March/April links

Happy May!

I hinted at this in the last newsletter installment, but I decided to take a sabbatical this year to pivot my career a bit. I've been in product management for about a decade, but, after some intense self-reflection late last year, I realized that I've always experienced a greater joy from making things with my own hands (be it software, writing, or brewing beer on the side). I feel much more satisfaction when I deeply understand how the things I build actually work, or when I've had some say in their composition. So, I'm pursuing an engineering-focused role.

I've been creating small projects and pushing them up to GitHub to learn the fundamentals for months now, but last week I hit pause on my coursework to build a prototype of a macOS app for journaling (with an emphasis on privacy and storing data locally). This stemmed from the idea that staff at Notion, which I use for a bunch of personal organization, can theoretically dip into your account at any time with no notice and read your stuff.

I thought of it on Tuesday and it existed by Thursday. I've been avoiding using Cursor's built-in agent too much as I learn, but I let it rip to build out the Rust-based backend to interact with the SQLite database. I tinkered with the React and Typescript app until I got it to a decent working version. Then I fought with Apple to get the binary notarized and released.

Whew! What a concentrated and awesome learning experience. This was essentially a hackathon that taught me 1) something in the world has indeed shifted and 2) it's super far from perfect and I think it is still very worthwhile to learn how to code and likely will be forever. I corrected Cursor's agent dozens of times, rejected changes, and had to continually remind it to use an updated version of Tauri (which is the Rust-based framework that ports web apps to a macOS webview) because I read the docs and could see that package names and syntax had changed all over the place.

The app is super basic at the moment, but I spun up a Linear account and I'm now tracking a backlog of changes that I want to bite off in pieces in parallel with my studies.

I would be honored if you tried out Journal and let me know your feedback here! You can download it below:

Journal

A lightweight journaling app for macOS, built with privacy as its core principle. No cloud. No syncing. No sharing. Just your thoughts stored locally, and seen by no one but you. A calm, focused writing experience made just for your Mac. It’s also open source (MIT license). Try it out:

Nick RobertsNick Roberts

If you're curious about how it works, the repo is here.

Anyhow! There's some cool stuff in this links edition.

From the past couple months

Traveling through Iraq in 2025. (Video)

The Urgency of Interpretability. (Link)

Michael Truell, founder of the Cursor IDE, on the company's explosive ARR growth and the future of software engineering. (Podcast)

America's covert involvement in the Ukraine War. Really excellent piece. (Link)

I liked this quote:

"Wondering what to do with your life? Here’s what I suggest:

First priority: Your physical health. (No health → no life.)
Second priority: Reasonable financial security. (No food → no health.)
Third priority: Good relationships with friends and family. (Depressed → no mental health.)

After that you can do whatever. The game you’re playing doesn’t have any rules and there’s no way to win." (Link)

On the biggest crypto heist in history. (Link)

Kayak's travel agent. Talking to hotels and flights with an LLM. I'm not sure it'll be replacing my use of the normal UI, but it's cool. (Link)

A version of Claude obsessed with the Golden Gate Bridge (found through Amodei's article on interpretability above) (Link)

A 1994 New York Times article on how to watch hummingbirds. Beautiful writing. (Link)

A solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem in the context of a South Korean bar crawl. (Link)

Results from "vibe coding" for 30 days. If you're unfamiliar with the hottest new AI term/pejorative on the block, vibe coding means using tools like Cursor, Windsurf, etc. to build applications without understanding the underlying code the models produce. (Video)

The island in the US where people still speak Elizabethan english. (Video)

A cool YouTube channel about street photography. (Link)

Bill Gates actually has a pretty cool personal website. (Link)

Excellent overview of the Javascript event loop and task queue. (Video)