Steering Is Harder Than It Looks
July 8, 2026A reading group tries to build a psychohistory. First problem: every theory of history says it can't be done.
Blog written by Kyle Mathews who lives and works in Salt Lake City building useful things.
Essential Until It Wasn't
July 3, 2026Every generation of programmers believed their ground was solid. Assembly, C, manual memory management — each felt essential until the boundary moved. Now AI is moving it again.
Apps After Agents
July 1, 2026Models are commodity. Substrate is differentiation. The question isn't how smart your agents are — it's where the crystallized judgment lives.
The Rise of Protocols
April 9, 2024Protocol Theory may be as important as Information Theory, helping us rebuild struggling institutions.
Announcing a new Vite Plugin for integrating Capsizecss & Radix-ui
March 28, 2024A Vite plugin that integrates Capsize with Radix UI for precise, consistent typography across fonts.
LocalFirst.fm Podcast with Johannes Schickling
March 13, 2024Podcast transcript discussing sync engines, local-first DX, and why data-first development is the future.
Build Notes: Where I add an email newsletter with an ElectricSQL admin app
January 30, 2024Adding a simple newsletter by decomposing the problem and doing things that don't scale.
Build Notes: Where is my time spent when building two micro-apps?
January 22, 2024Time breakdown of building two ElectricSQL apps. Repetition compresses novel tasks into fast routines.
Flying Drones in Latent Space
December 19, 2023LLM prompts are like flying cameras through latent space, capturing snapshots of frozen intelligence.
Build Notes: Creating a Local-First, AI-powered YouTube Summarizer
December 13, 2023Building a YouTube summarizer with ElectricSQL, exploring lazy syncing and real-time progress updates.
Build Notes: Creating a Local First Vite/React/ElectricSQL Starter
November 15, 2023Notes from building a Vite/React/ElectricSQL starter with excellent DX and schema-first development.
Announcing trpc-crdt
November 10, 2023Run tRPC server calls over CRDT sync engines like Yjs and ElectricSQL for resilient, real-time RPCs.
Building a "per-user database" SaaS app with Turso
October 3, 2023Using Turso's 10,000 database limit to build SaaS apps where each user gets their own isolated SQLite database.
Some notes on Local-First Development
September 8, 2023Local-first shifts reads and writes to client databases synced by engines. A major paradigm shift ahead.
LLM Test Runners for Content
March 16, 2023LLMs finally enable automated testing for documentation by asking questions and asserting on responses.
A Social Protocols OS
March 14, 2023What if we had an OS for social protocols that made running clubs, conferences, and potlucks almost trivial?
Situated Software for Hyper-local, Hyper-yummy Ice Cream
April 28, 2021Building a micro-business web app to sell homemade ice cream to neighbors, exploring situated software.
Do you actually want your own open source project?
July 19, 2019Running OSS projects is rewarding but demanding. Consider your motives before starting one.
Building a Slack bot to help handle large numbers of PRs
April 22, 2019Using queuing theory from Product Development Flow to build a Slack bot that identifies unreviewed Gatsby PRs.
New blog design
March 31, 2019Redesigning my blog with Cooper Hewitt typeface, inspired by an airport banner ad in Amsterdam.
Hope and the Atonement
January 25, 2018The atonement gives us taste for what we can become. Closing the gap between vision and reality is hard work.
Typefaces: The easiest way to self-host open-source fonts
January 31, 2017NPM packages for self-hosting fonts. Faster than Google Fonts, works offline, and opens the door to further optimizations.
Working full-time on Gatsby
August 12, 2016Announcing full-time work on Gatsby.js and Typography.js after leaving my startup, with plans for service workers and GraphQL.