Hey! Quick note: After much thought, I’m narrowing my focus to writing about being a hands-on dad who is building a business around my family. I’ll still be writing about AI, software, business, health and fitness, and productivity but with that particular lens. If this no longer interests you, feel free to unsubscribe (or check out my field notes). If you will be staying around, reply to my questions below!

The 5 levels of hands-on dad

Because of my upbringing and flexible work setup, I became a rather hands-on dad. My parents spent my childhood building their business, so I want to spend more time with my kids. My wife works night and weekend shifts, so I solo-parent a lot.

With about three years of experience now, I thought it’d be fun to categorize the levels of hands-on dads. This exercise is also to help me reflect on how I can do more.

Caveat: This is for dads with young kids. I don’t have experience with teenage kids yet. If you have older kids, what would you add?

Level 1:

• You play with your kid at home, which gives your wife some breathing space.

• You bring him out once in a while for an hour or two.

• You sometimes rely on YouTube to keep your kid entertained by himself.

Level 2:

• You help change his diaper, give him a bath, and feed him.

• You bring him out for half a day or the entire day yourself.

• You sometimes take annual leave when your kid’s school is closed or childcare leave when he is sick.

• You help with household chores.

Level 3:

• You cook (or buy) meals for your family, with your kid’s preference in mind.

• You comment on and help out with your kid’s development.

• You can look after your kid yourself for the entire day.

Level 4:

• You think about and manage his major developmental shifts, such as starting on solid food, weaning off milk bottles, and training for the potty.

• You are the preferred person for morning and night routines.

• You are the default parent to take annual leave when your kid’s school is closed or childcare leave when he is sick.

• You can look after your kid yourself for multiple days in a row.

Level 5:

• You handle the admin (e.g. school paperwork and extracurricular activities) and logistics (e.g. diaper restocks and birthday celebrations).

• You own the household chores, so it’s off your wife’s mind entirely. You might do them yourself or outsource them to a cleaner.

• You spend more time looking after your kid than your wife.

• You can look after your kid yourself for any duration.

If you do the above for multiple kids, you should get an automatic upgrade to the next level.

My dad was at Level 0 because he never even changed my diapers. But he built an enduring 38-year business! I’m currently at between Level 3 and Level 4. But my business is still just getting off the ground. I don’t think it has to be a one-to-one trade-off between business and family, though. I am a living experiment to prove that.

Which level are you at? Do you know any Level 5 dads running their own businesses?

Stepping back, it is heartening to see more dads getting involved. My dad’s generation barely looked after their kids. Nowadays, I often see dads looking after their little ones themselves. Even if you are on Level 1, you deserve a pat on the back.

For sure, it is physically and mentally draining. But, man, just the other day, my 3-year-old son wanted me for bedtime and said:

“I want you because I love you.”

Because my family spoke Chinese and Singlish at home, my English was weak. Reading my friends’ essays made me feel worse. They used complicated sentences I could barely understand. For many years, I thought I was just not good enough.

But gradually I learned that the problem is how working adults write. Teachers, academics, and business people write complicated sentences to sound smart. So, we assume we should write in the same way. William Zinsser gave an example in Writing to Learn:

Consider these two sentences from a book by a famous sociologist. I didn’t choose them as exceptions; the whole book is in this style.

The third major component of modeling phenomena involves the utilization of symbolic representations of modeled patterns in the form of imaginal and verbal contents to guide overt performances. It is assumed that reinstatement of representational schemes provides a basis for self-instruction on how component responses must be combined and sequenced to produce new patterns of behavior.

Younger me would have thought this is great writing—mostly because I don’t understand it. But it’s the opposite: If people can’t understand your writing, it is bad writing.

Zinsser gave another two examples:

1. The ongoing reconfiguration positions Barbara offsite to hopefully identify growth and profitability potentials beyond what is currently being realized.

2. Barbara will try to find out why we ain’t doing better.

I write like the second sentence (with a little more polish). And I used to feel bad about it. But Zinsser wrote, “Number two is a little uneducated but a lot more helpful.”

Eventually, I realized my limited English could be an advantage. Haruki Murakami developed his unique writing style when he tried writing in English. His limited vocabulary forced him to write simple, short sentences. That led him to discover he didn’t have to try to impress people with difficult words.

I now embrace writing in simple English, even as my English has improved. I don’t write to look wise. I write to share my experiences and ideas with others. So, I write in a way most people can understand.

If you want to persuade others or spread your ideas, write simply.

Originally published at: https://alfredlua.com/field-notes/write-simply

Then, I dropped into an abyss.

Instead of looking at Cal Newport’s video, my eyes landed on YouTube’s recommended video, which took up as much space on mobile as the actual video I wanted to watch.

Street Fighter | New Trailer (2026 Movie)
20m views • 2:49

As a 90s kid who played Street Fighter growing up, how could I not watch it? And it was only two minutes!

But then, I watched another video.

I have sunk entire evenings watching useless videos on YouTube. I know it’s not a great use of time. But the abyss is engineered to pique my curiosity and pull me in. That night felt like it was going to be another wasted evening.

As I thought about that, I felt guilty enough to stop. I locked my phone, tossed it aside, and picked up my new favorite book, The Notebook: The History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. Just one paragraph in, I was reminded of how I had always wished for more time to read all the books on my reading list. I read for another half an hour before turning in.

I narrowly won this battle, but the war is ongoing. I know I cannot depend on my willpower alone to fight the temptations of YouTube. I had already deleted the YouTube app on my phone and signed out from YouTube on the Safari app. I might have to put my phone outside my room, like Craig Mod does. But I believe the more I choose my books over YouTube, the less I’ll desire YouTube.

I did, after all, climb out of the abyss last night. I can do it again, and again, and again.

Originally published at: https://alfredlua.com/field-notes/youtube-abyss

A filter I have been using is this: What do I want to pass down to my kids 20 to 30 years from now?

Here are a few things I have been writing down:

• Parenting: What worked and didn’t work for us

• Family recipes: Dishes my kids grew up eating (online recipes never include personal tweaks)

• Life lessons and personal stories: Making major decisions, building character, and finding your values

• Timeless craft work: Learnings from writing, making things people want, and running a business

• Books: Notes from books and why I read them so that my kids can use that to decide if they want to read the books

Even if you don’t have kids and don’t plan to have any, this will be helpful to future you, too. Thinking about my kids is just a way to force me to think much longer term. If you don’t want to think 20-30 years from now, cut it to 5 to 10 years, which is still much longer-term than how most people think.

This is not the same as hoarding as many articles, quotes, and ideas as you come across because you might somehow magically find a connection between them someday in the future. This is highly selective. Curated. Only things you want to come back to.

It doesn’t matter which app you use. I would prefer apps with these traits:

• Ownership. I should be able to open and read the information 30 years from now. So, open file formats like Markdown, JPEG, and MP4 will be better than an Instagram post or a company’s proprietary file format. Cloud services are fine as long as I can export my notes in those formats.

• Read-only by default. I should be able to read my notes without worrying about accidentally editing them. Writing and editing should be an intentional mode to enter.

• Hierarchy. I should be able to file my notes in a structured manner. The act of organizing helps me process the note further. But more importantly, the order can communicate meaning, like the relative importance of the notes, the intended reading sequence, and the depth of a topic.

• Linked. I should be able to jump to related notes, even when they are not hierarchically close. For example, a note on decision-making could link to a note about a book. It will be helpful if the app can also automatically suggest related notes for linking.

• Searchable. I should be able to find specific information quickly. This could be a simple search feature or one enhanced with AI, which can understand what I’m looking for and find the right notes.

• Proactive. The app should have some ways to remind me of my notes. Ideally, it can surface relevant notes at the right time (but hopefully without needing a chip in my head). It could be surfacing similar notes as I’m creating a new one, suggesting notes on a regular cadence to review, or maybe even weaving in my notes when I chat with an AI.

• Version history. I should be able to view the edits I made to every note, like how GitHub visualizes git diff, to see how my thinking evolved.

• Separation from scratchpads. I prefer to use a separate app from my daily notes app so that I think more long-term while using this particular app and temporary notes don’t clutter up my organized notebook.

Unlike paper notebooks, digital notes don’t physically degrade. Let’s use them accordingly.

Originally published at https://alfredlua.com/field-notes/the-forever-notes-app

I’m currently not limited by how well the AI models can code. My bottleneck is an unclear value proposition for Fernsage. What I need to do is refine Fernsage’s core value proposition until my ideal customers get it immediately and want to pay for it (and even tell their friends about it). This will involve some coding to tweak the product and website. But the Real Work is thinking. Thinking about what to focus on in the product. Thinking about how to communicate the core value. Thinking about how to reach potential customers.

Often, we get distracted by shiny objects and neglect the Real Work.

We don’t need a better writing app. The Real Work is to write.
We don’t need a new pair of running shoes. The Real Work is to run.
We don’t need to buy new toys for our kids. The Real Work is to play with them.

Most of the time, we already have what we need to do the Real Work. If you feel like you need X before you can do Y, consider if you are just avoiding the Real Work.

Originally published at: https://alfredlua.com/field-notes/real-work

Hello readers!

I didn’t have time to write a short email, so I wrote a long one.

I took some time off this week for my son’s school trip because I love excursions with my son and never miss them (except when my yima passed away). I’m also tweaking the format of this newsletter because I want it to feel more like a personal email than a commercial templated newsletter. Thoughts welcome!

As an experiment, here are five short notes for this week:

1. Write Club

2. Why notetaking hasn’t helped me feel wiser

3. The curse of the wonderful devices

4. The stories we tell ourselves

5. Aeron and sunk cost

Write Club

Yesterday, I was chatting with a friend about notetaking and compounding knowledge. He mentioned how if writing is thinking and most people aren’t writing, then most people aren’t thinking!

its just like
there are running clubs.
there are reading clubs.
there are chess clubs. there are xyz clubs.
heck, even have ice bath club.
but...
no club to get people to sit down and think.

Well, there should be one.

If I were to start one, here are the rules:

• For two hours every Friday morning, sit down to write

• Turn off the Wi-Fi on your computer

• Turn on Do Not Disturb on your phone and leave it out of sight

• The only requirement is to publish what you have written at the end (If you have a website, great. Otherwise, a Google Doc is fine, too.)

• Bonus: Read one another’s published notes

(Sorry, there will be no talks, no networking, and no food!)

You don’t actually need a club to do this. It is what I have been practicing by myself at home, and it has been surprisingly helpful.

If you haven’t been writing regularly, this will be hard. You will stare at the blinking cursor for 10-15 minutes with nothing coming to mind. So, here are my recommendations:

• Write about something small, and see where it leads you. Don’t aim to write a novel or a thesis.

• Write about something you did or something that happened to you recently. (I once wrote about replacing my Aeron chair with a $10 wooden stool, which made me realize I had fallen for the sunk cost fallacy.)

• Or write about a decision you want to make. (Writing about wanting to focus led me to set up a more thorough writing environment.)

• Or write about something bothering you. (After I wrote about why notetaking hasn’t helped me feel more knowledgeable, I went to read up on tacit knowledge.)

• For the first hour, don’t edit. Just let your words flow. Edit in the second hour.

If you commit to this, after a few attempts, your brain will start noticing things you might want to write about each Friday.

What if you need to research and verify information online? No, you don’t have to during that two-hour window. You can do that afterwards. In fact, if you sit with the uncertainty as you write and commit to it even just for two hours, you will remember the information better when you research online later, especially if you turn out to be wrong. You can always update your published note.

If you want to try this and want someone to hold you accountable, send me your published note at hello@alfredlua.com. I’ll read it and reply to you.

Why notetaking hasn’t helped me feel wiser

Through my schooling years, I developed a notetaking system that helped me score great results. But that system didn’t help in life.

The system was simple. A few weeks before the exams, I’d print out all the lecture slides and rewrite everything in my own words as much as possible in a notebook. One notebook for each module. In the days leading up to the exams, I’d read only the notebooks and not the lecturer’s slides. During the exams, when I needed to recall certain information, I could even pull up a mental image of that information in the notebook, saym in the bottom-right of a page.

There were two issues with this system: First, I could remember the information well for only a few weeks. After the exams, when I didn’t need the information anymore because my first job didn’t require my degree, I slowly forgot what I had learned. The second issue, though, is the bigger problem:

In life, there are no neatly-defined modules, no lecture slides to print out, and no scheduled dates for “tests”.

My fabulous notetaking system became useless.

For the past 10 years, I have tried various methods and modifications. But I have yet to find a suitable system. More importantly, I don’t feel particularly more knowledgeable. I believe there are several causes why notetaking hasn’t helped. (My counter-arguments are in italic.)

• The fields I have been in have moved fast, so notes became outdated quickly. When I was doing marketing at Buffer, content marketing (as in writing articles) was just becoming a thing. Then there was tweeting, and then Facebook and Instagram Live, and then TikTok. Then, when I moved into AI, well, things moved even faster. But I suspect (1) there has to be a good way to update notes and/or our knowledge just as quickly and (2) even as the field moves fast, there are timeless concepts and skills; for example, writing is as necessary for articles and TikTok scripts.

