Have been agonizing a lot over a new direction for periscopechat. I can't yet see how the new product is going to look and behave. I only know what it is going to do. I hope the function will define the form and I will 'see' what needs to be built. Does this happen to you?

Once I can visualize it, I can build it. I find it extremely difficult to build in an abstract way. Some people break down the feature, write the backend code, then the frontend code, then hook everything up. I work better when i know what the UI and the user flow is going to look like.

thinkdeli.com/contests

Opened up the contests feature. Now, you can set up your own writing contests. It is crazy that outside of thinkdeli this happens on google forms, docx files, and personal dms. Maybe, I am crazy.

Do you care about organizing your notes as folders? I don't. thinkdeli currently, doesn't. But have received a couple of requests for folders or notestacks. If you do care about folders, is there a system that you like?

Your notes are yours. thinkdeli doesn't want to impose any lock in. What you write in thinkdeli can be exported any time with just one click.

When it comes to writing, November ‘24 was phenomenal for me. I don’t get these many likes even on Instagram. 😂. Glad I did the #NoBreakNovember challenge

periscopechat was born out of thinkdeli. A friend saw thinkdeli and found it interesting. We reconnected after 20+ years and decided to build something. This is perhaps the first time where I earned a little $ almost from day 1.

I built my first RAG agent for thinkdeli. At that point, I had no idea, I would be deploying RAG agents for 2 customers within a few months. For the first time, I was able to monetise what started out of pure curiosity and interest.

One advice for the new year - start hacking away at your side projects. You are not going to get new ideas if you are not building. Once you start, you automatically start getting new ideas.

When I started working on thinkdeli last year, single player mode is what I had in mind. I wrongly assumed that writing is a solitary activity. I realized later writing needs support, and motivation, and most importantly, an audience!

Here it is!
The big thing is the (experimental) Environment API: our hope is it can serve as the foundation for frameworks that run code in multiple different JS runtimes.
The internal module runner refactors also pave the way for some interesting things down the road...