Update for the week ending on Friday, Mar 27, 2026

Refactoring English

• Published “Which Design Doc Did a Human Write?”
• Added a new section to design docs chapter called “What belongs in a design doc?”
• Continued working on “Help the Reader Achieve their Goal” chapter
• Continued working on “Meet the Reader Where They Are” chapter
• Made minor revisions to “Make your writing sound natural” chapter

Little Moments

Little Moments is an open-source web app I’m working on to replace the current family photo sharing app (TinyBeans) I used (which I strongly dislike).

• Got done with most of milestone 1
  • Browse page
  • View photo page
• SQLite implementation is not complete yet
• Cloud storage is not implemented yet
• Importing from TinyBeans all works
  • Imported emoji reactions from TinyBeans
  • Switched to generating new UUIDs for files instead of reusing Tinybeans UUIDs
  • I suspected that we were getting unintended side effects from reusing the TinyBeans UUIDs, and I was right, as too much was implicit.
  • This also made me realize we don’t want URL paths to use UUIDs, as they’re too long and ugly.
  • As a side effect, I shortened to 4-digit friendly IDs for URLs.
• Use lowercase for photo and video entry type values
  • Similarly, I suspected we were inheriting implicit behavior by copying exactly from TinyBeans, and this caught a few issues.
• Fixed timing in GIF-to-AVIF conversion on TinyBeans imports
• Added support for basic keyboard shortcuts
• Added support for swipe gestures on mobile
• Turned on caching of embedded static assets
• Added stronger typing for certain fields to prevent AI agents from doing dumb things with data types
  • Added strong typing to CommentText type
  • Added strong typing to ReactionEmoji type
  • Added strong typing Email type
  • Added strong typing to UserID type
• Added AGENTS.md guidance about defining symbols close to where we use them
• Added a quick pre-commit check to stop AI agents from testing unexported symbols
• Replaced Font Awesome with Lucide icons
• Added video badges on video thumbnails
  • Simple, but distinguishes them from static photos
• Fixed a gap in tinybeans-export where it wasn’t exporting threaded conversations
• Updated Playwright from 1.57.0 to 1.58.2

Go App Starter

• Added a standard /about page
• Added more rules to AGENTS.md
• Added a CLAUDE.md that redirects to AGENTS.md
• Added a nix build target for the Dockerfile
• Added folders to gitignore that I use with AI agents
• Set npm dependencies to auto-install from nix flake
• Moved ESLint ignores to eslint.config.js
• Updated to prettier 3.8.1
• Upgraded to go 1.26
• Removed an outdated feature on the template landing page

Misc

• Disabled dependabot on beancount-capitalone and beancount-mercury
• Fixed the built-in microphone on my Framework 13
  • I knew it wasn’t a hardware issue because it worked fine on Ubuntu, but I could never figure out why it was so messed up on NixOS
  • I asked Claude Opus 4.6, and it correctly diagnosed it as a bad input gain setting
    • After incorrectly diagnosing it as a kernel module issue
  • I set the gain to 0.4 and now it sounds great!
• Argued about with the vendor about a bug bounty