• I didn’t have a clear purpose for my notes. This could be because I have been “jumping around” professionally, dealing with areas ranging from marketing to designing to bookkeeping, and not having one or a few clear goals. When I tried to do too many things and take notes for everything, taking notes became too overwhelming and time-consuming. This is also why I find the second-brain approach too much. I have many interests, and collecting everything I’m remotely interested in so that I might use it in the future felt like too much work for an unknown upside. Perhaps the simple solution is to take notes for only a single goal that is most important to me (e.g. learn X) and leave everything else to memory.

• Much of the “knowledge” I deal with is hard to write down. It could be “taste”, “intuition”, or “tacit knowledge”. I can write down the formula to calculate the price of a bond but there is no one-line formula for building a product people want. “Talk to users” is great advice but insufficient on its own. Cedric Chin of Commoncog has written several articles on tacit knowledge and is running a great experiment of teaching people business expertise through repeated reading and analyses of many case studies (I’m over-simplifying his approach here!) So, such “knowledge” can be extracted and written down.

• There are no regular or well-defined “tests”. I define “tests” very broadly as situations that demand our knowledge and help us refine and retain our knowledge. Writing notes alone doesn’t help us grow smarter if we don’t apply the knowledge or “test” ourselves. Spaced repetition is useful for remembering facts, like when I’m learning Japanese. But we can’t Anki our way to writing good essays or making products people want or playing the piano. Chip War described how smart folks like Morris Chang optimized their chip production yields but that has a well-defined, easily-measurable goal. In a way, we could define each essay or even product as a test. But how do we measure it, especially when you are starting out with zero readers or users or when there is too much noise in the results? How about business decisions that happen infrequently? Can they be run like science experiments? I suspect this is more of an art than science, and it is up to individuals to define their subjective or objective measurements. For example, Michael Nielsen talked about creating artifacts, especially when he needed to teach what he had learned, to help him retain knowledge.

• Maintaining and updating notes takes a lot of effort. Some effort is necessary because the friction helps us learn and retain information better. But if it requires too much work, we are serving the system and not the other way around. As with above, reducing the scope will help. Also, regular “tests” might be a good solution, which could reduce or even eliminate the need for notetaking. A small example: if you keep coding similar functions for various products, you can reach a point where you don’t have to note down how to code those functions.

• I have been using notetaking apps mostly as scratchpads rather than an accumulation of knowledge. I take meeting notes in Notion, I write outlines in Obsidian, I put todos in Apple Notes. I suspect the ease of creating notes led me to use them as temporary documents—which I think might be fine as long as I also turn the important ones into something more enduring, like an essay or permanent document.

(Do any of these resonate with you? What have you been doing to aid your learning?)

I’m coming to realize that notetaking is helpful for learning but insufficient on its own. What will compound knowledge is having a clear project where I can repeatedly apply what I know so far and seek out what I don’t know yet.

The curse of the wonderful devices

After sending my kids to school this morning, I got engrossed reading the latest AI debate and forgot about buying groceries for dinner tonight. I walked right past the supermarket as I stared down on my phone. By the time I realized my mistake, I had to walk five minutes back to the supermarket.

And after buying the groceries, I got distracted by Gemini. I was asking it how to stir fry pork ribs after cooking them in a soup. This time, I left my son’s stroller parked outside the supermarket.

Modern devices are such a wonder because they allow us to do so many things. But modern devices are also such a curse because they allow us to do so many things.

I have been trying to write for two hours every morning before I do anything else on my laptop. But it is just so distracting to have other apps opened at the same time: Claude, Brave Browser, Basecamp, Antigravity, Todoist, Notion Calendar. It is like eating oatmeal in front of an intercontinental breakfast buffet. Whenever I’m stuck writing, my brain will invent the most ridiculous task once it sees one of the other apps. “You know what, I should add a todo to write for two hours today in Todoist.” The tasks are always small, so I don’t feel bad spending a minute or so completing it. But my concentration has already been defeated, and I need to pay another few minutes to get back to writing.

Craig Mod writes on a separate laptop—without internet connection! I don’t have the luxury of having another laptop... Hmm actually maybe I should get the new MacBook Neo? I remember it is quite affordable. It’s a business expense, right? It’ll help me concentrate and write better. Let me just quickly check... And there goes another half an hour.

Until I have an air-gap solution, I need an environment with better boundaries. For now, here is what I’m experimenting with:

1. Hard Shutdowns: At the end of the work day, I shut down my laptop, not just shut the lid. I made sure only Obsidian will open automatically on login. Opening any other app requires an additional step. Every time I turn on my laptop, I’m already in my writing setup. It is a digital version of laying out my running attire the night before a morning run.

2. Offline by Default: I set up a Shortcut to turn off my Wi-Fi and shut down my laptop. When I start a new day, my laptop doesn’t have internet connection by default, so I don’t get distracted by “a little” browsing until I’m done writing for at least two hours.

It might seem absurd that I resort to such friction to focus. But I know I can’t trust my willpower alone. Creating the right environment beats relying on my willpower.

The stories we tell ourselves

For the past week, I had been wrestling with a problem:

When thinking about my next steps during my five-month break, I naturally gravitated to writing online, building Fernsage, and parenting. But they felt like three different paths. Some people might even consider them as three different jobs. Deep down, my gut told me they are, in fact, one thing. But on the surface, they sure didn’t look that way.

Gradually, I started to feel lost and doubtful.

I spent multiple days debating with Gemini and Claude and getting them to debate with each other. (Claude seemed much more critical when I asked it to comment on another LLM’s ideas and I explicitly said it’s from another LLM.) Then, I uncovered it:

I want to slow down to build things that last: my body and mind, my family, my writing, my software, my business.

I stepped away from the startup hustle to be more present with my family.
I quit social media and shifted to writing longer pieces on my own site. I swapped followers for subscribers.
I went from building AI tools based on the latest AI hype to making non-AI tools based on timeless practices1. I refuse to use fast, attention-hijacking TikTok videos to grow my business.

Writing online, building Fernsage, and parenting are, indeed, one thing: slowing down to build things that last.

Piecing together this story has helped me clarify why I’m doing three seemingly different jobs and gave me more confidence that this will work.

During my debate with Gemini and Claude, Claude criticized this story for being a nice tagline and warned me not to be fooled by it. “It is not load-bearing.” Perhaps that’s where machines and humans differ. The ever-objective machines are logical and rational but we soft-tissue humans are emotional and irrational. We don’t need facts as much as stories to tell ourselves.

Aeron and sunk cost

About 10 years ago, when I had a nice-paying job, I was tempted to buy a Herman Miller Aeron because everyone seemed to swear by one. I was working from home, and it felt justified to spend on an expensive, high-quality, branded chair. But when I tried it out at a local shop, I didn’t like it. So, I sat on a $10 wooden stool for many years.

People who discovered I was sitting on a wooden stool kept persuading me to get a “proper” chair. Two years ago, I caved and bought a second-hand Aeron for about $700. I wasn’t blown away when I got it, which should have been a sign. But I begrudgingly sat on it, even though I found it rather uncomfortable. I paid $700 for it! Everyone says it’s amazing! Maybe I just haven’t configured it well!

Today, I finally pushed away the Aeron chair and dragged over my $10 wooden stool. I already feel much better on my trusty wooden stool. I no longer fidget every few minutes to find a comfortable position.

You know what, I should have listened to myself.

What do you think of this format? I read and respond to every reply!

Warmly,
Alfred

its just like
there are running clubs.
there are reading clubs.
there are chess clubs. there are xyz clubs.
heck, even have ice bath club.
but...
no club to get people to sit down and think.

Well, there should be one.

If I were to start one, here are the rules:

• For two hours every Friday morning, sit down to write

• Turn off the Wi-Fi on your computer

• Turn on Do Not Disturb on your phone and leave it out of sight

• The only requirement is to publish what you have written at the end (If you have a website, great. Otherwise, a Google Doc is fine, too.)

• Bonus: Read one another’s published notes

(Sorry, there will be no talks, no networking, and no food!)

You don’t actually need a club to do this. It is what I have been practicing by myself at home, and it has been surprisingly helpful.

If you haven’t been writing regularly, this will be hard. You will stare at the blinking cursor for 10-15 minutes with nothing coming to mind. So, here are my recommendations:

• Write about something small, and see where it leads you. Don’t aim to write a novel or a thesis.

• Write about something you did or something that happened to you recently. (I once wrote about replacing my Aeron chair with a $10 wooden stool, which made me realize I had fallen for the sunk cost fallacy.)

• Or write about a decision you want to make. (Writing about wanting to focus led me to set up a more thorough writing environment.)

• Or write about something bothering you. (After I wrote about why notetaking hasn’t helped me feel more knowledgeable, I went to read up on tacit knowledge.)

• For the first hour, don’t edit. Just let your words flow. Edit in the second hour.

If you commit to this, after a few attempts, your brain will start noticing things you might want to write about each Friday.

What if you need to research and verify information online? No, you don’t have to during that two-hour window. You can do that afterwards. In fact, if you sit with the uncertainty as you write and commit to it even just for two hours, you will remember the information better when you research online later, especially if you turn out to be wrong. You can always update your published note.

If you want to try this and want someone to hold you accountable, send me your published note at hello@alfredlua.com. I’ll read it and reply to you.

Originally published at https://alfredlua.com/field-notes/write-club

Hello readers,

This past weekend, I held a mini-football session for my son and two of his classmates. It was chaotic, they barely listened, and my son fell down thrice. It might have been easier to sign him up for some classes. But what’s the fun?

Slow down, life ahead

I once heard a story about a father rushing his son to put on his shoes. His son complained, “It’s Saturday!” Then, the father caught himself. It was Saturday. They didn’t have to reach anywhere by a particular time. Why was he rushing? I’m reminded of this story every time my son is putting on his shoes.

I used to be always in a rush. In my 20s, I was obsessed with productivity. I felt I had to cram as much as I could into as little time as possible. I walked super fast, thinking about nothing but my destination. My mind was always thinking about what’s next because I wanted to be prepared. I thought being busy and rushing around is what an ambitious person should do. I was burnt out about once a year, which felt like a badge to show off.

(I suspect growing up in a highly efficient city like Singapore has played a part. If you are ever in Singapore, try this: Go to Raffles Place MRT station, a stop in the Central Business District, between 8am and 9am on a weekday and walk to Lau Pa Sat leisurely. Watch how quickly people overtake you. Everyone is rushing.)

A turning point for me was when I started meditating with the Calm app. In one of the free introductory sessions, the instructor says:

... We rush around in the daily grind of life and at the end of the day, falling in bed exhausted, waiting for weekends to come around. When they do, we spend our time racing the clock stressed about what we didn’t achieve or what’s next on our plate ...

That's me! Then it dawned on me: I was missing out on life's everyday moments. What a horrible way to live!

Slowing down is more a mindset than a matter of time. Take an hour-long drive. The driver could be frustrated at the traffic, annoyed at the cars that cut into his lane, and hopelessly wishing he could drive faster. Or he could enjoy the music on the radio, chat with his passengers, and appreciate the beautiful blue sky. The drive is still an hour. But the mindsets and experiences are different.

This is still an ongoing practice for me. Just recently, I noticed that, since having kids, my wife and I had been rushing through our dinner. Whoever finished first would wash whatever dishes could be washed, so we could wrap up dinner and sit down to relax. But one day, I noticed the irony. We were rushing to relax. Then, I decided: Let’s all sit down around the table until everyone is done. Let’s talk about one another’s day when there are no phones, books, or toys distracting us. Let’s just sit with one another, even for five to 10 minutes. Of course, it’s rarely this orderly with two kids under three. But I always find it a blessing.

Here are some other things I’m doing to slow down and pay attention:

Putting my phone down. This is the most important one for me. I’m addicted to my phone and can find countless reasons to check it. Oh, I need to get Claude Code to do something. Let me read this email. Ah, I need to reply to this WhatsApp message. To fight my bad habit, I put my phone outside of my office when I work and on the charging dock when my kids are home (though I sometimes want to take photos of them). My phone is permanently on Do Not Disturb. Without my phone, my attention doesn’t get hijacked. And time seems to slow down.

Taking photos. I’m not a professional photographer but I love capturing scenes. I bought myself a $3,000 DSLR with almost all my savings when I was 18. But it’s too huge to bring around. Nowadays, even an iPhone XR produces amazing-quality photos. Whenever I’m out for a walk, I take photos of things I see, such as flowers, airplanes, and buildings. Taking photos helps me slow down and notice little details. The dew on the leaf, the direction of the sunlight, the symmetry of the buildings.

Taking notes of books. I used to pride myself on how quickly I read—until I realized how little I retained. Now I type out lines, rephrase ideas in my own words, add my reflections, and organize them into topics in Fernsage. I have even typed out an entire short book. Even though I could just copy and paste, typing slows me down and helps me internalize the ideas better.

Writing long-form essays. I choose to spend several days on each essay, instead of firing out 10 tweets a day. Having this heavier work helps me slow down and think more—because it is hard to write, edit, rewrite, and then publish a 1,000 to 2,000-word essay. Writing this newsletter every week has also encouraged me to pay closer attention to my life for interesting things to share with you. When I went to a bath house recently, I noticed small details: the orange iMacs on the reception table, the cold peach tea they served, and the rotation countdown timer for every customer.

