DSri Seah (they/them)

Screenshot of Visual Studio Code depicting source code that draws a pyramid of 10 blocks, stacked four rows high with debugging guidelines to verify alignment.

BUILD 18/30: Programatic Drawing of Word Counting Calendar Blocks
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1106/
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Today's progress on the 30 Day Build Challenge is using code to draw a "Pyramid Block" for the Word Counting Calendar! Getting closer!

A sketch of a stroked box with dimension information in points beside it.

BUILD 17/30: A PDF-LIB Reference
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1105/
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Today's sharepiece is the start of a PDF-LIB API cheatsheet. Info is reorganized into functional groups instead of a useless alphabetical listing.

Several kinds of gourmet donuts on individual cake trays, a delicious variety of filled donuts, crullers, and cronuts.

Skip Day Blog Post! Doctor Visits and Voting
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1104/
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A daytrip to Concord, followed by voting in the midterms and a reward meal. No energy left, so I'm declaring today a SKIP DAY of blogging instead of building.

A scene from K-Pop Demon Hunters with the three main characters Mira, Rumi, and Zoey about to face down the final boss of the demon world, united in friendship and accepting of their imperfections.

BUILD 16/30: Articulating Friendship
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1103/
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I wrote a working definition of friendship, as I understand it, after being inspired by K-Pop Demon Hunters this weekend.

Adobe Acrobat interface displaying a very simple PDF with text 'FORM.WCC-01' and copyright information drawn inside light blue page margin

BUILD 15/30: Super Simple PDF Progress
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1031/
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I'm not feeling well today, so I just ported the minimum PDF page generation code to refamiliarize myself with pdf-lib. Notes follow.

Title image showing calendar layout sketch for checkboxes, progress cards, and handwritten layout notes for parameter sizing and field types.

BUILD 14/30: Calendar Layout Code Progress
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1030/
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Working on the Word Counting Calendar layout code. Slow going! I share the drawing code parameterization process.

The November 2025 word counting calendar has places for filling in daily and weekly word counts, making it easy to gauge pacing of your writing.

Build 13/30: Word Counting Calendar Interim Release
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1029/
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I posted the interim Word Counting Calendar for November so writers had something to use while I get my software moving. It's going slowly.

The 2025 Word Counting Calendar for November! Track 50,000 words over 30 days using visual graphing day-by-day with weekly counts to see how far ahead/behind you are

Still making Word Counting Calendars for Novel Writing Months!
davidseah.com/node/nanowri...

screenshot of code generating calendars and pdfs

Build 12/30: Word Counting Calendar Reboot
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1028/
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The old NaNoWriMo org is dead, but there's still demand for Word Counting Calendars! I made a placeholder pdf, and will write software to generate them for the rest of this week.

Photo of computer screen with magnified designs of personal calling cards

Build 11/30: Unprofessional Business Cards
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1027/
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Rather than make a business card with my title and areas of expertise, I wanted something that conveyed what interactions I warm up to.

title picture depicts a scanner being fed with a paper sketch depicting a complicated process diagram

Build 10/30: A Silly Pass at Logo Design
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1024/
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An logo design experiment for farmer's market vendor who needs a business card. We start with some associative questions, and look for the silly parts.

Title photo shows a closeup of a test sheet used to calibrate the Heidelberg Offset Press

Build 09/30: ETP Mini Notebook Printing Press Tour
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1023/
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I check on the progress of The ETP 5885 Mini Notebook at the local commercial printer that makes them. This production run will be the last on Amazon Marketplace.

A table showing a refined version of the Activity Bingo Board. It has 5 rows ranked from D to S and 6 columns across forming a grid of colored blocks with the names of activities in them.

Build 08/30: Activity Bingo Form Progress (part 2)
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1022/
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I took the last revision of the "activity bingo board" and adjusted it to fit within A4 width, then normalized type sizes and dimensions. I also added C-rank quests.

Screenshot of Affinity Designer editing the Mini ETP Front Sheet insert for packaging.

Build 07/30: Restart ETP Notebooks Production
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1021/
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I have the final run of 1000 ETP Mini Notebooks in production, but the front cover insert needed name and link updates. Tried Affinity Designer for press-ready work for the first time.

A computer monitor displaying a colorful grid of options for an Activity Bingo Board design, inside of Affinity Designer

Build 06/30: Workshopping the 'Activity Bingo' Form (part 1)
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1020/
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I'm focusing on creating new design work this week, testing Affinity Design as a replacement for Adobe Illustrator. In Part 1, I work through what an "Activity Bingo [...]

