What is this?
I am forever stumbling across topics I’d like to explore further. It can be easy to bikeshed 1 and never complete my current thought. This is the greenhouse where I’m going to plant these starts which may get the attention they need to be evergreen members of my garden, or they may live here pending future pruning. Either way, I can move forward without them stealing my focus away from what I’m currently working on.
Starts
Philosophizing
- no-motes: Motes in the business sense diminish human flourishing. Medical advances or process innovations become guarded secrets to build a small empire instead of being for the betterment of society in general.
- no-kings: The idea is simple, equality means that there are no and can be no kings, no emperors. I first encountered this under the doomtree banner and more recently it has taken on a more directly political meaning
- Open Source and Fair Code: Refer to the ramble I started down over on the Tools homepage
- Recycling: The floor of St. John Lateran is a patterned mosaic of the ruins of other Roman buildings. Are our lives being built with material valuable enough to repurpose as our calling changes? Alternatively, are we aware of all the ways our lives are built on the ruined thoughts of antiquity as an alternative to standing on the shoulders of giants.
- Recycling and the Mathusian Swerve: Further thoughts on how we quantify resources relative to grand buildings like St. John Lateran and how recycling of materials will be necessary to avoid full depletion of many resources.
- How art/entertainment are funded: From benefactors to soap operas.
- How we relate to AI: AI algorithms are baked into the platforms we use to commoditize and sell our attention. What does it look like to take control of AI as a tool to serve your interests instead of serving your attention to others?
- How do we help people?
- Homeless as a lifestyle for personal autonomy
- What does it take to help people overcome trauma?
- How do I help (react) when I’m confident that the asked for assistance will lead to harm?
- How do I help someone stuck in addictive cycles?
- The challenges along the path of recovering to independence
- What are the prerequisites to helping: From Tribe of Mentors: You should earn wealth before you set out to help others. Good intentions to help others need to follow from having helped yourself.
- Digital Ownership: How we’ve given up our rights. From CDs to Spotify. From books to kindle. The centralization of content. Our new dependence on our tech overlords.
- Where are the gardens?: How we’ve sacrificed local farming for cheap food and ignorance of where our food comes from.
- “Someone” and national anarchism: The sentiment that “someone should do something” raises the question of “Who?” that is an appeal to authority where there is no governing body for the world and countries relate with each other in an essentially anarchic manner.
- Responding to thought police: Wrong think should insight curiosity to discover if it’s real. People are rarely evil so perceived evils often highlight ignoring in the thinker or malice in the presenter.
Life skills
- Credit cards: Why they are good and also dangerous, how to use them and why most folks shouldn’t.
- Protectionism: Proactive vs reactive, the pros and cons. Why in the United States big business hucksters are allowed to prey on us with deceptive products that hurt most of their customers.
- Bill pay automation and habit: Practical patterns for managing anxiety and living a low stress life while also being a responsible adult.
- Paperless: The pros and cons of paperless living. Why its hard to get entirely away from paper.
- Annual review processes: Why do companies ask employees to write reviews / feedback? How should you think about this process?
- Getting things done / Inbox 0: Tools I find useful in managing life.
Professional
- Estimating team work - Time vs points, individuals vs groups
App/Project Ideas
A note here: Yes, I am sharing ideas of things that someone could make and derive money from. No, this doesn’t bother me. These are things that I want to exist in the world. I hope to build some of them, if someone else has already built some or all of these and I am able to use them on acceptable terms, thats one less thing for me to do…
- Maintenance cycle tracking: All of people, animals and things have maintenance/management cycles. It would be amazing to have a single dashboard tracking all outstanding maintenance/management actions needed to adult well. Ideally this would integrate with your todo/notification systems. Syncing is hard. Maybe its enough to have one place to track things like this.
- Flash cards for learning notes: Define a pattern for capturing flash cards into learning notes and offer an interface for reviewing to memorize.
- Votes/comments/annotations for everything: A minimal browser extension for annotating the internet. Allow sites to enhance users experiences by auto tagging lists/resources with. Public/Private/Protected.
- Deep linking standard: For youtube, videos are easy to deeplink. It looks like there’s a similar standard in Spotify. It would be nice to create link sharing that subsumes my listening/viewing platform so that a reader can view the content, at the start position I have shared on their platform of choice.
- TOS Tracker - A browser extension that logs the TOS/Agreements encountered by the user as they browse. This could provide stock feedback as a free tier and very custom feedback for a paid tier.
- Neighborhood community cooperative services - A cooperative service buying social network focused on connecting neighbors and their local service providers. One part Angie’s list, one part nextdoor, one part collective bargaining.
