Notes

These are my short notes: mostly what I’m reading, half-formed thoughts, and what I’m faffing around with.

My longer written pieces mostly live on the blog now. You can get an RSS feed just for notes if you want to follow just these.

  1. Yak shaving with tax and collages

    This weekend I had two FUN JOBS: (1) do my tax return, and (2) make some artwork for my latest blog post. (OK, only one of those is fun.)

    Naturally I needed to build my own software to do that:

    • Capital Gains Tax Calculator: paste in any trades you made, and it applies HMRC’s byzantine rules to match them up, and make an estimate of what you owe. It runs completely in your browser, so your data is never sent anywhere. Obviously, you should also have an accountant to verify.
    • Collage Maker: I wanted to make one of those dithered/halftone illustrations that you see in magazines, and Canva is just overkill for that. This is a simple web app that lets you paste images, add shapes and create a simple collage.

    Both are MIT licensed, knock yourself out!

  3. k6 workshop in Bergen - thank you

    Thanks to everyone who came to Imma and my workshop “Shift Left: Reliability Testing with k6” at Cloud Native Norway in Bergen! And thanks for the organisers for having us.

    You can find the slides here and the labs in this repository on GitHub here.

  4. Radios and ponies

    I’m looking for some inspiration for my own Apple Watch development aspirations, and I found these really fun apps (via r/AppleWatchApps):

    RadioStation - free, private radio player with cute Apple Watch tuner companion app

    Crown Calm - fidget app for Watch. I love the marble maze!

    PonyRelief - HRV stress trends, but mainly just because you can choose your own pony mascot

  5. Radio 4 Free Thinking

    I’ve just read on the great This Sceptred Dial radio newsletter that the BBC is to axe, amongst others, Free Thinking which is such a great show. I’ve discovered numerous interesting things from that show including On the Silver Globe, a fascinating unfinished sci-fi film project I’d never heard of.

    And I really hope the BBC finds another outlet for Matthew Sweet. He’s one of the best radio presenters they have.

    As pillars of Radio 4 crumble, what kind of network are we going to be left with?

  6. Widget

    Another interesting use case for Claude:

    Always wanted a desktop widget but thought it was a faff to create one? Just get Claude to create it.

    Here’s one I created today: show me the current virtual desktop name, so I can see what I’m working on, on my current desktop.

    plasma-desktop-name widget

  7. My first ever IAP sale

    A couple of days ago, someone bought the Pro upgrade for Basic Countdown Timer today. That’s $2.99, minus Apple’s cut.

    This is the first IAP sale I’ve ever made! I wrote the first version of this app on an iPad in 2024 to learn Swift. Then, I abandoned it for two years. It gets about 20 downloads per month.

    Whoever you are, thank you!

  8. Just ship

    I just read this in an interview with the makers of the app ‘Grug’, which won an award at this year’s Apple Design Awards.

    What advice would you give to a developer or designer just starting out?

    Ship. When you build, you find new ideas, bad ideas, technical roadblocks, better directions, and real people. Put something into the world, learn from what happens, then keep going.

    So, just ship.