Update for the week ending on Friday, Jun 19, 2026

Refactoring English

• Worked on adapting the design docs chapter into a public excerpt

Website

• Dropped newsletter signups from the website
  • Now that the book is nearly complete, I’d rather the path be that people just buy the book instead of signing up to a mailing list.
• Rename “Chapters” to “Excerpts”
  • It felt too confusing since the chapters don’t perfectly match to excerpts
• Styled book excerpts as cards instead of flat text
  • Before
  • After
• Adjusted the early access page to better explain the current status of the book

Feedback App

• Started working on supporting separate user sessions
• Added support for tying comments to a specific book version
  • Previously, it was assumed that there was only one version of the book, but really, there will be multiple drafts
• Ported improvements from go-app-starter
• Added a cleaner parse function for comment requests
• Added support for parsing the book version metadata from the book file uploads
• Created a better API for the book HTML files
• Added type checking for reading static assets
• Tighten chapter file discovery to match the book’s actual file layout

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).

• Finally finished magic login email-based authentication
  • I’ve been yak shaving this for four months
  • And fix a bug where I accidentally shipped dev mode logins to production
    • It wasn’t a huge deal because the attacker would have had to guess one of <20 valid emails associated with the server
• Switched rate limiter to be per-IPv4 and per-email
• Changed semantics of NewSender to return ErrUnregisteredEmail instead of empty entry
  • This was really confusing me, and I traced the issue to this “empty struct has subtle meaning” API bug
• Added an env var for litestream DB path
• Added renderTemplate wrapper to eliminate ExecuteTemplate boilerplate
• Added project milestone status to README.md
• Ported improvements from go-app-starter
• Tried to build the Docker image from the Dockerfile in Nix
  • I eventually just gave up because it’s too hard.
  • Nix blocks Docker from pulling images from the Internet, so I basically have to rewrite my whole Dockerfile
    • Mitchell Hashimoto has a viable example
  • It would be nice to have my Nix-based CI be able to check if my Dockerfile actually builds, but it’s too much hassle, and it’s not that hard to fix when I find out at deploy time.
• Updated to Litestream 0.5.11
• Inlined the arguments to ffmpeg
• Added log messages to record whether the login token generator is in dev mode or prod mode
• Changed Tinybeans import to convert MP4 videos to WebM
• Improved the design doc
  • Got rid of the global rate limits to prevent an attacker from trivially DoSing the server
  • Added a note about how Bunny’s S3 implementaton can’t support Litestream
  • Converted the permissions lists into a table
  • Fix the HTML rendering so that the table of contents appears after the title and metadata
• Moved database replication to milestone 5
• Refactored docker-entrypoint semantics for clarity
• Updated upload-prod-db to use the latest flyctl CLI semantics
• Refactored tests to use a single helper function for email address creation
• Change ImportMedia to take a struct instead of an arg list so that callsites are more obvious
• Moved mustGetenv to main.go
• Renamed srcFileData test field to the more accurate dstFileDataExpected

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

• Worked on support for “draft mode”
• Added ETag caching for static assets
• Make SQLite foreign key enforcement explicit
• Fix Go tool settings in Nix shell
• Modernized Docker and Fly runtime config
• Refactored HTML template rendering to use a common function
• Switched JavaScript tooling from npm to pnpm

go-app-starter

• Backported improvements from Grosiree
• Backported improvements from Little Moments

Grosiree

Grosiree is a shared grocery list web app I’m making with my wife to show her how vibecoding works.

• Moved my Grosiree instance to fly.io
  • I was hosting on my Oracle free tier instance, but I found out from reddit that Oracle is taking it away and was about to start charging
• Backported a bunch of Go app project improvements from Little Moments
• Fixed range requests on static assets
• Documented GROSIREE_SHARED_SECRET in .env.example
• Added VCS metadata on about page
• Updated fly.toml for recent config options

aw-web-ng

My custom frontend to ActivityWatch for tracking my time locally.

• Played around with CLI semantics.
• Added support for nested activities like “Book/Writing” vs. “Book/Website”

Misc

• Attended Tom Buchok’s founders dinner in Boston