode of operation.

It can also happen while walking down a street full of commercial things designed to get your attention: 'huh, look at this shiny object', 'ooh, that place has a sale', 'yum, this seems tasty'.

It doesn't even have to be about shops: I notice my attention on pigeons gathering, car drivers getting into arguments, judgements about people's clothing…

I say I'm 'scrolling' when I don't realize my attention is bouncing between these things, when the channel changes are the main event.

There's nothing wrong with having attention on any of those things, but I'm noticing a similarity between how I scroll online and how I jump between things in the real world.

In the same way I would prefer to choose where my attention goes online, I would like to have that kind of choice offline: to choose to be absorbed by random things walking down a street, or not.

More and more, I prefer to observe where my attention goes, and at least to be aware when random things appear to be the main event.

From watching the screen to watching myself watch the screen.

Scrolling to strolling.

My birthday reflection this year is a kind of online update since I've been more offline the last while. I'm currently not so clear-minded, somewhat fatigued, with less to say even though a lot happened. But I'm here, and happy to share this.

waves of loss

My father's passing shuffled around many things beyond what I could have expected, and I'm still trying to make sense of this new life. I learned that when a loved one passes away, your old life dies with them and things never 'get back to normal' at some point. Life and death somehow feels a needle apart, which has shifted my priorities, and so I find myself with even less attention to the unnecessary, travelling lighter. At the same time, feeling fortunate to be alive and make the most of it with who or what nourishes me.

movement

I gave myself the gift of training capoeira some weeks in London with a group and master I've been following the past two years. Life-changing by my standards, but not sure how to describe it other than new sensations of what is possible and a vibe that I'll probably carry with me everywhere. Well, at the least it makes me want to dance.

my own food

Although I'm grateful for what seems like years where food just happened around me, it's so satisfying to cook again. Preparing meals while travelling has always been a challenge and I've gotten more practice this year than ever. One thing I'm grateful for is my friend Nairouz demystifying stir-fry to me, as I've enjoyed making it a few times now.

more questions than answers

The past year seems to have been characterized by much uncertainty about the future and what makes sense for me to do.

I passed many periods overwhelmed by my perception of bad things happening in the world, and although I have my own ways to cope, I would invite anyone reading this to share with me: what helps you? I often come back to doing what feels meaningful, even if it's not sufficient. Seems hard to estimate what the world will be like in even five years.

With respect to the technology threads I've been cultivating in previous years, I'm not sure where to place myself considering how the landscape is changing. Conversations and music feel more obvious, as their significance will likely not change in the future. It's interesting to consider what technical things will remain constant… I don't know, but I want to feel like I'm working with a strong sense of purpose.

Perhaps, as someone recently said to me: everything we do matters.

All yearly reflections: 33, 34, 35, 36.