Projects
Things I make on my own time, to use myself. The rule is one act worth remembering, finished properly. Open one.
Every morning at six, a newspaper made only of what I care about lands on my phone: film, AI, technology, Apple and my five teams, plus one thing to read and three things to listen to.
- News apps decide what you see with feeds and paywalls. The DJ reads 55 sources I chose, and a Claude editor picks the day's stories under written rules: innovation, joy and product first, two sentences each, then the link to the outlet that reported it.
- The editor never invents a story. It works only from what the feeds delivered that morning, and if it cannot read the news it publishes nothing and tells me why.
- It is a static site with no dependencies: a fetch script, a build script and one file of editorial rules. Named for Damian Jr.
Bloom is a native iPhone app where Planty, a small sunflower with real character, shows you the shape of your day. Movement, sleep, reading, focus and mindfulness help him. Too long in the apps you chose to watch makes him thirsty.
- The goal: make the invisible visible. A walk, a night's sleep, an hour of deep work and an evening of scrolling all feel abstract until something you care about reacts to them. Planty is that something, on your Home Screen and Lock Screen.
- Why I built it: habit trackers turn wellbeing into admin, with numbers, streaks and guilt. I lose evenings to apps I never meant to open, and I wanted the Tamagotchi feeling instead, a creature you glance at and understand without studying a dashboard.
- Planty is meant to be cute, delightful and a bit funny, in the lineage of Flubber, Snoopy and Olaf. He is animated frame by frame like stop-motion, speaks in his own voice, and never dies. One bad evening cannot undo weeks of growth.
- Bloom reads the signals the phone already trusts, HealthKit and Screen Time, applies plain rules you can read, and keeps everything on the device. No account, no cloud, no AI guessing at your life.
- The first TestFlight build went out in September 2026. I am living with him before anyone else does.
A Something Wonderful Studios ↗ project.
Something Wonderful Studios is the name I put on the things I make for the joy of it: small software first, and other media when an idea asks for it. Bloom is the first. The DJ is a cousin.
- It is a side project, not a company. The point is bringing joy back into software: an authored point of view, one act worth remembering, and the finish of something you would keep.
- My shorthand is "the A24 of technology". That is a standard for what gets selected and how carefully it is made, not a business plan.
- Everything starts as something I want to use myself, gets finished properly, and only then decides whether it wants a wider audience.
