Blog · notes

Notes from the studio.

Occasional writing on building small, offline, privacy-first software - and the problems that turned into apps.

Aug 8, 2026 · 2 min read

The summit date is optional

Most tracking apps make the date a required field. But plenty of people remember the mountain perfectly and the date not at all.

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Aug 5, 2026 · 3 min read

Half a million mountains, zero network calls

Peak search could have been an API call. Shipping 50 MB of SQLite instead made the feature work in the one place it matters most.

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Aug 2, 2026 · 2 min read

Denali counts twice

Two famous climbing lists overlap by exactly one mountain, and there are two competing versions of one of them. The catalog has 57 entries for a reason.

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Jul 29, 2026 · 2 min read

A globe made of triangles, not textures

The easy way to build a 3D globe is to wrap a picture of the Earth around a sphere. That approach falls apart the moment you want a country to light up.

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Jul 25, 2026 · 2 min read

What we decided not to lock behind Pro

The easiest subscription to sell is one that caps the core feature. Summit does not cap it, and here is the reasoning.

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Jun 2, 2026 · 2 min read

How I decide which app to build next

With one person and no investors, every app has to earn its place. Here is the filter an idea has to pass before it becomes a Flowstate app.

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May 30, 2026 · 2 min read

The end-of-shift habit that pays off

The value of a tip tracker is not any single number. It is the small habit of logging every shift, and what that record tells you a month later.

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May 28, 2026 · 2 min read

Continent to city: how precisely to track a place

A weekend in a city and a layover on a continent are not the same kind of visit. Worldly lets you choose how precisely to log each place.

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May 26, 2026 · 2 min read

A viewer, not another dashboard

HogWatch never writes back to PostHog. That single constraint is what makes it safe to hand your analytics key to a phone app.

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May 24, 2026 · 2 min read

Beating decision fatigue on a free afternoon

The problem is rarely a lack of things to do. It is the small, draining decision of choosing one. SideQuest removes that decision.

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May 21, 2026 · 2 min read

The idea behind Flowstate Industries

Flowstate Industries is a one-person studio making small, offline-first iOS apps. Here is why it exists, and what that means for the people who use them.

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May 18, 2026 · 3 min read

Knowing what you really earn on tips

If you live on tips, your real hourly wage is surprisingly hard to see. Here is why a simple tip tracker for servers and bartenders changes that.

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