Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
Posts introducing, updating, and covering various projects to which I’ve contributed or that I maintain.
Where Can I Watch? has always answered a simple question: where can I actually watch this show or movie right now? The catch is that “right now” includes more than the subscription services you pay for.
A lot of content lives on free, ad-supported platforms like The Roku Channel, Tubi, Pluto TV, and the like. Those are legitimate, no-cost ways to watch something tonight, and the app was leaving them out.
Continue readingA few years ago I started building a thing called Backcast. The idea was simple: I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I wanted a way to back them up. I got as far as parsing OPML exports, writing some unit tests, setting up PHPCS, and documenting the whole thing on this blog. Then life happened, I lost the thread, and it sat untouched.
The itch never went away, though. I kept finding myself thinking, “I know someone said something about this on a podcast, but which one? Which episode? When?” Podcasts are full of ideas and I had no way to get back to them.
So I started over. Different project, different approach, same underlying frustration.
Where Can I Watch? 1.4.0 is out, and it’s one of the bigger releases since launch. Two ideas drove most of the work: making Today its own top-level tab, and giving Episode Detail a consistent home in every place in the app where you might tap into an episode.
When 1.3.0 shipped, the plan I wrote for 1.4.0 was a detail-page overhaul:
The more I continued to use the app, the more it was clear the foundation for those enhancements wasn’t quite in place yet:
1.4.0 puts those foundations in place. The detail-page enhancements will be in 1.5.0, built on top of everything in this release.
A few months ago I shipped the first version of BurnRate (and another version after that). It’s a macOS menu bar app that showed your Claude Code usage limits at a glance.
It solved a real problem: I didn’t want to stop what I was doing to type /usage every time I wondered how close I was to hitting my limits.
But Claude Code solved it better.
The first version of Now Playing Notify was primarily focus on notifications for the currently playing track. The second release was about being able to do something with them such as being able to click to open a track, copy a link, and launch at login.
This release is focused more on optimizing several things behind the scenes. As such, most of what’s in 1.2.0 is invisible.
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