- Customer backchannel for Growth engineers - How often has a notification, email, popup pushed with the intent of increasing conversions made you grow in dislike for a brand in a lasting way? What if these connection points had a direct feedback mechanism? Build a platform/mechanism for giving immediate feedback into growth engineering campaigns.
- Github issues management platform - Issues can be hard to track and having a platform to track/manage KPIs for your github issues tuned by your needs is high value to earn developer trust with your users. This would pair well with some amount of dashboarding/monitoring/alarming.
- BIDARA prompt for evaluating project ideas.
- Interview code interface - Build a shared code editing platform that is built to maximize both candidate and interviewer experience. Track candidate activity vs inactivity. Offer agentic experiences / lookup to keep all interactions concentrated on the shared coding process. Extend with system design speech/instruction to diagram experience.
- AI assisted coding benchmarks - Once setup, how easy is it to perform normal looking tasks in any given AI assisted coding experience? Create a standard set of projects to attempt and post benchmarks / experiences. This could be a social activity where many people from different experience levels time themselves and grade their experience to get an aggregate score which acts as a guide for new users on what to use for the best experience. Inspired by Simon Willison’s pelican tasks.
- Geo/time tagged documents - A portal that allows an organization to publish documents related to a specific place and time where users can view documents offered near them. Ex. Sporting event guide. Museum guide. Conference community guidelines. Public meeting Agenda. Concert program.
- Experience portal - Community shared recommended experiences. Searchable, filterable by price/duration/open hours/… Ex. Stone Arch Bridge river walk, maybe list adjacent shops/restaurants worth checking out. AirBNB had an experiences section at one point. A bit of a superset of something like alltrails.com. Bootstrapping content would be hard.
- Crypto NFT based CCG - Build a collectable card game based set of crypto tools / experiences for releasing card collections and playing games with other users.
- OSS Code Review - Explore public repositories reviewing code for quality and building an index of cool patterns / approaches observed in the wild.
- Inventory App - Capture notes about possessions organized hierarchically by location. Make it easy to manage / maintain so you have a good sense of everything you own and how it is organized, with metadata about history / maintenance / intent.
- Personal datalake - Personal data is spread everywhere over the internet and isn’t easy to collate. Offer a single platform that syncs your data from all other services into a single platform where you can build dashboards and/or automate actions.
- Crypto reputation tracker - Build a set of contracts / patterns to support: 1) Agreeing to mutual review and appeal. 2) Sharing history. 3) Appeal arbitration. Pair with escrow. Targeting experiences like rideshare, classified exchange, short term rental. Cases where two parties want to know that they can trust one another and agree to allow their reputations to be updated following a transaction.
- Podcasting platform - Full end to end podcast launch platform that automates web experience, mobile app experience, release to all major platforms, transcription, mailing list management. Reduce the cost to start a podcast to as near $0 as possible. AI features. Social media cross-posting.
- AI RSS Reader - Put the user in control of the sorting / filtering / automation of how content arrives in their own inbox. Maximize your personal signal based on your own definition of value.
- Catholic saints site - Build an aesthetic portal that features engaging content on the lives of the saints using social input and AI to make a community / gardening type of experience. Success would be having the saints be better known / more approachable.
- Church information database - Build a community database of Catholic church data such as, where are churches, which governing bodies to they roll up to, which priests served at which parishes for how long, what are the parish boundaries, what is any given churches art/architectural feature/history? Build a governance structure to consider expanding content and maintain a high quality and review standard for existing content.
- Personal timeline - Build a time indexed view of my digital footprint. What happened when? Offer the ability to rollback time. Related to Personal datalake.
- Screenshot timeline - Build a simple cross platform app that takes a screencap and uploads it every 60 seconds (on some interval) on every device I use. This provides a personal history and offers insight into how I spend my time. Could be AI reviewed.
- Personal audio timeline - Make it easy to capture an audio record for as much of my day as I would like. Offer a button or a wake word to tag moments / periods worth reviewing. Offer transcription / summarization on demand for any section of the your recorded life.
- Typescript DSL builder - Build a standard set of DSL builder patterns for constructing and transforming complicated typescript builder patterns.
- Personal Day Planner - A one page day planner that captures intent/goals/tasks/habit tracking/expected vs actual time use.
- Professional development bootcamp app - Habit tracking to tune back media diet. Mixed mode working through knowledge acquisition and lab work. Merit badges / rewards. Could include a pairing/mentoring component.