Exercising. With Claude as planning assistant, I built myself a fitness program that includes a recovery swim and run every week and a deloading week every four weeks. To recover properly, I have to slow down to keep my heart rate under 149. It feels agonizing sometimes, especially when other runners zoom past me. But after being an athlete for 17 years, I know slowing down is part of getting faster.

Being with my children. Kids are great at being in the moment, and they are delighted by all the little things. A Zebra plate? Giggles. A piece of cake dropped on the floor? Giggles. A leaf blown onto your face? Giggles. Their laughter is so contagious that I often can’t help but laugh along at the silliest of silliest things.

Cooking. I frankly find cooking more time-consuming than I’d like and often rush through it. I have even thought about buying ready-made meals. But when I don’t rush, cooking gives me some peace. My wife and I have been trying one or two new recipes each week. Nowadays, I write down the recipes in my Fernsage after cooking the dish, which extends the experience. I also consult Gemini while cooking and have picked up new techniques, such as using grated apple to tenderize pork ribs and adding sesame oil only near the end so it doesn’t break down from the heat.

Looking outside the windows. Ever since my son became a toddler, we have been looking out of our windows regularly. There are no four seasons in Singapore, but these past few weeks, I noticed the trees at the park opposite our house are turning orange, brown, and red. Sometimes, there’s an ambulance with an urgent-sounding siren. Is someone sick? Other times, we see if the passing bus is a double- or single-decker. Oh, and where’s the moon tonight?

Fixing the house. It’s more efficient to get someone to fix things in the house. But my father taught me to fix things myself by fixing things in his house himself. I recently fixed a loose kitchen tap handle, two blown-out T5 LED light bulbs, and a non-IKEA shelf. When I don’t know what to do, I have to slow down, study the object, and figure it out. For instance, I discovered (with Gemini’s help) that my kitchen tap handle has a tiny access hole at the bottom for tightening or loosening it with an Allen key.

Taking public transport and walking. My wife and I don’t own a car because we don’t think the cost is justified. The price of a certificate to own a car for 10 years in Singapore is about $100,000 USD. This doesn’t even include the car! While we could take Grab, we end up taking buses and trains most of the time—partially because we are frugal, partially because my son loves buses and trains, and partially because it helps me slow down.

Doing less. We all have 24 hours a day. If I squeeze in multiple activities with little buffer in between, of course I’d be rushing around. On the weekends, we now only plan one or two activities and have lots of slow leisure time. Also, I quit social media, cut back on attending events, and avoid cold coffee chats. I don’t need to do many things but a few meaningful ones.

To remind myself, I even named my business Slow Delivery. As Joan Didion said, when asked why she used her good china every day: “every day is all there is.” I want to live the length of a life, not rush to the end.

In the film Click, Adam Sandler received a magical remote control that let him pause, rewind, and fast forward life. Happily, he used it to skip boring and stressful moments, like traffic and arguments. Gradually, the remote learned to skip ahead whenever there’s a problem he would usually fast forward through. So, when he wished to become CEO, the remote skipped 10 years of his life, making him miss important milestones like his father’s death and his kids’ childhood.

When I watch my son struggle to complete a puzzle or finish a sentence, my first instinct is to jump in and do it for him—so we can move on with life. But I wait. If we skip all these slow, messy moments, what is life?

From my commonplace book

Nice sentences (updated)

I’ve been reading very little this week and reconciling with nature instead—swimming, cycling, and applying large quantities of sunscreen

— Celine Nguyen

“Reconciling with nature” is such a beautiful phrase!

Inside the Box (updated)

I picked back up the book this past week as I have been reflecting on my new business and lifestyle. Even though I can do anything, having the freedom to do anything is probably bad. I have some thoughts about this, which I’ll share in a future email. Also, I love the examples, so I copied them down.

Coding: Limiting parallel work (updated)

I used to get Claude Code to work on several big tasks in parallel, thinking this would be faster. Often, it will hit the session limit before completing them. By the time I resume the conversations after the session limit restarts, the prompt cache would have expired. So, resuming the tasks often eat up 10-20% of the session limit immediately. Working in series and completing each task within each session uses much fewer tokens and likely gives better results because I’m not switching context as much.

Around the web

How Our Leisure Time Got Monetized by

Life is different now. People use up their leisure time scrolling through web ‘content’ saturated with advertisements—teens especially, who devote 4-5 hours per day on these platforms. Or they binge on Netflix. Or pay to play video games.

It’s pretty sad if childhood is only filled with pixels on the screen and not sunshine, mud, and grass outdoors. I love technology but I love being outdoors more.

Paul Jarvis: gaining freedom by building an indie business with Justin Jackson

The longer I’m offline, the more trivial everything on the Internet seems.

I was looking for people who mix different work for a living and realized I hadn’t seen Paul Jarvis around the internet for a while. It turns out he quit the internet in 2020 and removed all his online presence. I was reminded of another friend who used to be very famous online for his business and suddenly disappeared from the internet when he built another business that doesn’t require a public face. I sometimes think about disappearing like that, too. But I also value having an outlet to share my experiences, help others, and put my perspectives out there. Would you?

Leisure as a Dream Job by and A Billion Dollars by

I recommend reading these two together (and also my newsletter on the odd shapes of work!) Did you know Dua Lipa has a free newsletter and a book club? Madison Huizinga hypothesized that, instead of trying to be one of the greatest pop artists, Dua Lipa is “sacrificing” that to also pursue her interest in travel, food, and books. Similarly, Kevin Kelly advises that we don’t need a billion dollars before we pursue our dreams.

After a few rough weeks, life seemed to have settled down a little. Last week, I wrote about running on a slower clock while my child was sick. Looking back, perhaps that was just another reminder to slow down.

Warmly
Alfred

Hello readers,

I’m addicted to Claude Code. Whenever my 5-hour session restarts, I get it to work on as many things as possible to maximize my usage. This is perhaps fine if I’m only building things.

But I also want to write. It took me a while to admit that squeezing my writing in between Claude Code conversations was destroying my focus and affecting the quality of both my app and my writing. I needed better boundaries. So, this week, I adopted Craig Mod’s ritual and would only “let myself” build things after a morning of writing.

Trying to balance these two different crafts got me thinking about the different shapes of all our work.

The odd shapes of work

My parents have been running their small car accessories workshop for almost 40 years. I barely saw them growing up, and my 67-year-old father still has to kneel beside customers’ cars under the hot Singapore sun to install or fix car audio systems and video recorders. My parents worked so hard so that my siblings and I could have stable, comfy 9-5 office jobs—because, in their generation, that’s the ideal job. Running a small business is for those who “couldn’t make it”.

It’s easy to fixate on the most common shape of work around us. In Singapore, the typical and celebrated path is to go to university and get a corporate job. Then, the rest of our lives are moulded around that 9-5 schedule. We squeeze in a workout before first light and send kids to school by 7. We send them to after-school classes because it’s good for their education but also because we have to work in the office until sunset. But that isn’t the only shape of work.

I’m fortunate to have experienced different shapes of work. For seven years, I worked remotely at two startups. Then, for the following four years, I bootstrapped several startups with my high school friend SK. Instead of being a small cog in a large air-conditioned machine, I got to build software, produce videos, and even manage our accounting books. But I also had to take 6am or midnight calls, work on the weekends while my child napped, and sometimes take no salary.

I use the term “shape” because one type of work isn’t absolutely better than another. A circle isn’t necessarily better than a square. It depends on what the shape is for. Similarly, the ideal shape of work depends on what you want. I have a few acquaintances who raised millions from venture capitalists, worked pretty much 24/7 for a few years, and never had to work again after they sold their businesses. Is that good or bad? Again, it depends on what you want in life. A square is a terrible shape for a wheel, just as a venture-backed startup is a terrible shape for a father who wants to be hands-on with his three kids.

Just as shapes aren’t all regular, our work doesn’t have to be regular. Our brains like to simplify things, so we have preconceived notions about what each type of work should be like. Writers have to publish books; developers have to take a tech job; musicians have to get a recording label and make albums. But those notions are incorrect.

Essayist Henrik Karlsson wrote about a talented musician friend who did what someone who wants to be a musician “should” do:

His main calling in life is writing songs. To this end, he has signed with a record label, put out EPs and albums, and slept in cars behind concert venues—the full package of what “being a musician” means to him. It hasn’t worked. As in, he spent his twenties stressed and doing things he didn’t enjoy (like negotiating contracts and writing social media updates) at the expense of making songs. Looking back, at thirty, he felt a bit like he’d sold out, except he got no money for it. The accumulated stress came back to collect its debt in the form of anxiety and heart palpitations, and he was physically unable to write music for several years.

Instead, Karlsson tried to push him to consider what he actually likes (which is coming up with new songs and performing live) and how he could do more of those without “being a musician”. He could, for instance, write music for video games or work part-time and jam part-time, making a living while still doing what he likes.

The issue, though, is that most of us are not exposed to many different shapes of work. We have only seen a few shapes, or we don’t know the irregular shapes enough to think we can do them. We are biased for what we can see growing up: our parents’ jobs, our friends’ jobs, what our education system tells us. And that shape of work feels most achievable because the people we know are doing them.

So, it’s worth seeking as many odd shapes as possible, ideally those similar to the shape you want. For example, if you like to write, you don’t only have to write books. Ben Thompson writes a hugely popular publication on technology and strategy, Stratechery, and charges $15 per month for subscriber-only updates and interviews. Cedric Chin runs Commoncog, a membership for accelerating business expertise, where he writes business cases. He started it while running marketing part-time for a SaaS company. Henrik Karlsson writes full-time on his 65,000-subscriber Substack. For four years, before his Substack could pay his bills, he wrote his blog at 5 in the morning before work and late at night after his kids went to bed.

Even if you really want to write books, there are many different types of books. On one end, Walter Isaacson writes in-depth biographies and Haruki Murakami writes long novels. On the other end, Alice Munro wrote short stories and Austin Kleon writes short illustrated books. Munro wrote short stories because she didn’t have time to write a novel as a mother of three daughters. Her stories were short but no less impactful, eventually winning her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

Or if you like to code, you don’t only have to work as a software engineer at a tech company. Several of my developer friends run small dev shops to build little apps and automations for businesses. Herman Martinus works on Bear Blog and JustSketchMe, which allowed him to quit his job. An acquaintance has a PDF editing app that he grew to more than $50,000 monthly recurring revenue over five years while having a part-time consulting gig.

Taking this even further, you can also combine different interests to create even weirder shapes. Robin Sloan writes novels, produces extra virgin olive oil, and runs a print shop that sells physical stationery with digital capabilities (like a postcard with digital media, for which he wrote the software). Craig Mod publishes beautiful photography books about walking in Japan, supported by his $10/month “Special Projects” membership program. One of the perks is member-only apps that he built, like A Good Book (a Goodreads replacement) and The Good Place (a Twitter replacement).

How do we get exposed to more irregular shapes like these? For me, it was a series of lucky experiences and experiments:

To begin with, my parents are entrepreneurs, so I know working in an office isn’t the only option. Watching them at their workshop during my school holidays made me think running a small business is normal. After my National Service, I had almost a year of spare time before university started. On a friend’s recommendation, I got a contract job at a corporation. That made me realize I hate the office cubicle and pushed me more towards startups. I became “allergic” to the typical Singaporean lifestyle. I believed there had to be a different path.

For university, some friends persuaded me to study in the UK. Convincing me wasn’t that hard because I already didn’t like the pressure-cooker education system in Singapore and I wanted to see the world. There I met other Singaporeans who were working in London. While I knew it was possible to work overseas, knowing people who were actually doing that made it feel more plausible. I eventually got a startup internship in London, which confirmed my gut feeling that I could get a job outside of Singapore.

While using Twitter, I discovered Buffer, a fully remote startup before remote work was a thing. If I could get a job outside of Singapore, why not a remote job? After three applications, I got the job and worked there for six years. Buffer encouraged us to start side projects to learn. So, while I was there, I started a notebook ecommerce business (this made some revenue but lost money), a notetaking app (this is low cost but made no revenue), and a paid newsletter (this had high time commitment but made recurring revenue). Each gave me a little more confidence that I could make money online.

Then, when my super smart high school friend asked me about cofounding a tech startup, I was comfortable enough to take the leap (but not without hesitation). Most of our products failed. But it proved to me that I could make a living online (albeit with a friend). And while working on our last product, Booplet, I discovered Robin Sloan through his article, An app can be a home-cooked meal, and then Craig Mod through Sloan’s writing.

While taking a break from my startup and thinking about my next steps, I contemplated whether I should find a regular-shaped job. But instead, inspired by Robin Sloan’s and Craig Mod’s unique shapes, I took another step into the irregular unknown. I registered a business and drew up a plan to write and make software while parenting two children1.

My parents slogged at their workshop for decades so their children could have a more comfortable and stable life. The best way to honor their hard work isn’t by defaulting to a cubicle-shaped job. It’s to design a shape of work that fits the life I want—with the stability they provided. So I can give my children the same.

P.S. While my Asian dad would never say it, I suspect he is secretly happy that my sister and I became entrepreneurs.

From my commonplace book

2026 (new)

I have been setting annual goals for more than a decade now. I missed this year’s because it was going to be unpredictable. Since things are settling down, I finally got around to listing my 2026’s 1-year, 5-year, and lifetime goals. Better late than never! I’m keeping it private (sorry) but take this as a nudge to review your 2026 goals.

