Built RSS reader.

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…Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. I think this is going to be a fun session. We're going to cover a lot of ground, and some of it's going to be a little bit of show and tell. One of the things I've been thinking a lot lately is people are so excited about going down the Claude code and AI agents and all these sort of various rabbit holes that a lot of people are probably coming up with very interesting ways of working and not sharing them as much as they probably could because it's just so much fun to do and it's so bespoke and it's like, at least for me, I find I've had on my to-do list, like, I should do an episode about my setup. And I kind of keep thinking, well, I wanna do this one more thing before I actually get it done. So finally cornered you and said, all right, I wanna see what's going on. And then there's plenty more stuff beyond that to talk about as well. Maybe for starters, tell me what you're building. You've been programming since, I was able to see on LinkedIn as far back as 1985 with multiple companies that you started and exited, including Rightly, which became Google Docs. What are you building today? So, and this is all on the side 'cause, you know, 'cause my day job is, you know, at Golden Gate Institute, and so, and some of what I'm doing, a little of what I'm doing relates to that, but mostly it's just kind of personal tools. So on the side, evenings and weekends, I've got something like 15 different projects going, mostly under the heading of personal productivity, kind of the theme has been, You know, like so many of us, I've just been drowning, you know, over the last couple of years. They're trying to keep up with everything that's going on, in the world in general, and in AI in particular. And I now know-- this is a statistic I wouldn't have known until I started building these tools. Actually, I don't have the hard number, but it's-- I get something like 50 Substack posts, other blog posts, newsletters, like kind of big information items in my inbox per day. plus everyone I follow on Twitter, plus a bunch of WhatsApp groups I'm in. And I was spending, I don't know how many hours per day just trying to read, just keep it, let alone synthesize that, let alone do anything else. And so the theme of everything, of most of what I've been building is manage that workload. And I realized, like the first thing I built, and this is something I'd been dreaming about and muttering about for a long time, was something to just... summarize, and not because a summary is as good as the original, but more to tell me what to read. Like, you know, I don't know how many posts I'm going to get over the next few days about Opus 47, and I don't need to read all of them. And so pretty much the first thing I built was just an RSS reader that takes all the Substacks and other newsletters and podcasts and a couple of other things. And pre-computes a summary for each one, actually kind of two levels of summary for each one. And so every morning I can glance through that, glance through the summaries and decide which of these am I actually going to bother reading? Is this a new take on 4/7 or is it basically the same as I've already read? It's especially helpful for a podcast where there can be an interesting topic and it may or may not have an angle on that topic that I haven't seen before. And the summary can be really helpful for that. And then the other theme, so just like sort of distilling the information flow is the first theme. The second one, which took me a while, like I sort of had a vague inkling, there was something I wanted and I couldn't quite figure out what it was, and it finally crystallized for me is giving myself focused time back. I probably get a few hundred, every day I get a few hundred emails, Slack messages, WhatsApp messages, whatever. Only a fraction of which really need my prompt attention, but a few of them do. And so I was in the habit of probably 30 times per day, every time my brain sort of came up from air from a task, I would check my e-mail, check my Slack chat. prompt attention, but a few of them do. And so I was in the habit of probably 30 times per day, every time my brain sort of came up from air from a task, I would check my e-mail, check my Slack chat. I had about five apps I would rotate through, which is lots of opportunities for me to get distracted by seeing something I actually didn't need to see for a few hours. And so a much bigger and more complicated project has been, and like it's really about five sub-projects, is something that pulls in all the e-mail Slack, Signal, WhatsApp, and so forth, feeds them through, and the pulling in is a big complicated mess with lots of integrations, including with some services that didn't really want to support that, like WhatsApp. Then there's like one line of code to hand each message to an LLM and say, Is this urgent or not? And I've accumulated about a one-page rubric. you know, gradually, exception by exception. And then the timely ones pop up on a second monitor that I purchased for this... I've gone like 40 years of engineering without a second monitor, and I finally bought one to have a rolling view of my calendar and this, like, list of urgent messages. And the idea is that those are the only things I need to look at other than whatever I want to be focusing on right now. So it's sort of an attention firewall.…

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