- Retreat/Mission/Campaign Management App - Build a common platform for offering shared experiences with regularly released content (text/audio/video) paired with habit tracking activities / signing up to fill a schedule. Broadly, its a content/community experience management thing where different groups may need focus on different features. Configurable via json / markdown content so its easy for leaders to put together a function for their communities, which can be loaded through the app without central management. The app should be an empty shell, ready to be populated.
- Application template library - Build up a library of common Application patterns that follow best practices and can be adapted to use by individuals or organizations.
- Church website templates - Offer easy to use Church website templates that are easy to adopt, populate, deploy and manage.
- Smart dictation App - Users can speak to their phone and it gets auto-dictated. Their intent will be guessed at by AI and derivative / related questions will show up on the screen to help them continue their thinking / fill in gaps. Once complete the AI sill produce a summary of the dictation, put together a refined / clarified transcript and can be directed to turn the overarching thought into a script for a podcast / interview or some other presentation or do deep research on the topics discussed.
- App building decision tree - Build a elegant visual decision tree for the technologies to choose when building an application in the js/ts ecosystem.
- CLI App building decision tree - Ask questions and pull in all the tools / prompts / rules / templates needed to successfully build any app based on simple branching questions.
- Learning platform for App building decision tree - Provide both human and LLM guidance on the technologies needed to build an app based on stepping through the App building decision tree.
- Rebuild a church (or non-profit) site every way - Document the process of building the same website on all major site building platform. Ideally have the full experience including managing maintenance.
- Anonymous credits for internet services - Paying for things creates / builds a relationship, for features like search, it would be nice if the user could not be product without forming an relationship with the vendor with identified and credit card connectivity.
- Automated newsletter (personalize) - Pick a subject and give guidance and an agent will curate a feed/newsletter of personalized content to keep you up to date.
- Live meeting assistant - An agent that logs into your call that anyone can connect with and cross prompt to receive meeting notes / thoughts / feedback to help them engage / guide the conversation.
- Decentralize internet voting currency (Decentralized Twitch bits) - Create a browser plugin (or use lace to build an app) that allows cheering on streamers and content providers using cryptocurrency (like Ada)
- Live streaming avatar - Build a machine that can perform an image transformation on video in real time. Allow both anonymity and responsive interactivity like being a mascot. Can a streaming transformation machine be productized? Camera → Live Transformation → Stream. Can the same host handle OBS or do we need to chain boxes?
- AI investing assistant - Realtime stock information and news. Use the news to gather sentiment / predictions, derived using AI. Use predictions to test sources, authors, companies for accuracy weights and build models to trade with/against.
- Github Pipeline view - Build a multi stage published pipeline view for github action processes that consist of more than a single action.
- Github Issue management dashboard - Build a dashboard for managing github issues / communication / sentiment / velocity for the packages you own/manage/interact with.
- Do my own Build12 campaign
- AI project templates - Build AI prompt guidance (or MCPs) that make AI assisted coding very productive when working against specific high productivity solution patterns.
- RSS following all activity of public persons work - Follow all articles / interviews / activity of a given user either 1st order effect or everything about them too.
- ShadCN social directory - Share and iterate on ShadCN components. Collect component install metrics. Like https://21st.dev/ (but more social and less sales)
- Developer job board - If building tools for developers, have a job board as a profit center makes sense.
- SDE Hiring process definition automation - Build an SDE hiring process tailored to your company/team based on prompting. Job descriptions / interviews / rubrics etc…
- Social bookmarking - Rebuild delicious.
- Transcription hub - Transcribe podcasts and videos and store the result. Make podcasts and videos searchable by their transcription content.
- Local/Remote AI partnership - Have a local (dumb) LLM parse through the prompt content and identify the problem that needs solving, then have a remote smart/expensive AI generate a multistep prompt plan for the local LLM to execute the project. My data stays local, but I get to leverage smart LLMs to avoid the need for human prompt engineering.
- Community tokens - Buy N tokens to vote/influence a community with and get N/100 durable generative tokens that will draw that many recurring tokens to keep you durably in the community.
- Localism portal - Build a regional portal for things happening near me. Sort of a localism social network.
- Magazine for one - Have agents curate content and format it well for your singular consumption.
- Real estate scoring - Build custom scoring algorithms to sort/alert on for property listings.
- Indulgence tracker - Brainstorm indulgences that you can seek out, track when you do it, keep a global tally of tracked indulgences.
- Running DMC - A community divine mercy chaplet app where people sign on to pray at specific times where to goal is to have the divine mercy chaplet prayed continuously around the world.
- Novena app - Sign up to pray along with Novena’s (partner with the praymorenovenas folks)
- AI voice interface for - Journaling, brainstorming, interacting with inventory app idea, etc…
- Coding as a service - DesignJoy model for contract work as a service.