Eat Your Ice Cream (updated)

An unfulfilling life, no matter how long and healthy, is not the ideal. A long life is worthwhile only if it is filled with meaningful relationships and activities.

Here are my complete notes for the book. It doesn’t have anything particularly enlightening to me (only because I have been reading about health and fitness for many years) and is filled with too much research and too few engaging stories. But it has several good reminders. If you don’t need to be convinced of the importance of wellness and only want the key tips, start with my notes.

Pork burger patty, Sweet garlic pork ribs (new)

Every parent will understand this joy: When your children love what you cook. My wife and I tried these two new recipes this past week, and our son refused to share the dishes with us!

Around the web

Take your kid to work by Austin Kleon

Growing up, I spent my school holidays at my parents’ workshop. I used to complain about that because my friends were off playing while I was sweeping the floor and running errands. But I’m starting to appreciate it more now: I got to play with electronics and build little circuits (which I wish I kept doing). Also, my parents wanted to spend more time with me and could bring me there. Nowadays, many parents disappear for eight hours or more every day and their children have no concept of their work.

Basecamp’s new website

Some people love Basecamp. Some hate them—to the core. I respect them for being opinionated and creating unique websites (see their latest website) and software rather than simply following trends. Also, being profitable for more than two decades and helping nearly a million people with their work is so much better than raising VC money to fund an unprofitable business that closes down after only a handful of years. My parents have been running their small and profitable car workshop for almost 40 years now. Many customers are regulars who would sometimes come in just to chat and hang out. I’m coming around to the fact that this is the type of business I want to run.

What’s working for my health by Eric Nehrlich

I like reading about what’s working for other (normal) people, especially parents, on top of all the scientifically proven health and fitness tips. I wrote about my health routine two years ago but my life and work have changed since. Time for a refresh?

My kid was sick three times in the past three weeks. The last was kind of self-inflicted, from a vaccination we had postponed because of the previous bugs. At some point, I stopped fighting the disruption (because it’s outside my control) and accepted that my life is temporarily running on a different, much slower clock than the rest of the world. These weeks won’t matter much on a calendar years from now (my firstborn had a similar episode two years ago, which I have largely forgotten). But how I show up during them matters right now.

I hope you are giving yourself some slow days when you need them, too.

Warmly,
Alfred

Hello readers,

It has been blazing hot in Singapore for the past week... except for last Friday when it poured during my recovery run. Of course it did.

Speaking of running, I found a new favorite running route! There’s a park connector near my place that I avoided for quite literally my entire life because I thought my running routes were good enough. Flatter path, fewer people, and only two traffic lights away. There’s also a down-to-earth cafe at the end, and my wife and I will pop in there for coffee when we run together. I’m glad I went exploring!

(I have more to say about exploring a neighborhood on foot—or bicycle. More next time!)

The one habit that keeps me grounded

Often, everything feels out of control. My toddler melts down because I walked to the bathroom. Few people open the newsletter I wrote and rewrote all week. Nobody seems interested in the apps I spent months building.

In times like this, I just want to lie flat on my living room floor and watch the ceiling fan spin. But I don’t. I lace up and head out for a run. When everything feels chaotic and overwhelming, I fall back on this habit:

Exercise.

I have been exercising in the morning for more than two decades. It first started against my will. I failed my physical test in high school and had to run around the school track even before the sun was up. But gradually, working out in the morning became my routine. In the military, I exercised before the first parade. At university, I exercised before the first lecture. For the last 10 years, I have been exercising before my workday starts.

Then it became my support system. I need to exercise. It keeps me grounded and sane. After a workout, everything just feels not that bad. Not perfect. But not as bleak as I had thought. Perhaps it’s the dopamine. Perhaps it’s the break giving me a new perspective. Perhaps it’s the fatigue calming my restless mind.

Besides all the wonderful health benefits, there’s a special quality to exercising. Take running. At its core, it’s putting one foot in front of the other. It doesn’t matter how slow I am. If I keep putting one foot in front of the other, I’ll finish my run. If I keep running one run after another, I’ll improve. I can’t prevent my toddler from throwing a tantrum or force people to buy my products. But to put one foot in front of the other? I sure can.

At some point, I realized this isn’t just about exercising. It’s about control. About agency.

When I stepped back from my startup to take a five-month break, I felt lost. My professional identity went from a cofounder to nothing. I was so anxious that I couldn’t even nap in the day after not sleeping at night. I kept thinking, “what should I do? What should I be doing?” So, I fell back to my habit. I turned to weightlifting. Week by week, little by little, I lifted heavier weights. I put in the reps, and I made progress. I felt in control. That helped me gradually find my way forward.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing for Winston Churchill. In 1929, his political career was at a low point. He lost his government position and his party lost the election. Everything felt out of control. He turned to laying bricks at his country home, Chartwell. In his letters to his wife, he wrote about how mixing mortar and setting straight courses grounded him when political news was grim. Physical, tangible work gave Churchill something he could control when his political world was uncertain. He couldn’t change his situation immediately, but to lay one brick after another? He sure could.

We often get frustrated and overwhelmed when others don’t act the way we hoped. I have already done this. Why won’t you do that? Instead of focusing on ourselves, we wish others would behave the way we hoped. But as Epictetus wrote, Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our actions.”

I can’t control whether my toddler is upset.
But I can love him, set boundaries, and manage my emotions.

I can’t control whether my baby falls sick.
But I can keep the house clean, wash our hands regularly, and stay healthy myself.

I can’t control whether people buy my apps.
But I can talk to potential users, refine the product, and pivot if necessary.

I can’t control whether subscribers read and share my emails.
But I can study other writers. I can learn from my mistakes. I can keep writing and hitting that “Send” button.

And when I don’t know what to do, I know where to start.

I lace up.

I put one foot in front of the other.

From my commonplace book

Writing lessons and mistakes (new)

I’m trying a new practice of noting down my lessons and mistakes from each newsletter. Can this improve my writing? You can be the judge!

Non-conventional working hours (new)

Sometimes we get too fixated on needing eight hours of uninterrupted time to do good work. Don’t get me wrong; I think uninterrupted time is crucial. But not everyone can have a good eight-hour stretch, especially parents. So, I curated a list of people who did great work during non-conventional working hours.

Eat Your Ice Cream (new)

I’m halfway through the book but it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite health and fitness books because the author’s advice is straightforward. That’s exactly what the general public needs (as I wrote two years ago).

“All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there,” Charlie Munger liked to say. The first chapter of this book does just that, telling us things to avoid if we want to have a long and healthy life.

(I skimmed through a lot of the research studies quoted because I find them a little too much. But some are pretty interesting. Check out my note!)

Around the web

In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley (1961–2026), with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years by Stephen Wolfram

I never knew of Elise Cawley until I read this beautiful piece. So, I’m glad Stephen Wolfram wrote this to honor her (which I think is important!).

Raising Makers by Nicole Ruiz and Simon Sarris

They help with everything, but especially with tidying, laundry, cooking, and so on. We try to include them in everything, even if it takes longer. Even if I’m trying to get the pasta done quickly and I can’t want to wait for Lu to help roll it out, I might give him his own piece of dough and a rolling pin and just have him practice. It’s more parallel play than direct involvement, but it’s just as important for him. He’s still engaging with and making dinner.

Continuing from last week’s newsletter, here’s part two of their interview, which goes more deeply into Simon’s parenting and household rituals.

Public vs private writing by Marlene Jo

... it’s also important for new writers to be aware of how performative it is to write in public, even if you don’t have a large following, there’s a strong incentive that works on a psychological level that a) acts like a little brain parasite motivating you to snap-to-grid all truths into pithy, narratively legible little platitudes or arcs and b) removes you from the slower and unrewarding work that allows you to form a more interesting and complex understanding of things. The more I privately journal the better my public stuff gets. The private stuff is important because it’s the only place you can contend with the truth...

I have been big on publishing to think and learn better, but frankly I’m updating my stance on that. I realized that there are many things that are important to reflect on but that I might never want to make public for various reasons (or at least not in the exact shape). I have even “updated” the way I use Fernsage and been writing more private notes.

I have been using Claude as my fitness buddy (not coach). This week is the fifth week of the 12-week training program, and it has been an interesting experiment so far. Keep an eye out for a future email about that, and let me know if you have any questions in advance.

Warmly,
Alfred

Hello readers,

In case you missed it, I launched Fernsage, a public commonplace book app, last Friday. I wrote about what it is and why I made it in my last email. If you are keen to accumulate and compound your knowledge, do check it out!

Earlier this week, a friend read my parenting notes and we chatted about it over WhatsApp. This is exactly what I had hoped my public commonplace book would do.

Personal website fever

I love my personal website. It’s a little corner of the internet that I truly own. And that ownership allows me to tinker endlessly with it.

If you are as old as me, you will remember the times we “skin” our weblogs and make snow fall from the cursor. I am not technostalgic enough to want to bring all that back. But we have strayed too far to the other side. In a few clicks, you can create an Instagram profile for your photos or a Substack publication for your writings or a LinkedIn profile for your projects. When these platforms made publishing so easy, why go through the hassle of setting up a personal website?

But our creations become stuck in the minimalistic frame that Big Tech calls “feed”. We obsess over our photos and forget we can customize the frame.

When I set up my website in 2014, I had to figure out how to set up WordPress. When I wanted more customization than what free themes gave me, I studied how to create a WordPress theme and made my own. When I wanted to tinker even more, I watched YouTube videos and coded a custom website from scratch. Frankly, it was more effort than I would like to be able to tinker with my own website.

Then, Claude Code happened.

Earlier this year, everyone wouldn’t shut up about Claude Code. I opened WhatsApp: “Have you tried Claude Code?” I opened my email: “I built these 10 things, even though I don’t know how to code!” Alright, alright, let’s try it. I brought Claude Code to my playground, alfredlua.com.

To dip my toes, I got Claude Code to look through my website codebase and find issues. It found a link missing a critical slash, a bug with my Strava code, and a CSS style that was repeated 15 times. It fixed these easily. Pretty cool... but I could do these myself, too.

Can I do more?

I threw Claude Code an issue that I had been dreading for many years but that I knew I had to deal with someday: Outdated Next.js. It’s the thing I worried about the most when it came to having my own custom website. All this scary, endless maintenance, which, as necessary as it is, has nothing to do with publishing new essays or customizing my website! Claude Code took care of it. Upgrading two versions? Fixing breaking changes? No problem. It even ran tests to make sure all pages could load without errors. I could have done this myself... but definitely not in 10 minutes.

Can I do more?

There was a task that had been at the back of my mind for years, but it was so tedious I gave up trying to do it. But I could never give up the dream. When I moved my blog from WordPress to my custom website in 2021, I exported all my posts as a huge XML file. But I didn’t migrate all the posts because I just physically couldn’t parse through WordPress’s verbose wp-this and wp-that code to extract the posts into separate markdown files for my custom website. To make things worse, I wrote exclusively on Substack last year. So, I had 63 blog posts stuck in the WordPress XML file and 56 articles on Substack.

But my new playground friend made my dream come true. Using countless Python scripts, it extracted the blog posts into markdown files, searched for images on Wayback Machine and downloaded the ones it could find (sadly, many were lost to time), and formatted the text. All my writings finally reunited on my personal website!

I could have done this myself... if I ate a magic pill that gave me infinite patience—and maybe the ability to stop time!

Can I do even more?

My personal site was too minimalistic and soulless. I could toss some Tailwind classes around but they rarely align nicely to form a work of art. I often look at designers’ personal websites and wish I could create something at least a little nicer. (I’m realistic about my skills!)

To give my website more “soul”, I leaned into my newfound love for anime like Frieren and Witch Hat Atelier. These anime often feature beautiful blue sky, enormous white clouds, and expansive green fields. They mesmerize this city boy. I wanted them on my website, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to use such imagery in my design. A blurry background? Fade-out gradient? Light overlay?

I directed Claude Code to create five variations with a rough description of what I want (it only took five minutes!) It didn’t generate something I loved, but some were promising. So, I asked it to generate more in those directions. After several iterations, I landed with something I liked and tweaked it further. (I also used this approach for Fernsage’s website, creating at least 20 variations before I narrowed down on one direction.)

As I became more confident using Claude Code, it became more fun. It was less of “let’s implement this design“ and more of “what other crazy ideas can I try?“ I tried making the paper note peel off like it would in real life but that didn’t work well enough. No biggie. Even though most experiments failed, they didn’t take long. But when something worked, WOAH! Here’s my favorite: Toggling to dark mode turns the scene from day to night.

I could have done this myself... but Claude Code brought back the fun in tinkering. I went down rabbit holes, overthought sprig dividers, and obsessed over getting that tiny animation right.

Will everyone start making their own websites? I don’t think so. Like IKEA, the ease and convenience of Big Tech platforms have made them very attractive. Too attractive. Just like we fill our houses with identical furniture, we publish our thoughts, showcase our projects, and post our photos in identical frames.

But if you care about where your ideas and achievements live, Claude Code has handed you the tools to build and tinker with your own frame. The excuse that it’s too hard is dead. What’s left is not your inability but your inaction.

