People who make useful content and services intended for interactive human use available for free have written at length about the ongoing issues with AI crawlers scouring the web in an insatiable search for new training data. Some people are coming up with interesting technical solutions to the problems posed by AI crawlers, but I have ultimately opted for a much simpler solution: a paywall. Kullish is a project that I operated free of charge for all users from 2020 until January 2025.

In 2024 I received $1861.88 in sponsorships via GitHub Sponsors for my work on komorebi, the tiling window manager for Windows, which has continued to grow beyond my wildest dreams; it currently has 10k stars on GitHub, 106k downloads and almost 2000 members in the community Discord. Below is the monthly breakdown of the sponsorship payouts received in 2024: Month Payout January $92.35 February $115.48 March $143.03 April $150.30 May $188.

The big mistake Using Tailwind CSS for Notado is the single biggest mistake I have ever made in my career as a developer. I cannot overstate the amount of technical debt that this has introduced, and how it has compounded over the years since this decision was taken. Never use this for a one-man SaaS project. One of the biggest consequences of this mistake was that introducing dark mode immediately became a non-trivial task, especially when compared to Kullish, where I had the good sense to use Bulma, and adding dark mode was the simple case of adding a single link element to my existing base HTML template:

Earlier this week I saw an Ask HN post titled “What are some iconic comments on HN?” Over the years, I’ve seen some iconic comments on HN. Inspired by this, I want to create a website showcasing the most memorable discussions and comments on this website. What are some of your favorite comments on HN? I have been saving comments from Hacker News on a variety of subjects and topics since 2020 when I finally ditched traditional URL-focused bookmarking services and created Notado to be able to save, archive and organize comments on discussion websites quickly and easily.

Certainly, no contributors get into projects with the sole purpose to get a financial gain out of them. Open source has never been about money either. But for you as an author, the lack of funds to sustain your ideas and pay for even a small portion of the time you’re spending on them is—I’m not going to lie—devastating. It may not be your concern at first but it will inevitably become one when your ideas gain popularity, demanding significantly more time than there are hours in a day.

A few weeks ago I ran nix flake update to get the latest versions of CLI tools that I regularly use from nixos-unstable. atuin is one of those tools which I started using relatively recently and quickly became a huge fan of. I run it on all of my machines, and I can’t overstate how amazing it is to have all of my shell history across all of my machines synced.

In the previous article we walked through how to set up our very own Nix binary cache. It’s great being able to run attic push system /run/current-system on whichever machine we are currently using, but the the chances are that if you use Nix to manage your system configurations, you have a system configuration monorepo, and depending on how many machines and architectures you are targeting, it can quickly become tiresome to manually push to the cache from each of them.

I have tried running the Attic Nix Binary Cache on my Hetzner dedicated server in Germany a few times in the past, but the peering issues and the latency to Xfinity in Seattle have always made me throw my hands up in frustration. This morning I noticed a comment by Zhaofeng on the repo issue tracker. As a NixOS aficionado myself, I begrudgingly admit that I’ve been running my instance on fly.

For the most part I feel very much at home on the Hachyderm Mastodon server; it’s probably the best social media experience that I can remember having and I have had the pleasure of interacting with so many cool and impassioned people there. Hachyderm implements the default 500 character post limit which is hard-coded into the Mastodon codebase and as of writing these, seems unlikely to ever be made configurable.

The Layoff Along with 25% of my former colleagues, I was laid off by Beamery (glassdoor reviews) immediately before “American Thanksgiving”. I was provided with a number of informational pamphlets at the end of a 5-minute layoff call at 9am which was scheduled with less than 15 minutes of notice. The following Wednesday, I was at the neighborhood social dance, trying to take my mind off the stress of job hunting in Q4 and interview preparation with some live music.