Craft By Zen

👋🏽 Hi! This is Jeremy's Craft by Zen

  • 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
    🔖 weeknote   ai   books   postgres   security
  • 2024 Week 36 - Weekly Notes
    Posted

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

    Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    🔖 weeknote   ai   music   biology   zines
  • 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
    🔖 weeknote   crypto   postgres   conferences
  • 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
    🔖 newsletter   season_4
  • 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
    🔖 weeknote   ai   notes   postmortem   memory
  • Blockbuster SVG
    Posted
    Filed: 🚰 Stream
    🔖 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
    🔖 weeknote   ai   data_pipeline   self_hosted   books
  • 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
    🔖 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 “recipes” 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
    🔖 pkm   self-hosted   data-pipeline
  • 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
    🔖 weeknote   ai   reading   visualization   maps   Intel
  • 2024 Week 31 - Weekly Notes
    Posted

    Playing with htmx and migrating to the latest version of Ideaverse Pro. Using SQLite in CSV mode, bento slides, quantization visualized, and AI Friend domain sale. Using Little Sis, a photo of Gabriel Medina, Olympics long-term injuries, and welcoming Breaking.

    Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    🔖 weeknote   htmx   pkm   journalism   ai
  • Newsletter - Summer Ablaze
    Posted

    Newsletter - We talk about the fires and the heat. I share some website updates with the home page. Then we go over Hushpuppies and consulting. Finally, I give a recap of what I'm currently reading - Frostbite.

    Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    🔖 newsletter   season_4
  • 2024 Week 30 - Weekly Notes
    Posted

    A news break this week. Some old tidbits like the ten commandments of egoless programming, solitude and leadership. Some new things about knowledge management at NASA, visual programming, engaging over showing. Alexa is losing billions, and how large scale order emerges from complex systems.

    Filed: ✍🏼 Writing
    🔖 weeknote   order   knowledge_management   leadership
  • Typst
    Posted

    Typst is “a new markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn.”

    Screenshot of rendering Fibonacci Sequence using Typst
    Screenshot of rendering Fibonacci Sequence using Typst

    It seems very interesting as an alternative to LaTeX. A lot of emphasis on typesetting. I haven’t gotten the chance to work with LaTeX, so I’d be curious if jumping over that and learning this might be a good alternative. Plus, it has a multiplayer feature built.

    Check out their Github, written in Rust.

    Filed: 🚰 Stream
    🔖 papers   tool   typesetting
  • Network Test
    Posted
    Building a network test tool to test whitelisted IPs, netowrk speed, and latency
    Filed: 🚢 Playground
  • 2024-07-23

    📍 Location: San Jose, CA

    It’s been a season since the last now post. Besides getting married, I’ve also went on a honeymoon, got COVID, and now re-settling back into my normal routine. This website got changed quite a bit again where the home page is now a feed. I’m still thinking through what I want it to ultimately look like, and you may see more changes soon.

    Walking away from the altar
    Walking away from the altar

    The week notes have been keeping me fresh with new ideas of what will be in store for the future.

    Much of my time has been dedicated to playing Baldur’s Gate 3 with my wife. We haven’t played a lot of D&D, so there’s been a learning curve to the possibilities with this game. The world building is very rich.

    Poster for Baldur's Gate 3
    Poster for Baldur's Gate 3

    I’ve been meaning to write in Camp NaNoWriMo, but it’s been hard with the little downtime that I appear to have. If I review my week notes, it looks like AI, obituaries, productivity tools, and tech have really taken my attention. I’ve been meaning to cut out the dopamine-filled addictions like social media doomscrolling and replacing it with reading. It always feels like an assault on my senses, especially with the current political upheavals the US has been facing.

    Filed: ⌚ Now
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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.

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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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