From my commonplace book

AI coding (updated)

I added two new notes:

1. /doctor in Claude Code helped me to check my setup and clean up my CLAUDE.md file.

2. From the Claude Code team: Adding examples in the system prompt is no longer a best practice. Lists of “don’t do X and don’t do Y” can also reduce the quality of the results from the latest models.

Thinking modes to avoid (new)

I added one so far: Self-pity (from Charlie Munger). Munger went through a divorce where he lost everything, and he lost his 9-year-old son to leukemia. Yet he believed one shouldn’t let a single blow become worse through a lack of will or wallowing. Every unfair setback is an opportunity to behave well and learn something new. I meditated on this several times this week!

Writing references (updated)

I just added How I Became the Honest Broker. Recently, as I have been trying to improve my writing, I started quoting historic figures and even anime. Ted Gioia used a personal story about a drunk Australian, which feels much more compelling. Another reminder to live an interesting life!

Around the web

Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon Sarris by Nicole Ruiz

So never stop at the thinking stage, a good life begins with deliberate effort. This is the moral of many fairy tales. Not magic, not thinking, but effort.

There are many things I like about this interview but I want to share a related story. As I was reading through the section on building a house, my instinct was to think, “Ha, must be nice to be able to build a house in the US. That’s never going to be possible in Singapore!” But then, I caught myself. At my friends’ wedding a few years ago, I met an entrepreneur about my age who built most of his house himself, with the help of some part-time workers and YouTube (yes!). It’s extremely rare but it’s not impossible.

Friction is the answer to the human desire for meaning by Utsav Mamoria

Katalin Karikó’s research into mRNA helped enable the COVID-19 vaccines. I didn’t know how many setbacks she had overcome before she was recognized for her scientific work. She definitely has no self-pity!

The year is 2063 and you were never interesting. by Liz Leatrice

You are 70 years old. You’re sitting in your home. Your grandchildren ask you what your 20s were like, and you honestly can’t tell them.

You can’t read this essay and think, “let me go scroll some more social media.” Go live a real life, away from the tiny screen.

I rewrote this week’s essay three times because the earlier drafts just didn’t feel right. I’m grateful for having the time and space to do creative work like this. Thank you for following along!

And if you are in Singapore, happy long weekend!

Warmly,
Alfred

Hello readers!

Today, I’m launching a new business:

Fernsage, an app for keeping a public commonplace book to help you think and learn better.

I created Fernsage because private notetaking apps felt like a graveyard of forgotten ideas while public blogging felt too messy and ephemeral. Fernsage is my take on compounding wisdom over a lifetime. Starting with my own life:

https://alfred.fernsage.com/

Let me tell you what Fernsage is, why I made it, and what you can use it for:

• Wisdom grown in the shade

• Five years in the making

• From Marcus Aurelius to me

Wisdom grown in the shade

Why “Fernsage”? It is a compound word. Fern, the ancient plant that thrives quietly in the shade. Sage, a wise person. I wanted a name that evokes someone who steps away from the noise of social media to cultivate timeless wisdom in the quiet.

Fernsage the software is built for that: Write down things that inspire you, in a structured manner, and refine them until you internalize them. Your commonplace book is a deliberate collection that grows more useful the more you use it.

And, yes, using Fernsage feels intentionally deliberate. When I sat down to design it, my principle was: Reading the pages should be easy; editing should be intentional.

Just like the content page of a book, your Fernsage home is an organized list of pages like this:

Reading a single page looks like this:

Want to edit a page? Click “Edit” first. Want to rearrange your pages? Click “Organize” first. Traditional notetaking apps feel too easy to edit, too fluid, too light.

Whether you revisit your notes is technically up to you. But I wanted to be opinionated about it. So, I baked Review into Fernsage. Click it anytime, and get five entries that you haven’t visited lately. This has nudged me to revise and update my older notes, and even merge and delete some.

Oh, and I HAVE to tell you to install Fernsage as an app on your smartphone. Tap “Share”, then “Add to Home Screen”. I spent many days crafting and tweaking the mobile experience because I use it on my iPhone multiple times a day.

Want to write your book? $10 a month, 14 days free. There isn’t a free tier. Subscriptions are the whole of the business, and the simplest way to keep this going forever. A tool to hold decades of your thinking has to last as long.

Five years in the making

Here’s something personal: I have been feeling rather stupid.

It has been a decade since I graduated from university and stepped into the “real world”. I have built and marketed software, founded startups, and become a parent. Even though I have been through quite a bit and learned a lot, I found myself retaining very little. Which, honestly, sucks. Starting from (almost) zero all the time is ridiculous. I want my knowledge to compound.

I used to think: Oh, if it’s important, I’ll remember it. Some stuff, I do. But a lot, I forget. Then, I thought: I can just google or ask ChatGPT. Seneca wrote about a lazy Roman who bought educated slaves to prompt him with poetry quotes so he could sound wise at dinner parties. Seneca wrote of him:

a man whose reliance on slaves is so complete that he cannot even think for himself. He has bought slaves and has had them trained to memorize poetry, so that he can be cultured while having nothing in his head.

Ouch! Using Google and ChatGPT sometimes feels like this. I can ask ChatGPT to translate a Japanese sentence but that doesn’t help me converse in Japanese. I can google for Anna Quindlen’s A Short Guide to a Happy Life anytime I want but that doesn’t help me embrace life fully. (Typing it out does.) Having the information is not the same as knowing, understanding, and acting on it.

Perhaps I just needed to be taking notes? Over the years, I tried Evernote, Notion, and Obsidian. Even as my notes pile up, I felt none the wiser. What I found is that these apps are great scratchpads (I’m writing this draft on Obsidian) but not for accumulating knowledge.

I first attempted to solve this problem for myself five years ago. Not only did I start a physical notebook business, I also built Augment Notes, a notes app to augment my memory. (Both failed.)

Earlier this year, when taking a break, I had the space and time to ponder what to work on next. After becoming a parent, I have been thinking more about learning and how we pass down knowledge. Then, this commonplace book idea popped up. The stars aligned. Building something I’m passionate about that can also help me become a better person? Oh, elegant. I’m in!

As a software lover and builder, I began my quest for a solution. Five years of endless iterations in Figma and countless ‘not good enoughs’ from SK have sharpened my instinct for software. All that eventually led me to Fernsage, and this email to you.

From Marcus Aurelius to me

Marcus Aurelius quoted and paraphrased other thinkers like Socrates and Epictetus according to his current challenges so that he could be inspired to act with virtue. Ryan Holiday reads widely, writes down his notes on 4x6 ruled index cards, and organizes them in a physical box, which he then uses for his writing and talks. Austin Kleon stores quotes in an Apple Note and hand-copies selected ones, one a day, into a 5-year diary. History is filled with famous thinkers who kept such a practice: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain.

There isn’t a “correct” way to keep a commonplace book. Your book is… yours! The ways I use mine were inspired by the giants before me but adapted to my very ordinary life:

• Whenever I come across something interesting about topics I care about (parenting, AI coding, human behavior), I copy it and add a quick personal note. I usually add to an existing page so that I can keep refining my notes, unless nothing is suitable.

• When I make a mistake or learn something new, such as dealing with caching for a publishing platform or adding hidden features in an app, I write down what I learned.

• I also record things that I actually want to refer to in the future, such as house renovation lessons and cooking recipes. Some of these, I keep private, of course.

I don’t record everything in my commonplace book. Recording everything just because I might use them in the future is what created my graveyard of notes that I actually don’t touch. I curate. I hand pick. I prune.

But why publish my commonplace book? It is a forcing function. I write differently when I know someone will be reading. You probably do, too. When taking private notes, we can afford to be sloppy. But when writing for others, we hold ourselves to a higher standard, to think and write clearly. “It’s by writing about a subject we’re trying to learn that we reason our way to what it means,” wrote William Zinsser. And if we are wrong on the internet, someone will correct us. It’s like free peer review!

*Cue XKCD*

If you do create a commonplace book on Fernsage and leave your book open, send me your link. I’d love to read your thinking, and feature a few favorite books on the website.

From my commonplace book

Children education

I have been working slowly through Michel de Montaigne’s On the Education of Children, with the help of Gemini because I’m not used to 16th-century prose. There’s so much to learn. It’s definitely something I want to revisit again and again.

Confucianism 儒家思想

I bought Analects: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries in 2015 as a Kindle book and recently bought a physical copy so that I can flip back and forth between pages more easily. I haven’t been able to work through it as much as I’d like but here are my three favorite chapters from my reread so far. I just added 1.1 this week:

子曰：「學而時習之，不亦說乎？有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎？人不知而不慍，不亦君子乎？」

The Master said, “To learn and then have occasion to practice what you have learned — is this not satisfying? To have friends arrive from afar — is this not a joy? To be patient even when others do not understand — is this not the mark of the gentleman?”

Inside the Box

I have been reading David Epstein’s new book, which is finally out on Libby. Wanting to share this page actually forced me to scroll through my highlights and update my notes. The process is working!

Around the web

Keeping to the theme, this week’s links are all about commonplacing.

Letter 84: On Gathering Ideas by Seneca (and commentary by Stephen)

we should imitate the bees: we should sift through whatever we have gathered from various reading sources (for things kept separately are better preserved), and then, applying the care and skill of our own mind, blend those various tastes into one combined flavor.

Montaigne, quite aptly, borrowed Seneca’s metaphor in his essay, On the Education of Children:

Bees cull their several sweets from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they find them, but themselves afterward make the honey, which is all and purely their own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the several fragments he borrows from others, he will transform and shuffle together to compile a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment: his instruction, labor and study, tend to nothing else but to form that.

Re-Noted: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Wide World” by Jillian Hess

Make your own Bible. Select & Collect all those words & sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of a trumpet out of Shakespear [sic], Seneca, Moses, John, & Paul.

Emerson also believed that, when we know someone would read what we write, we become self-conscious and write differently. He thought that is bad if we wrote to seek approval. “A man’s speech is shallow, himself is shallow, who speaks or writes to satisfy an audience.”

How And Why To Keep A “Commonplace Book” by Ryan Holiday

I have always been inspired by how much knowledge (or quotes) Ryan Holiday has. This article is from 2014(!), which shows how timeless his approach is, but the practice goes way back to Ancient Greece and Rome.

I have been delaying this launch so that I could keep polishing the app and website (and partially because I was and still am nervous about a lukewarm response). But reading Inside the Box prodded me to draw a line in the sand and launch before July ends. This is my last July newsletter and my final opportunity to launch Fernsage. So, thank you for reading along and giving me the push I needed.

Take a look around, and let me know what you think!

Warmly
Alfred

Hello readers!

As I was reading Theo of Golden this week, I picked up a new term, “joie de vivre”. Wikipedia defines it as “joy of living” but I very much prefer the definition by my Kobo eReader:

Exuberant enjoyment of life!

I wish I had learned about this term last week, before I emailed you Get a life. A real life. But it is also relevant for this week’s topic:

Stepping away from social media, stepping back into life

I loved social media. Loved.

Back in 2013, I was a lost kid at the University of Warwick, constantly thinking about what to do in life. I was studying accounting and finance but didn’t want to work in financial institutions. At the same time, social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat were blowing up with millions of users. Even though I was in the middle of nowhere, they connected me to the world. My family back in Singapore could see how I was doing from thousands of miles away by looking at my Facebook profile. I also could interact with people working on interesting projects on Twitter. I loved social media so much that I eventually worked at Buffer, a social media management software company, for six years. I gained a lot from being active on social media, too: a job at a Silicon Valley startup, speaking opportunities, triathlon sponsorships, and more. At almost all local events I attended, someone would tell me they had seen my LinkedIn posts. Influencer, maybe?

But social media is no longer what it was meant to be. It is a lot less connecting and a lot more content. Clickbaity content. Controversial content. Mindless content. When my son was still a baby and I would carry him for his naps, I could watch YouTube Shorts for up to three hours. (My sleep-deprived brain wasn’t making the best decisions.) Besides wasting my time, this infinite comparison engine was making me unreasonably envious of others and upset at myself1. I know what I saw was only the highlights they wanted to show. But still. My attention span also caved. When I had a good chunk of time to read, I drifted towards tweets and short-form videos. Whenever I tried to write, I got pulled away by “research” on social media. The worst part? Social media force-feeds us content from faraway strangers whom we don’t care about and disconnects us from our loved ones who are right beside us.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

— Herbert A. Simon

I had previously deleted all the social media apps from my phone when my yima was in a critical condition. Because of what I was going through then, I didn’t want to know about other people’s lives. But I felt I couldn’t ignore social media for marketing if I wanted the fastest result. Pebblely grew to a million users in only seven months because of viral videos on TikTok. Later, when SK and I wanted to push Booplet, I brought back social media in full force, posting on both the brand and my personal accounts. Also, the most interesting AI projects are happening on Twitter, and not being there felt unprofessional.