Productivity Energy Crash: A dark gray forboding sky

Build 05/30: Productivity Energy Crash Day
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1017/
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Today's sharepiece details an unexpected energy crash after four good days of productivity. Was it ADHD? Lack of sleep? Or did I just overdo it?

3 columns of web pages showing blog posts, demonstrating how an XML feed can be styled in the browser by XSL.

Build 04/30: Eleventy Templates for Atom Feeds
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1016/
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I wanted my autoposts to Mastodon and Bluesky to have a single image, not all the images. Today's sharepiece is the Eleventy code I hacked up with a nice XSL stylesheet.

Build 03/30: Reviewing Old Work and Stories
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1015/
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Restarting my design business means new business cards and a logo. I have a good idea what's important to me NOW, but it's very different from my PAST identity work. I review old work to look [...]

Day 3 of a push to reboot my design practice by making crap! I’m going to shift from voice to visual design today. After fixing stupid encoding issues in my site feed output.

screenshot of Eleventy template and TypeScript source resulting in rendered page

Eleventy html template, showing markdown and html script tags

TypeScripts source file to be run by the Eleventy html template

Page on dsriseah.com showing the script in day02.ts running inside of day02.html template

Build 02/30: TypeScript Mini Apps in Eleventy
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1014/
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I added "mini web app" functionality for my Eleventy template pages. I can create individual Typescript source files inside a project directory that works with live-reloading.

screenshot of terminal output and github repo

Build 01/30: A Web App Template
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1013/
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I'm starting a 30 Day Building Challenge to build and share something every day to help get my design business restarted. I'm not exactly sure what the business will look like, but today's exploration [...]

A diagram of category boxes covering software, infrastructure, and personal project interests.

A fanciful diagram showing how my motivation to do tasks are intertwined with my emotional core.

Making Operational Diagrams for Motivation
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/1006/
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This month I have been rebooting my 2010-era design practice, and there's many moving parts. I've been making a set of maps to help me visualize tasks with my current understanding of The Sri [...]

a pepperoni and cheese pizza from Funspot

Bad Habits that Undermine My Productivity
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/0930/
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I have been feeling icky and lethargic for weeks, and finally realized it might be based on my eating habits. Here's what I've been doing to test whether this is true. ⊕caption A gooey [...]

Color-coded boxes labeled by project. See the Whimsical document linked in the caption for the text.

A Bingo Board for Task Focusing
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/0922/
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I have created an Activity Bingo Board to accompany the Master Planning Collage from last month's GHDR Progress Report. The board is intended to serve as visual reminder of what kind of stuff I ought to [...]

Side-by-side screenshots of Powerpoint and Inkscape, showing simple resume layout

Sharepiece 5/5: Resume Layout Hacks
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/0919/
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⊕caption I hated every minute of using these programs, but it's possible to use these in a pinch. But really, you probably should use Canva or something newer. Today's sharepiece is an [...]

Emergent Task Timer Pro 6-minute version

Sharepiece 4/5: Emergent Task Timer for Lawyers
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/0918/
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Today's sharepiece is a refresh of the 6-minute increment version of the Emergent Task Timer which helps see where your time is going throughout the day. It was mentioned by Chris [...]

Screenshot of Reason 12

Sharepiece 3/5: Making a Clonk Sound
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/0917/
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Today I tried to export a sound from Reason 12 . I have no idea how to create music with it, nor how to use its many synthesis and filtering modules. I had previously only used it to record podcasts [...]

a pixelated dancing or angry crab

Screenshot of GIMP, showing CROP TO CONTENT command

Screenshot of GIMP, showing use of select tool to determine dimensions

Screenshot of GIMP, showing resizing of canvas to multiple of 8 pixels

Sharepiece 2/5: Resizing a Crab
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/0916/
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There is an animated pixel crab I'm very fond of and would like to use as a Discord Emoji, but it's too small. Here are my notes using GIMP for the first time in years to try resizing it.

several crude sketches of cats

Daily Sharepiece 1/5: Trying to Draw Cats
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/0915/
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We've started a trial "5 Day Sharepiece Challenge" in the DSCAFE Discord, where I and others are posting "something small yet tangible" we made. The idea behind this is to [...]

Daily Sharepiece: Eleventy CLI Proof-of-Concept
https://dsriseah.com/journal/2025/0913/
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For Saturday's Sharepiece, I made a proof-of-concept tool for my Eleventy -based PKMS, which is what runs dsriseah.com . I already have a command line utility that creates/modifies the [...]