Like an animal bred in captivity, I feel unfit to be uncaged. But here I am, unleashed.

The business class section of the Heathrow Express is packed. I arrived early and set myself up with a seat in the corner. The lady across from me seems irritated that I have chosen to exist. I’m in concordance with her, it is annoying. I wish she could sit with her husband too. I wish I could sit with mine. We should all get to sit with our husbands.

What else is there? Remember that time Sofía said “I don’t like Mickey Mouse”? Back then I knew how to play a triste. Been walking around the house singing a song about being in pain. So maudlin. So dramatic. One time in school a teacher called me a “drama queen” and I walked out.

Your journey’s not over, it’s just begun.
Make your dreams your destiny.
And do what must be done.
If you’re frightened, if you’re worried: you’re not alone.
Hand in hand we’ll take the step into the great unknown

Littlebook

This week I’ve been sitting in one spot, holding onto the part of my life that is not fluctuating. That part of my life has cotton sheets. When not working for a living, I’ve been working on Littlebook.

p: But, why?

s: Because it’s beautiful!

occasionally collaborative rectangles

I’ve added an opencanvas experiment where there is an Automerge doc the shape of a canvasprotocol.org OCIF file. The opencanvas plugin provides two Views:

• one capable of converting to-and-fro Tldraw<->OCIF.
• one capable of converting to-and-fro Excalidraw<->OCIF

So far I’ve only implemented rectangles, but it’s cool. Collaborative rectangles between devices, browsers, and even apps! You can move them around and change their colour and resize them in Tldraw, and watch the same thing happen over there on your phone in Excalidraw.

Plugin Workshop

I’ve also added a PluginEditor plugin which is a mini-IDE that allows you to build Littlebook plugins within Littlebook.

PluginEditor supports .tsx, .ts, .jsx, .js and .css. You can import from https://esm.sh. You can set the @jsxImportSource and then write React, Preact, SolidJS, etc.

There’s a little special set up to get SolidJS working properly behind the scenes because it depends on its own babel plugin, but anything that uses the regular JSX transform will Just Work™.

Some common libraries are available from an importmap on Littlebook itself. Any https://esm.sh imports will be cached by the ServiceWorker. Did you know that you can @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/preact and it actually works?

There’s some Automatic Type Acquisition affordances too.

hehe

In fact, you know i’m writing this article in it right now.

To Berlin

I’m off to Berlin now for the Local-First Conference. It’ll be nice to talk to the people who are interested in (the non-corporate parts of) that. The parts that are to do with freedom and ownership, and about making the world brighter and fairer. A lot of it will be about Sync Engines, which is fine. But the really special stuff is happening in other places: collaboration without a server, without the internet, without a network. If I send you a file, it’s yours. We can merge them together later, but it’s up to us. Every single person is the source of truth for their files. And a server is just a computer that’s more likely to be on than off.

In the airport, I keep on remembering how excited I was for the future, and then breaking my heart over again. Little things. And big things. I keep remembering that I was excited for the future, and then it cracks a little more again. But I’m also in heat and salivating.

My work decided they didn’t want to pay for my conference anymore because I quit my job. That’s fair, though I wish they’d given me more than 2 days notice hahahah. So my bank balance is twice light and red.

landed

ate whopper

Ode to the girl with pink and lilac space buns and little star hair clips and yellow and magenta tie-dye santa cruz sweatshirt who gave up her seat on the bus for an older lady

The guy at the front desk of the hotel gave me a free drink voucher, and told me he’ll be in london in a couple of weeks. The people of Berlin are hungry for rabbit.

And I don't do love
I just know someone who I can think about

I’m back in my room now. This hotel has room service guitars supplied by Gibson. It also has €26 breakfasts. I’m looking forward to trying both of those things tomorrow.

It was great listening to peter, alex and seph talk about events and everything. i have things to say but i think i’m talking too much, so tomorrow perhaps i will not speak anymore. orion is lovely.

It’s been enjoyable meeting everybody so far. I’m tired and riddled with anxiety. Hope I can manage to make it out of the hotel room tomorrow.

It’s nearly 4am tomorrow and I promised breakfast that I would be up by 7, so I’d best turn off

it is now after nearly 4am. it is closer to 4:10am. am i going to get no sleep? it’s been a while since i’ve tried to sleep in a new bed alone. i never fare well with sleeping in that scenario.

Let’s get matching tattoos.

Oh look, I’m back. Back in London. London, England. England, United Kingdom. United Kingdom, Earth. Earth, in The Moon System. The Moon System in Engine Alcheme. Stay tuned for more, after these messages from our sponsors.