But since I got the opportunity to rethink my life a few months ago, I decided enough was enough. I deleted the social media apps from my phone and haven’t touched them for about five months2. For my well-being, it has been great! I don’t instinctively take out my phone to scroll whenever I have a minute, such as waiting for the bus or queueing for food. Admittedly, I haven’t replaced it with healthier habits, such as reading a book, but I try to always have a book with me, as Ryan Holiday recommends. I do find reading newsletters during those pockets of time easier because they are shorter. I carefully curated my newsletter subscriptions, which currently include Craig Mod’s newsletters, Common Cog, Dense Discovery, and Kevin Kelly’s Substack. But sometimes I just do nothing. Perhaps stare at the clouds in the sky or muse about what to write next. And after missing out on the latest AI news and projects on Twitter for a few months, I realized I don’t need to know them as soon as they were published. In fact, I didn’t even need to know about most of them. I don’t get much fomo now. To still stay in the loop, I get slightly delayed but human-curated updates from folks like Simon Willison and Ben Evans. And, of course, using AI is more important than reading about it (which has a lot of noise!)

“It is surprising how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.” — Theodore Roosevelt

While the pockets of time here and there add up, what matters more is how I spend the bulk of my time. The rocks in my jar. For that, I have been making heavy things. Not just things. But heavy things. I used to think the solution to my social media addiction was to create. Hey, I’m not just consuming content. I’m creating! But that’s just a cop-out. As Anu Atluru wrote, “No matter how many you stack, Tweets and TikToks don’t add up to something heavy.” I stopped churning out tweets and TikTok videos, which would fade by tomorrow, to feed The Algorithm. I switched to writing newsletters, building Fernsage, and parenting. Fernsage itself is an embodiment of that heaviness. I want to write down things so that I can refer to them for a long time. If I succeed, it might even be something I pass down to my children (assuming they want their dad’s good ol’ advice).

The biggest question I have yet to answer, though, is: Can I build my business without social media (especially since I have depended on it heavily in the past)? My honest answer is I don’t know yet, but I believe I can figure it out. I have been inspired by folks like Craig Mod, Robin Sloan, Herman Martinus, and Cal Newport, who have been making a living without depending on social media. Yes, growing a business without social media might take longer. But writing newsletters like this and commonplace pages like those below is more in line with what I want to keep doing in the long term.

Where do I get the source for all this content? My life. Like the advice Ryan Holiday got: “If you want to be a great writer, go live an interesting life.”

Joie de vivre!

From my commonplace book

Be careful with abstraction

An erroneous log in my Meimei app got me thinking about how to highlight such mistakes to the users (which are just my wife and me). Claude Code suggested an abstraction that sounded smart initially. But after some thought, I realized it was a harmful design.

Understanding meltdowns and tantrums (WIP note)

According to The Whole Brain-Child, we have a left (logical) and right (emotional) side of our brain. When a kid is emotional (e.g. “I don’t want to go to school!”, replying to them rationally (which is how we adults usually think) will make things worse (e.g. “everyone goes to school”). A possible solution is to connect emotionally first and then redirect them to what we want them to do.

I have been on a quest that every parent eventually thinks about: how to reduce meltdowns. I can’t say this solution has been perfect, but it does seem to work sometimes and feels much more loving (yet firm) than simply reprimanding.

Cook from frozen

My son is into Din Tai Fung’s Crispy Prawn Cake, so my wife and I got the EB Frozen Golden Crispy Prawn Cake to make at home. I got intrigued by the instruction to “cook from frozen”, and here’s what I learned.

(I’m also starting a recipes collection in my Fernsage. Please send me your favorite recipes for kids!)

Around the web

Patagonia’s Philosopher-King by Nick Paumgarten

Yvon Chouinard has been a huge inspiration for me. He was so deeply into climbing that he designed and made new climbing tools. That eventually turned into Chouinard Equipment, and then Patagonia. For example, when he was frustrated with European pitons, which cannot be removed from the wall, he made reusable pitons. Later, worried about degrading the rock, he made aluminum chocks that wouldn’t leave any gear or scars behind.

Also, their office has day care, which has raised 1,500 kids so far!

I highly recommend his book, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. He would probably hate hearing this, but he inspired me to want to build a business based on my interest and lifestyle.

Better Than Free by Kevin Kelly

If AI can reproduce our work for free, what should we sell? Things that cannot be copied, like trust.

1. Immediacy

2. Personalization

3. Interpretation

4. Authenticity

5. Accessibility

6. Embodiment

7. Patronage

8. Findability

This has been a timely read as I work towards my 1000 True Fans.

Dutch kids declared the world’s happiest (again). Here’s why by Gavin Haines

While I think fulfillment is more important than happiness, there are several things in this article worth thinking about:

• Working part-time to be with our kids more (or work in the same space as our kids)

• Open communication, especially on taboo topics

• Shared decision-making

• Cycling to school

My kids’ school is closed today, so they are both home. I used to feel bad about taking a day off work to be with them. But I’m learning to embrace such precious and chaotic days. As Anna Quindlen said, “You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.” This email was scheduled yesterday, so I don’t have to touch my laptop today.

Warmly, Alfred

In 2023, my son was born. It was my first major life event. In the following year, I experienced a major death event: I lost my aunt, who was like a mother to me. Life and death, in a year. At the end of that year, 2024, I sat down and wrote my annual review, as I had always done for the previous seven years. In that review, I wrote about memento mori and living more intentionally. I subsequently published a monthly recap to keep myself in check. Yet, I found myself slipping. As much as I tried to “live intentionally”, I was still doing the same things as before and just going through the motion in life.

Perhaps the universe decided I needed a harder shove. At the start of this year, within a week, I welcomed my daughter and almost lost my wife (to postpartum hemorrhage). How fragile is life! Was I paying attention to what actually matters? This shove gave me courage to make decisions that pivoted my life. I sold my equity in Pebblely back to the company, stayed home to look after my daughter, and spent a lot of time with my wife. After half a year of reflection and experimentation, I’m glad to report I think I’m onto something.

And, hence, this newsletter. From now on, I aim to send you a weekly email, updating you about my life and projects. I have dreamed up a master plan. If it works, I can finally be present with my family, run a software business, and write altogether. It has been a long time, perhaps years, since I felt this excited. What’s telling is that I don’t know if my grand plan would work, yet I wake up every day wanting to work on it. And this excitement, I think, is half the battle won.

For many years, I hesitated writing about my life because I never found it interesting. It is just what it is. But I realized I was just not attentive enough. Looking back, my life has been filled with so much adventure:

• I was working at an all-remote company before remote work was a thing. My parents wondered if I actually had a job until COVID happened.

• I grew Yeti Distro, a paid newsletter about tech companies’ distribution strategies and my work at Buffer, to $150 monthly recurring revenue. This was when I made my first dollar from the internet, and I still kept the Stripe notification email.

• I was training to join the Singapore national triathlon team while working full-time. I never made it, and life took over.

There are many more stories like these, if only I had looked more closely.

But, more importantly, interesting living doesn’t require grand gestures, just full engagement with the ordinary days. In A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Anna Quindlen shared:

“I never think of my life, or my world, in any big cosmic way. I think of it in all its small component parts: the snowdrops, the daffodils; the feeling of one of my kids sitting close beside me on the couch; the way my husband looks when he reads with the lamp behind him; fettuccine Alfredo, fudge; Gone with the Wind, Pride and Prejudice. Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.”

She put it simply, “get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.”

Or as Himmel the Hero said in Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, when his party was stuck indoors on a rainy day, “adventures are made up of ordinary, shitty days like these.”

So, what exactly am I doing?

I’m typing this in my living room as my sick daughter is napping in her room (which used to be my study) while Claude Code is editing my code. This quite sums it up. I’m building a software business and writing newsletters and library pages while parenting two children with my wife and rebuilding my fitness. I’m also learning Japanese and learning to read books slowly. Piano is next.

Just a heads up, there will be a lot of AI. Like Master Qifrey in Witch Hat Atelier said, “If you feel that restless urgency and want to learn [magic] quickly, the best thing you can do is to make it a part of your life. There’s no better teacher than living itself.” While many people seem worried AI would replace them, I’m exploring how I can use AI can reshape life and work as we know it. I haven’t found the perfect balance but having the freedom to find a balance is such a blessing.

If all these sound like what you are looking for, stick around. Or even drop me a reply!

In my coming emails, I’ll be sharing about...

• why I left social media

• how working with Claude Code has been very similar to working with my technical cofounder SK

• how I used Claude to help me build a 12-week fitness program and guide me along

• and more

I can’t wait to share them with you.

Talk soon.

Alfred

Oh, by the way, I realized I still own the domain, founderdads.club. I didn’t have time to turn it into a community for the past two years but it now feels like a suitable project to take on. I’d love to have a place to chat about parenting, business, software, and AI. Anyone else? :)

From my library

A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen (Quotes)

AI and automation are all cool and stuff. But some things are more useful when done by hand. I chose to type out A Short Guide to a Happy Life so that I will remember it better. Due to copyrights, I can’t publish the full piece, so this library page contains my favorite quotes.

Japanese words

Similarly, I type out the new Japanese words I learned every week to practice pronouncing the words (on top of doing Duolingo every day).

AI coding, context, and usage limit

I have been hitting Claude’s 5-hour session usage limit faster and faster. Here are some things I’m trying to squeeze more out of my subscription.

Around the web

Something is very wrong with modern longevity science by Dhruv Khullar

Okinawans, one of the Blue Zone folks, live long lives not because they lead a special lifestyle but because they likely reported older ages to get postwar benefits. Blue Zones turned out to be more of a business venture than a scientific health study. Instead of chasing longevity secrets, I just try to exercise every day, cook more, spend time with my loved ones, and pursue my interests.

There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate by Cal Newport

A meta-analysis released last fall showed that consuming short-form video content, as delivered by apps like TikTok and Instagram, is associated with poorer cognition and reduced attention

Cal Newport suggest we read and write more to build our cognitive fitness (which I’m doing a lot more nowadays if you can tell!) I quit social media earlier this year because I finally admitted it does more harm than good to me. I sometimes miss the latest news but the important ones would always reach me eventually. I’m even planning to grow my software business without it. Can I? I’ll let you know how it goes.

The best financial advice I can give you is to sell your car by Hanna Horvath

In Singapore, a 10-year certificate to own a car, which does not include the car, is about $100,000 USD. Cars are so expensive that my wife and I have hesitated for many years, even though we can afford one and it’d be much for convenient when commuting with our kids. But not having a car has also helped force us to slow down. Wait for the bus, enjoy the scenery, chit chat along the way.

Lately, I have been watching a Japanese anime called Witch Hat Atelier. In it, a girl named Coco dreams of being a witch, but she is not from a witch family. Only born witches and wizards can use magic, she is told. The best she can do is admire from the outside.

That was how I felt about software for most of my life. I dreamed of being a developer. My developer friends are like magicians to me. They inscribe arcane glyphs on their computers and, poof, create beautiful websites, helpful apps, and handy automations. I love technology but I had always felt powerless against it.

In my son’s first year, my wife and I logged his feeds, pee, and poop on paper. Having such a tracker was helpful. But using physical paper? The room would be dark at night, and we could barely see the paper. We had to keep reprinting the sheets. And, oh, where’s the pen? Even for something so close to home, I couldn’t pull out a spark of magic from within me to make us an app1.

Maybe the best I can do is admire from the outside? Maybe.

This year, before my daughter was born, I made us a baby logging app instead. No more scribbling on paper. AI tools like Gemini and Claude Code finally let me turn my product opinions into something real. I could make our own little app, easily and cheaply. Even better, I could customize it exactly to our needs, something generic baby loggers in the App Store could never offer.

Meimei 妹妹

Our app is called Meimei (妹妹, younger sister in Chinese). My wife and I use it more than 20 times every day, and we would be lost without it now.

It has three sections:

1. Home: A timeline of her daily logs (feed, activity, poop, pee, sleep)

2. Milk: 7-, 14-, and 28-day charts of her daily milk intake

3. Growth: Her height and weight trend

There are also little fun features such as dark mode for night feeds, height and weight percentiles based on WHO’s Child Growth Standards, and possible sleep regressions and leaps. We don’t need them, but adding them was fun and easy. I designed them such that they would never get in the way of what actually mattered: logging.

Because it’s our app, we can easily and constantly customize it; not in the sense of toggling various settings but actually editing the code and changing the app. For example, about a month in, my wife and I decided to follow Tracy Hogg’s E.A.S.Y. (Eat. Activity. Sleep. You.) routine. So, I added an Activity log option and reordered the options to the E.A.S.Y. sequence in just a few minutes. (I share more about the technical aspect in the next section.)

Something I’m proud of is that Meimei loads instantly on launch. Most apps nowadays take a few seconds to load. How has that become acceptable? At 3 a.m., after a night feed, I just want to get back to sleep. Those few seconds feel like minutes.

(It’s technically unfair to compare my simple app with complex apps like Notion and Obsidian. This comparison is just to show how much of a difference it can be.)

More than a logging app, Meimei has been a great communication tool between my wife and me. We don’t have to frustrate each other with endless “when was the last feed?” or “when did she wake up?” because the information is all in the app. In the first few months, we took turns looking after our daughter for half the night each. The person on the second shift could know how the first half went by checking the app. The person on the first shift could head to bed without having to hand over.

Looking back, I’m amazed we made do with the printed tables for our son. They feel so primitive to us now. Of course, paper is not always bad. I still use paper notebooks. But this is a good example of how technology can improve our lives when used right.

The magic

(This section is technical. Feel free to skip ahead if you are not interested.)

