Levi Nelson

Every morning I sit down with a pour over in my living room and get to work on what I want to work on.

That’s the moment I’ve optimized my whole career for. I look forward to it every day.

Friendly reminder: you don't have to optimize for money or prestige.

Helped my daughter with her science fair project the other night. We typed some things up for her board. I asked her to choose fonts.

Guess what she picked.

Impact and Comic Sans. Say what you want, but man those fonts have universal cross-generation appeal.

Should have showed her Papyrus.

Joke's on you Ryan I do all of it.

What's the first thing YOU do when you get a new Mac?

I empty out the dock so this is my default state ☺️

Noticing this with advanced Gen AI:

Non-experts can use it for low-stakes work—prototypes, social posts, etc.

But for “serious” work, you still need expertise. AI can help build features, but seasoned engineers should review before shipping to thousands or millions.

Will that always be the case?

Bunny over here jumping like Yoshi

For every Reddit comment saying my apps are too expensive or there are free ones that do it "better", there's an email in my inbox from a customer like "This is one of the best finds for quantitatively tracking and journaling life in general."

Find the people that appreciate the value.

My son captured the exact moment I blew a Balatro run by accidentally hitting “play hand” instead of “discard”.

Played The Last Guardian last night. Shadow of the Colossus is a top 10 game for me so I felt it deserved a shot.

What a bizarre game. How can one game can have both the best animal animation/AI I've ever seen, but also the worst controls? Glad I tried it but I don't think I can stick with it.

Another day another domain purchase.

What makes tomorrow exciting? Do you remember the first time you looked forward to work?

Wrote something about my past, flow state, and finding work that makes you look forward to tomorrow.

AI chat is everywhere right now. It’s often overhyped, but sometimes it’s actually useful—like making sense of a lot of text.

That’s why it’s great for parsing your content in Iterum.

Ask Iterum AI to uncover correlations, find patterns, summarize trends, and more.

https://buff.ly/4jq4tsK

This. This is the content I'm here for, Kenji.

mockvox - AI Text to Speech for Mac Transform text into natural-sounding speech with mockvox, a native Mac app powered by OpenAI. Generate professional voiceovers instantly, starting free.

I built a super simple UI for OpenAI's text-to-speech API.

Might be useful for content marketers but also teachers or curriculum designers; basically any time you need a "good enough" voice over for something, quickly and cheaply.

Check it out if it sounds interesting!

hereand.co/mockvox

Love this from James Clear today.

"At any moment, you are one good choice away from a meaningfully better life."

My deep dive into replaying some classics from my childhood continues. Excited to show this one to my NBA2K obsessed kids.

I was frustrated with App Store Connect's slow and confusing interface, so I created a fast, straightforward dashboard for my iOS/Mac apps. It consolidates all key metrics on one page. Would anyone be interested if I polished it for others to use? (screenshot data is fake 😅)

Being a solopreneur is heaven for a generalist, but torture for a specialist. Today I...
- Shot and edited a new video for my latest app
- Wrote some code for iOS apps & websites
- Set up ad campaigns on Google, Facebook and Insta
- Wrote an email newsletter

My brain's tired. But the day flew by!

AI favors the generalist curators. One way to future-proof yourself is to develop your taste - hone your ability to recognize quality. Another is to stretch yourself in more domains - become comfortable wearing many hats.

Man, good on Naughty Dog (and Sony) for going for a brand new genre and IP. Did anyone see this coming? I’m hyped!

Finding crashes in your app is usually a bad news / good news situation.

Bad news: ... it's a crash.

Good news: it typically leads to refactoring that needed to be done anyway 🤷

Spent today working up some visualizations for the metric details screen. The first of hopefully many ways to slice/dice your reflections in Iterum.

I've found ChatGPT o1 to be far more direct than any prior model. Earlier models would have preambles and explain their work. o1 is FAR more concise and just gets straight to the point without any elaboration.

Maybe it's taking my default instructions of "be concise" way more seriously?

Just because you CAN imagine a “logical” end to a tech trend doesn’t mean it’ll happen. Past generations imagined
- All energy being nuclear.
- Drum machines replacing all drummers.
- Microwaves dominate all cooking.
- Faster and faster airplanes
- Ubiquitous flying or (at least) self-driving cars.

Everything had an inter-connected, in-world explanation, even down to the "Puppeteering" controls.

Now it just feels like generic RPG. Still good. But it's lost that "labor of love" feel.

I got a hankering for Assassin's Creed recently, so booted up Origins. Hadn't played since Black Flag. It's good! Goes down easy.

But it got me thinking about how TIGHT the story, vision and art direction was for the original AC. It had its issues, but you can't deny it was a whole connected VIBE.