Sometimes sponsors are the only way to get water.

On Monday I met this bird:

On Tuesday we (Zaina + me, not me + the seagull) flew to Amsterdam, we walked along the canals and we ate spaghetti. And on Wednesday we met another Little Bird. What a wonderful time meeting my oldest friend in person for the first time, and we all took a ride along in a boat and learned about all the top ten grachts in amsterdam and the perils of building everything out of wood (catch fire).

If you owned a bowling alley under a bridge on a canal what would you call it?

And then we (me + Zaina) flew back to Málaga on Wednesday Evening. Zaina didn’t have to show passport to anyone the whole time we were in Amsterdam, noch in het hotel 🏩, noch op de luchthaven ✈️.

The European Dream, living ones Schengeniest life.

On Thursday I attended the conference. Met up with pvh and talked a little Automerge, Malleable Software and whatnot. Orion did a great talk about “adversarial malleability”.

That night Zaina and I attended an impressive flamenco performance, the performers had the duende. Olé!

On Friday another conference day, though I spent the first half walking on the beach. pvh’s talk was very good. Funny and inspiring. Afterwards Zaina and I walked for a couple of hours to a pizza festival, got blisters on our feet, ate a good slice (hers had an egg) and went home.

The next day we got up early to watch the sunrise. We checked out, ate breakfast, lay on the beach. Zaina swam while I burned a bit.

Checking through security there was the angriest man. If you bring to mind the image of Peter Capaldi if he’d been a spanish football referee (who wishes he was a player) you are in the right ballpark. He kept shouting “Lady!” at Zaina and telling her to remove the keyboard from her bag (she had no keyboard). He was being such an asshole. He told me I had things I didn’t have too. He made some mistakes, and held up the line, and then got angry at us for his own mistakes. We gave him our grathias aluegos and went to the gates area where Zaina broke up with me.

I got home about 4am and ate a pizza.

Now I’m reörganizing the monorepo for one of my silly personal project apps. I’ve just noticed with my tongue that part of one of my teeth is missing. This time next week I’ll be in Berlin. The week after that I’ll no longer be an employee for the company I’ve been at for 7.5 years. The day after that I’ll start my new job.

Tense, waiting for a visa a few days before a flight you’ve already booked to a hotel you’ve already paid for. Big plastic envelope arriving 3 days before the flight. Has her passport in it which is maybe stamped Schengen and maybe not, don’t know until it’s in your hands. You have to do it that way, they don’t let you apply for the visa unless you already have a flight and hotel booked.

The visa worked out. We met up in Gatwick airport, ate spicy chicken, drank virgin marys, boarded the plane. Security was quick and painless. Landed in Malaga. Border control was quick and pain-free.

Got on a bus. Picked up the keys from a lockbox in Princesa. Headed to the apartment. Ate KFC at the beach just after sundown. Pretty sunset, heavy clouds, golden beams for borders and lime green and orange stripes along horizon. Nosotres fuimos al DIA por la mañana for eggs and mozarella and stuff for the hair and face. After coffee and breakfast, a walk along the beach and into the town centre. I dosed us both with Benedryl, for allergies, without realizing it was going to take us entirely out of commission. Very cloudy day on a very sunny day. A lot of coffee. Laid down on the bench, head in lap.

The patch where I spilt water 12 hours later wet with tears. I can’t answer these questions, though I’m trying, not in words. And omelettes, and patatas bravas, and an hamburgeusa. It’s been a tiring holiday. Enjoyable for the most part but I really need to take a break. Tomorrow we get on a aeroplane to Stroopwafel & Snert to see lil ol’ lb. Today we went in a photo booth in the middle of the street.

It’s time to go to sleep now maybe. Got to get up early to be treated like a convict by a low-priced airline.

🖖😎🤞

🖖😎🤞

🖖😎🤞

i turned on copilot, it keeps suggesting i add this comment:

// todo this is a bit of a hack

and this one:

// todo this is a bit of a mess

i’ve spent the week writing an app at nights

made a corned beef. unfortunately, it’s the second best corned beef i’ve ever made. i over-spiced it. i’ve only made two corned beeves.

the workers day bank holiday snuck up on me this time!

next time we speak i’ll be in Malaga, getting like berries—providing visas work out.

it’s so scary to have to book a holiday before you can get a visa!!! we’re fly on friday and they haven’t even told us yet if we can go!

i’ve been working on designing the ideal app architecture for a solid-automerge app. so far i’ve reïnvented MVVM.

👍😎🆒

🤙🙂‍↕️👍

🙂‍↕️🤝🙂‍↔️

👍🙂‍↔️👍

have a good week