I initially made this app with Booplet, an AI app builder by my former cofounder SK and I. But after we paused the project, my baby logging app kept having issues and took a long time to load. That pushed me to rebuild it with Claude Code.

This is the tech stack I used:

• NextJS for the frontend and app logic

• Supabase for the user authentication, database, realtime, and storage

• Vercel for hosting and deployment

• Cursor and Claude Code for coding

Within an afternoon, I managed to get a rough yet functional version up for my wife and me to use. At first, I tried generating a coding prompt with Gemini by providing multiple screenshots of the original app and explaining thoroughly what the app does. But Gemini generated a prompt that was rather outdated and probably unnecessary for Claude Code (”Act as a Principal Frontend Engineer...”). Using Claude Code for both the planning and implementation felt better. I had already used Supabase and Vercel for multiple projects in the past, so I was comfortable using them and could set them up relatively quickly. I also added a button in the original app to export the data as a JSON file, so I could import it into my new app.

In the following few days, I fixed the bugs and styled the app mostly with the Claude iOS app on my phone while I was out and about. For simple changes such as changing the default feed amount, I directly edited the code with the GitHub iOS app. Whenever I pushed a change, Vercel automatically deployed it, which made working on my phone a breeze. I have edited Meimei several times while feeding my daughter in the middle of the night.

I made Meimei a web app, instead of a native iOS app, because going through the App Store process felt like too much hassle and I didn’t need any native features2. I also made it a Progressive Web App (PWA), which feels just like a native mobile app.

Meimei loads fast thanks to the local-first approach. The app and cached data load instantly on launch while the app fetches any new data in the background, which usually takes less than a second (Stale-While-Revalidate). When a new activity is added, it (technically a temporary entry) appears instantly in the app even before it is added to the database (optimistic update). When the entry is successfully added to the database, the app will reconcile the local and database data, ensuring there’s no duplicates or omissions (conflict resolution).

Even though it’s an app only for my wife and me, I built it as though others would use it, as a practice for building products. Also, since multiple people use it on different devices, it can’t be entirely local on my computer. This means things like security and privacy are essential, too. For example, only users in a family can access and edit the same data and cached data is wiped on logout.

All I paid was a $30 Claude subscription, which I also used for other projects.

Learning from reality

I thought I knew exactly what the app should have. After all, I spent years shaping products at startups, I was building the app for us, and my wife and I had been through this newborn phase before. But the initial app didn’t work well for how we actually used it or what we actually wanted. Our preferences and behavior only became apparent after our daughter was born and we started using the app.

For instance, I thought logging activities with one tap would be a helpful shortcut. For example, I could tap “Wet” and get a log with the current time on the timeline immediately. But it turns out, well, I can’t press a button while changing a diaper. So we have been logging after the fact. Despite it being a “shortcut”, I had to tap “Wet”, get the log, tap to edit the log, change the time, and tap “Save”. Eventually, I changed the logging flow to show the new log modal and set the time to the current time, which I could easily change.

The initial app, with its timeline of logs, was just a digital version of our printed sheets. Besides being more portable, it wasn’t that much more helpful than paper. When I noticed my wife and I were constantly doing mental arithmetic (When’s her next feed? How long has she been up? How much did she drink each day?), I realized the app could easily automate the calculations and surface more helpful information at a glance. These features were trivial to add yet offered the most value. This reminded me that valuable features don’t always have to be complex or hard to build.

There were also small details that weren’t apparent until we started using the app. For instance, if I log the start of a sleep last night and I open the app again this morning at 2 a.m., should the incomplete log from yesterday appear in today’s timeline? My answer is yes. It’s a cross-day log, which technically falls on the new day too. And from a user experience’s point of view, it’s easier to set the end time without having to navigate to the previous day.

As powerful as AI coding tools are, they weren’t always thoughtful about such user experiences unless I prompted them specifically (though this could change in the future). But on the other hand, because it’s so easy and cheap to add new features to the app, I could have easily bloated it if I were not intentional. Product taste becomes doubly important as coding becomes easier. What to cut feels as critical as what to include.

Wielding magic

In a world where magic is reserved for those born into witch families, Coco finds another way to be a witch. It isn’t a path the insiders approve of. But Coco eventually proves that magic isn’t meant to be a guarded possession but a tool for everyone. Her master, Qifrey, believes the fundamental purpose of magic is to bring joy, help people in their everyday lives, and create a shred of hope.

I feel the same about software.

My journey has taken more than a decade. Many years of trying and giving up to finally feeling confident enough to Google for help and read Stack Overflow, to abandoning WordPress and coding my personal site with Lee Robinson’s videos, to creating websites and testing our products while working with SK, to now making apps with AI.

While I made several little apps such as Augment Notes, Alfie, and Magic Blocks, nobody actually used and liked them3. Myself included! Meimei is the first app I made myself that has brought joy, helped people (my wife and me!) every day, and made me feel ever hopeful about technology.

I’m finally wielding magic.

If you’d like to read more essays like this on making personal software with or without AI, here are some of my favorites:

1. Robin Sloan’s An app can be a home-cooked meal

2. Julie Zhuo’s How life was different during the early Internet

3. Craig Mod’s Software Bonkers

This recap is later than usual because, one, I have been busy preparing for Booplet’s launch (more on this in the next section) and, two, a mosquito bit my son.

What about a mosquito bite?

Unfortunately, the mosquito bit my son’s face near his eye, and his eye became so swollen that he couldn’t open it. We went to the A&E, and he recovered after a week. But a little incident during that period reminded me about being kind.

I was carrying my son along the pavement when we walked past three high school boys. One of them saw my son’s face and gave a shocked expression. After they passed us, I turned back and saw them looking at my son and whispering among themselves. I couldn’t hear what they said but I didn’t get a good feeling from their facial expressions. I doubt they had any ill intentions toward a tiny two-year-old but what the receiving party feels usually matters more than what we say, do, or mean.

The incident was a good reminder to look within myself because I know if I were in high school, I would likely have said something I shouldn’t have. I remember when my friends made nasty comments about others, I would laugh along and not stop them. I likely made a few too. I only became more sensitive, empathetic, and aware in my 20s. And even then, the fact that I suspected what the high school boys were saying means I have work to do. I was projecting, imagining what I might have done in their place, and holding it against them.

Also, how can I teach my son to be kind? I believe modeling the right behaviors and explaining why being kind matters will help. That said, I can create a conducive environment but I cannot force him. Even though I had a great upbringing, it took me more than two decades to mature.

And the world might not always be kind to him. Even when we have been teaching him to share his toys, others have refused to share theirs and have sometimes snatched his toys. How should he react? What would he learn from such experiences? How would these moments influence his character? This might seem like a trivial example but even adults go through similar scenarios later in life.

Ultimately, it’s up to him to decide. Many years back, when I was at Buffer, we did a personality test. People were split on the question “Would you rather be smart or kind?” My approach is to be kind until I have a good reason not to, because I don’t want to be taken advantage of. But I still lean more towards being kind (and trying to raise a kind human being) because things have gone well for me, all things considered, and I should help create a kinder world. Others have been kind to me, too, and I want to pay it forward where I can.

I know sharing this would not even make the world budge a bit. But it’s something I wish someone had taught me earlier. If you want to make my day, go do a kind deed today. You will make their day, too. A two-for-one deal!

How am I doing for my 2025 goals

August was quite a struggle but lightened by several happy moments and meaningful milestones.

Business: Build a meaningful profitable business

We launched Booplet (beta)!

(We technically launched it on 4 September but for this recap, I’ll consider it “last month”.)

With Booplet, we want to enable everyone to make their own apps. You don’t need to learn coding or figure out the technical setup; just describe what you want, get the apps, and use them immediately. You can easily create custom apps for your work, your life, and your hobbies. It’s like your personal app library.

Give it a try, and let me know what you think. It’s entirely free during the beta.

Also, follow us on your favorite platform (Threads, X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube), and support us!

Family: Bring my family on a vacation ✅

We went to Perth in March.

Parenting: Read at least 3 books on parenting

I completed Good Inside in April, picked up Totto-Chan in August, and have been reading The Daily Dad and The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.

Here’s my favorite entry from The Daily Dad for August:

August 6
Seldom Should Be Heard a Discouraging Word

If you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to slip into a kind of casual, thoughtless negativity: Why is your room so dirty? Why are you in such a bad mood today? Hey, stop doing that! Don’t touch this. No, you can’t watch TV right now. Why isn’t your room clean? No, you can’t have that. I’m disappointed with how you did on this test. This is just not realistic; shouldn’t you think about trying something else? I don’t think so. You already know the answer… and the answer is “no.”

This happens not because you’re a bad parent but rather because you’re a good one. You have rules and you enforce them. You have expectations and you push your kids to meet them. You know what’s best. You want to keep them safe and you have a house to run.

But still, if you’re not careful, it can come to be that almost every interaction you have with your kids is negative. It can start to feel, from their perspective, like an endless cascade of disappointment. And then, before you know it, you’ve become the voice of discouragement without even thinking about it.

Is that who you are? Is that the kind of relationship you have to have? If it isn’t, then you need to pay attention. Watch your words, Count your yeses and nos. Be intentional about what you focus on. Let the little things go. Be positive.

There’s a stereotype that Asian parents are always disappointed, even with our best achievements. While Asians tend to have higher expectations and the stereotype is a funny thing to say, I don’t think it’s helpful to make our kids feel they are never enough (or for us to feel that our parents are never proud of us; I’m grateful that I can immediately think of several occasions when I felt my parents’ genuine pride in me).

Growth: Write daily, publish monthly

I continued to journal every night (634-day streak) but only published my July recap in July (a total of 49 essays in 2025 so far). I had wanted to write more but I allocated more time to working on Booplet. Since we just launched Booplet, I want to continue devoting more time to it until I feel like I’m in a good rhythm.

As part of continuous improvement, I switched from Apple Notes to Obsidian and started taking notes more diligently (even if I might never refer to them again). I was initially hesitant to use Obsidian because I didn't want to have to pay for being able to use it across my devices. But I realized it works with iCloud Drive, which I already have.

I also picked up A Different Kind of Power and Michael Jordan: The Life to read.

Health: Eat healthily, exercise 5x/week, sleep well

I had a terrible cough for about two weeks, which was bad enough for me to stop exercising for several days. Other than that, I felt pretty okay for the rest of the month.

We ate out quite a bit, and the food wasn’t the healthiest. SK has been buying frozen meals from Yummy Bros and recommended it. I’ll try it in September.

On several nights, I could have slept early but ended up watching YouTube for half an hour or an hour before sleeping because I wanted to relax for a while after my son went to bed. I don't really like this habit. (I’m happy to share that since writing this reflection, I became much more conscious about watching YouTube and managed to cut back on it!)

My remaining goals

One-year goals (i.e. other 2025 goals)

• Help my son develop a night routine and be in bed by 8 p.m. - He has been sleeping close to 10 p.m., and I honestly don’t know how to bring it earlier. Because he is older and more independent now, I can’t force him to shift his night route earlier. Advice welcome!

• Take three deep breaths whenever I’m angry or frustrated - I lost my temper once and later worked to mend the relationship.

• Accompany my parents and uncle to their health appointments - Still four appointments so far but my uncle fell, hit his head, and was warded for a while. I worry this will become more frequent as he gets older.

• Cycle 10x a year - Still 5/10. I didn’t cycle in August because I didn’t feel like it. I might not cycle for the rest of the year.

• Switch from kopi (coffee) to kopi siew dai (coffee less sweet) - I mostly drank iced latte and had more cups of kopi siew dai in August than in the previous months. I’ve started to miss kopi; argh!

• Host five dinners at home - Still 1/5 for now.

• Get a part-time cleaner for our house - I think we are still doing okay.

• No coffee after 3 p.m. - Missed a few days but they weren’t long after 3 p.m.

Five-year goals

• Bring my family to Europe and New Zealand

• Create a library at home for my son - I turned our unused TV console into a mini-library for now.

• Teach my son to cycle and swim - He is back enjoying swimming; we even went to the pool more than once a week.

• Learn to play the piano - My dad salvaged an old piano from the rubbish dump. I might ask for it! Any tips on getting started?

• Complete a triathlon (any distance)

Lifetime goals

• Publish a book

• Get back into drawing

• Complete an Ironman triathlon

• Bring my son somewhere to see snow (maybe Japan, Seoul, or Switzerland)

• Raise kids with integrity, compassion, and agency

• Build something with my dad

• Have a workbench for playing with hardware

• Visit Ghibli Park in Aichi, Japan, and Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, Japan

• Mentor someone

• Volunteer somewhere (maybe contribute to healthcare or education)

• Contribute somehow to Singapore (maybe through my business) - My MRT status tracker is technically a contribution, given that some people in Singapore found it useful.

