Back to simplicity

I've been treading water the last months, spending too much time on Linux computer setups and other things that clearly does not speak to my core wishes of simplicity.

Lately I've been reading books on Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, and one thing that I deeply respect from them both is their ability to be reflective and self-critical without it being a negative thing.

They realize their mistakes, change course of action, learn from it, and reflect on it.

It all sounds trivial, but all too often people get stuck in a situation of sunk cost fallacy and don't properly evaluate the path they are going.

I've realized now that I've spent too much energy on this whole Linux direction, and that Mac simply is a better direction for me to stick with. I'm not the person to tinker most of my day in the terminal.

Anyways, "Onwards and upwards" is an idiom I love, and I will use that in this case!

Where are we at now then?

In my getting "back to basics" I've refound the joy in simple focussed web apps.

Things that really fascinate me are products like those from goodenough.us, like Pika, Albumwhale and Letterbird.
I really like these kind of focussed apps. And also the whole theme of "good enough". It's kind of saying "We don't try to be best at everything", and that resonates with me a lot.

Other creators I really enjoy:

iA Writer have long been up there.
I still love Kirby CMS for its simplicity in the CMS Realm.
As much as I really like the thoughts and business model of Obsidian it feels a bit too complex for my needs, but lately I've been enjoying Nota. Again, the whole concept of file-based-storage goes across both Kirby, iA, Obsidian and Nota, so that's definitely something I like a lot.

I really find Seb fascinating. All his work with Fffuel has amazed me for a long time, and his work at Muted is even upping it all another notch. Crazy stuff. I really wanted to take his course here the other day, but unfortunately it's not purchasable anymore. I think he sold the whole Fffuel site to Syntax/Sentry if I'm not mistaken.

Vincent Ritter makes some pretty interesting small products.

I'm also into well made puzzle games lately. Partly because they are fun to play, but also for the craftmanship, design, functionality and simplicity of them.
Some standout games lately: Clues by Sam, Fields and Stars from Inkwell Games.

Some simple apps from Github I enjoy

Bullet Journal by Bastian Allgeier
This is basically a basic bullet journal with a perfect week-overview and a simple way to add some notes.
It uses local storage and requires no setup really. I just clone the repo to my Herd-folder as "todo" and hit todo.test in by browser.

Journal by Kev Quirk
"A super simple, self-hosted Journal application that's written in PHP." Kev writes, and that pretty much describes it. A tiny bit more of a setup than the journal, since it uses sqlite and has a login panel, but really takes only a few minutes.

Flexoki Playground by Steph Ango
I have this running on flexoki.test, and it gives me a great base to work with color pallettes. They are already great from the get-go, but with the playground tools one can tweak the chroma and curves for fine adjustments. No local storage going on here, but still a cool tool.

Consumption vs. Creation

All of this inspiration is great, but it can't be that all I do is sit and sift through apps. I need to channel the inspiration somewhere.

So I try to start small and begin creating too. Especially inspired by the simplest of toools like the Bullet Journal and Journal, I have a few ideas I want to explore.

I've started with making a basic Wordle-like game in Norwegian for kids, and a super simple Kirby Theme called Index to get the ball rolling.

But honestly, part of this focus is also due to a substantial decline in client work over the last months. Maybe I should rather be working on sales and marketing, but I prefer spending time following my curiosity and building competence in areas I feel lacking. Interestingly the whole Design industry in Norway are going through tough times, with a critical combination of lowering service-prices, more competition, inflation, saturated private market and a public sector that is very much closed for only big firms. Good to know I'm not alone, but still very challenging to deal with.

Peace & Love.