Blog
Notes on building it
Mostly engineering, occasionally product. Written when a decision turned out to be more interesting than expected.
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Remembering to chase the things other people owe you
The invoice, the reply, the review. Waiting-on items have no natural moment to be written down, which is why organised people still forget them.
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Reminders for the things you check on a rhythm
Invoices, renewals, status pages, the quarterly review nobody schedules. Recurring browser checks are badly served by calendars, and the fix is unglamorous.
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Keeping research tabs without keeping the tabs
Deep research generates dozens of pages you might need. Most you will not, and the ones you will have a moment attached. Sorting that out saves the window.
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When a browser reminder is enough, and when it is not
A browser reminder gets you back to the exact page. A calendar reaches your phone. Which failure you can live with is the whole decision, and often it is both.
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Coming back to where you stopped reading
Saving a long page usually means reopening it at the top and hunting for your paragraph. There is a better way, and browsers already support it.
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Reopening a page where you were reading, without a permission
A scroll offset needs a script in the reopened tab, and access to every site you visit. A text fragment needs neither, and survives a reflow an offset does not.
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Organising tabs without keeping them open
Most tab tools help you hold more tabs. If the goal is fewer, the useful question is what each tab is standing in for — and then replacing that thing directly.
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How to save a web page and actually come back to it
Saving is the easy half. The part that fails is the returning, and it fails for a reason you can fix — nothing you saved knows when you wanted it back.
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Why your read-later list stopped working
It worked for a month, then became an archive. Not a discipline problem — a queue with no time in it can only be visited on purpose, and eventually you stop.
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Bookmarks, read-it-later, or reminders?
Three tools that look interchangeable and are not. The difference is whether you have to remember to go and look — and for anything dated, that decides it.
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Chrome tab management, sorted by the problem
Groups, suspenders, session managers, vertical tabs, reminders. Five categories that get recommended interchangeably and solve five different things.
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What to actually do about eighty open tabs
Groups, suspenders and session managers all move the pile somewhere else. The tabs you cannot close are the ones with a time attached, and that is different.
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Why Latr has no server
Every reminder app wants an account. Shipping without a backend turned out to be a product decision, not a shortcut. What it costs, and what it buys.
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The bug that only existed in German
A repeating reminder showed the English word "daily" in all nine translations. The test suite built to catch exactly that never saw it. Here is the gap.
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