• Become rich enough to be independent, not to acquire material possessions

• Live until 100 while being physically fit and mentally sharp

• Use social media to help others, not just consume content

• Learn to speak another language (maybe Japanese)

• Run a sustainable bookstore with a cafe with my wife

Links

• [Life] “people are so confused when you break a bunch of fake rules and live a way better life in a parallel, adjacent existence that requires just a little bit of independent thinking to achieve”

• [Parenting'] “The biggest gift in life are parents who believed in you and encouraged your dreams all along. The level of self confidence it provides a child is life changing. More meaningful than any amount of money they can leave you”

• [Parenting]

  

• [Design & AI] Interfaces That Augment or Replace? by Zeh Fernandes (Founding designer at Resend)

• [Design] how can engineers (or anyone) get better at design? by Ryo Lu (Head of Design at Cursor)

• [Growth] The Master Builder is the most valuable type of DevRel right now by

• [Growth] Scars are beautiful by Steph Ango (CEO of Obsidian)

• [Career] The other kind of creative director by

A few weeks back, out of curiosity, I tried building a website with Lovable, one of the popular AI app builder.

Because I was spending a lot of time on Reddit nowadays and the MRT trains kept breaking down, I noticed several redditors complaining about train delays and faults on r/Singapore. And interestingly, the official channels were not reporting them.

Then, the idea hit me.

Why not build a MRT status dashboard based on reports in r/Singapore?

In about 10 minutes, I managed to create this:

I wanted to launch this while the train lines were still affected to show how the website works. I was also eager for some social media dopamine, so I wanted to publish this on LinkedIn before the weekends.

It was Friday afternoon, about 4pm. I quickly checked the website was working and hit “Publish”…

Alas, the website had a major issue.

A few attentive folks called me out rightfully.

It hurted. So, I wanted to fix it as soon as possible.

My website was getting the Reddit posts directly from https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/new.json?limit=50, which Reddit and browsers don’t allow. It was “working” for me because Chrome somehow allowed that. If you were on your iPhone or using Safari, you would see mock data instead.

I stayed up that Friday night until midnight trying to fix this. But I couldn’t. After some rest and time with my son, I found a solution on Saturday afternoon. I moved the website from Lovable to Vercel and set up an serverless function to fetch the Reddit posts via the Reddit API.

I thought this would be the end of the project. But the trains kept breaking down in the past few weeks. When I spotted any reports on r/Singapore, I thanked the redditor for sharing because their report helped to update the status on my website. This led to several improvements and lessons:

1. I was ashamed to promote an ugly website, so I updated the style to match Singapore’s red and white. A redditor also shared helpful feedback.

2. I didn’t include the LRT lines initially until the Bukit Panjang LRT broke down and someone reported it on r/Singapore. I quickly added the LRT lines.

3. Some redditors mentioned that the website had irrelevant posts (often news articles about train faults several days after the incidents), so I had to figure out how to improve my filters. For example, I now filter out Reddit posts that are links because those are likely not community reports of train faults and delays.

4. On a Reddit post about train fault statistics, someone asked about delays not officially reported. Sensing an opportunity, I added a history of Reddit reports in 2025. This experience was very educational. I wrote a script to fetch all the relevant posts and add them to a Supabase database. I also created a GitHub Action that runs every morning to add relevant posts to my database.

4. Since there could be multiple reports for an incident, I create a table with the number of days with reports, broken down by the train lines. Styling these two pages was an interesting challenge but it helped that the train lines are colorful.

5. For a recent train delay, my reddit comment was upvoted by many redditors and drove over a thousand people to my website. I’m certain Vercel, Supabase, and Reddit can handle that volume well but I was inspired to add caching to the website. I had never done this before, so I learned. I figured it out after two nights. Now, every website visit doesn’t call the Reddit API and get data from my database, and the website loads much faster.

This Friday afternoon project turned into a month-long learning experience.

I started out just wanting to test Lovable; I don’t even take the MRT daily. But one thing led to another, and I’m glad I followed my curiosity. Even though there were several nice compliments about the website, it honestly has insignificant impact on others. But I learned to style the website and hone my taste, write scripts, work with Supabase, use GitHub Actions, and add caching. (As a bonus, I chalked up some Reddit karma.)

If I had started out wanting to learn all these specifically, I doubt I’d have made as much progress within such a short period. Working on a project and having both positive and negative feedback drove me better.

How am I doing for my 2025 goals

You would imagine my July would have been awesome after my reflection in June to be more intentional about my life. But it was more like a J-curve: things get worse first, then much better than the starting point.

Build a meaningful profitable business

After working with our beta testers and reflecting as a team, SK and I decided to pivot Dewlop to enable everyone to build their personal software with AI.

Remember the days we would spend hours customizing our blogs? Nowadays, people are just simply using Substack (guilty as charged!) We used to have personal photo galleries; now we all use Instagram. Personal diaries? Notion. Over the years, we have gradually moved towards mass market software, which is efficient yet lacks personality and customizability1.

Mass market software cannot be perfect for everyone because we are all unique. The apps are always missing specific features we want while also having features we don’t need (yet we have to pay for them).

AI is now powerful enough to enable everyone, whether you are technical or not, to create unique apps for that single person: Ourselves.

You want a journal to store your kid’s photos but also log her sleep and chart her growth? Or you want a personal financial tracker with three specific charts? Or you want a reading tracking for recording not just books but also articles, videos, and podcasts?

Sure. Instead of paying for bloated-yet-insufficient software or using hacky spreadsheets, you should be able to craft unique personal apps. With the new Dewlop, you can.

We are still working on the pivot but should have a beta app ready this month (August). Let me know if you are interested in trying it!

Bring my family on a vacation ✅

We went to Perth in March.

We also went on two school excursions with our son. I missed our son’s very first school excursion because my yima was cremated that same day. Since then, I have gone on every excursion. They are tiring (I won’t deny it) but so fun.

Read at least 3 books on parenting

I completed Good Inside in April, picked up Totto-Chan in August, and have been reading The Daily Dad and The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.

Here’s my favorite entry from The Daily Dad for July:

July 11
Let Them Decide

If I had one wish for my children, it would be that each of you would dare to do the things… that have meaning for you as individuals… but not worrying if you don’t please everyone. —LILLIAN CARTER

When Will Ferrell was in middle school, he qualified for the gifted and talented after-school enrichment program, so his mom signed him up. When Will found out, he told her there was a conflict—he had signed himself up for square dancing. He could only do one or the other.

To a parent, there is an obvious choice. It’s not even a discussion. We know which one will teach more, which one will be better for career prospects, which one is “cooler.” But our kids, they don’t know anything about decision-making. They don’t know about mental models. They don’t know about long-term consequences or second-order thinking. They don’t know about weighing pros and cons. They don’t know what’s best for them. They know only what they like, what excites them, what they want right now.

But as actress and fellow SNL cast member Ana Gasteyer tells the story, Will’s mom put all that aside. She looked at her son and said, “It’s up to you. You decide.” Will chose square dancing. “And that, to me,” Gasteyer said, “sums up why Will is the amazing Will Ferrell.” It explained, in her mind, how Will Ferrell became one of the greatest comedic actors of all time. His parents had encouraged and allowed him to. They didn’t intrude with their “real-world” priorities—they let him follow his heart.

When your kids feel a pull toward something creative or fulfilling, the worst thing you can do as a parent is prevent them from going in that direction. Your job, it’s worth repeating whenever there’s a chance, is to encourage them to be who they are, to follow their natural inclinations, to decide what they want to do after school.

Write daily, publish monthly

My journal streak was 603 days at the end of July. I only published my June recap in July (a total of 48 in 2025 so far) because I have been taking a break from writing. I have started several drafts, so you can expect more essays in August (well, hopefully!)

Eat healthily, exercise 5x/week, sleep well

I stayed up several nights for a “good” and a “bad” reason. The “good” reason is I was working on my MRT status tracker. The “bad” reason is I was binge-watching Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. I added the quotation marks because I don’t think they are entirely good or bad.

But being more tired than usual caused me to make more poor decisions, such as skipping workouts, drinking coffee after 3 p.m., sleeping late on more days, and misplacing my focus on less important tasks.

My remaining goals

One-year goals (i.e. other 2025 goals)

• Help my son develop a night routine and be in bed by 8 p.m. - As with every parenting things, there are good days and bad days. He slept by 9 p.m. on many days but was also up until 10 to 11 p.m. on several other days.

• Take three deep breaths whenever I’m angry or frustrated - Fortunately, I don’t think I had to use this in July.

• Accompany my parents and uncle to their health appointments - One more in July; thankfully the markers are good. Four appointments so far.

• Cycle 10x a year - I didn’t cycle in July. Still 5/10.

• Switch from kopi (coffee) to kopi siew dai (coffee less sweet) - I had an iced latte almost every day and sometimes two in a day. I’m okay with my caffeine intake but I want to reduce my sugar intake.

• Host five dinners at home - Still 1/5 for now.

• Get a part-time cleaner for our house - I think we are still doing okay.

• No coffee after 3 p.m. - Missed a few days when I was exceptionally tired.

Five-year goals

• Bring my family to Europe and New Zealand

• Create a library at home for my son - I turned our unused TV console into a mini-library for now.

• Teach my son to cycle and swim - He is back enjoying swimming; we even went to the pool more than once a week.

• Learn to play the piano

• Complete a triathlon (any distance)

Lifetime goals

• Publish a book

• Get back into drawing

• Complete an Ironman triathlon

• Bring my son somewhere to see snow (maybe Japan, Seoul, or Switzerland)

• Raise kids with integrity, compassion, and agency

• Build something with my dad

• Have a workbench for playing with hardware

• Visit Ghibli Park in Aichi, Japan, and Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, Japan

• Mentor someone

• Volunteer somewhere (maybe contribute to healthcare or education)

• Contribute somehow to Singapore (maybe through my business) - My MRT status tracker is technically a contribution, given that some people in Singapore found it useful.

• Become rich enough to be independent, not to acquire material possessions

• Live until 100 while being physically fit and mentally sharp

• Use social media to help others, not just consume content

• Learn to speak another language (maybe Japanese)

Links

• [Life] Flounder Mode: Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

Compared to this, Kelly’s version of doing his life’s work seems so joyful, so buoyant. So much less … angsty. There’s no suffering or ego. It’s not about finding a hole in the market or a path to global domination. The yard stick isn’t based on net worth or shareholder value or number of users or employees. It’s based on an internal satisfaction meter, but not in a self-indulgent way. He certainly seeks resonance and wants to make an impact, but more in the way of a teacher. He breathes life into products or ideas, not out of a desire to win, but out of a desire to advance our collective thinking or action. His work and its impact unfold slowly, rather than by sheer force of will. Ideas or projects seem to tug at him, rather than reveal themselves on the other end of an internal cattle prod. His range is wide, but all his work somehow rhymes. It clearly comes very naturally for him to work this way, but it’s certainly not the norm.

• [Life] why are we lying to young people about work? by

• [Life] Marriage by

• [Life & parenting] “If you are blessed with a partner that you love, some children that you adore, you’ve already won the greatest prize that most humans are able to achieve.”

• [Growth] How to instantly be better at things by

• [Growth] Animating in Public by Emil Kowalski

• [Growth] George Steiner on Learning by Heart

• [Fitness & AI] how to build an adaptive fitness coach that actually works by

  signull

Despite my last annual review and monthly recaps, I found myself slipping.

I started the year wanting to be intentional about how I live my life and spend my time. But gradually, I went into autopilot.

Bad night's sleep.
Workout (if I can get up).
Send my son to school.
Breakfast.
Work.
Lunch.
Work.
Pick up my son.
Dinner.
Urge my son to sleep, so I can rest.
Bad night's sleep.

Sure. I was still spending time with my family, working on our startup, and exercising. But I was just going through the motions. I wasn’t present. I was often thinking about the next thing.

Sometime in the middle of June, perhaps because it dawned on me that half the year was almost over, I caught myself drifting through life.

I don’t have a stable job but I’m married, have a house, and have a kid. I realized this isn’t a bad thing because I was intentional about all of them. They didn’t just happen. My wife and I pursued them.

But once I got into a comfortable state, I became less thoughtful about how I spent my time, my life.

Instead of playing with my son in the evenings, I sometimes wished he would go to bed, especially after we had played for two to three hours. I craved for some quiet time to read but when I got the time, I mindlessly scrolled Reddit. I created content and posted on social media to promote Dewlop because it’s what I know, not because it’s the best thing to do. Often, several days would go by, and I only had a vague idea of what had happened.

One day, I just decided to do better. Of course, I didn’t become better immediately and I’m still working on it. I try to pay attention. And not rush. I try to enjoy the daily mundane again. I remind myself that time with my little boy and wife will not come back if I let it slip away. I regularly look at my 2024 annual review to revisit my life principles.

Here’s a fun change as a result of the mindset shift. In the second half of June, I became more deliberate at improving my product skills. Instead of just posting about Dewlop and hoping people would be interested, I contacted my friends and managed to have several insightful conversations with them and their referrals. I practiced and refined my user interviews. I researched and reached out to more experienced folks for advice. These are things I desperately wanted to do in my previous jobs. But when I could do it for my own startup, I had been rather thoughtless.

But it’s never too late. If you have been feeling rather sluggish lately, I hope this is the nudge you need!

How am I doing for my 2025 goals

The first half of June felt rather off. I felt I wasn’t doing my best work, and I was too tired. My son felt sick, and we barely slept for three nights.

Then, I had the reflection above. To be honest, I’m not sure how I managed to convince my brain but I suddenly looked at many things much more positively and did much better work. It was a virtuous cycle: I felt better, did better work, felt more recharged, and became excited about my work.

Build a meaningful profitable business

We are not generating revenue for our new project Dewlop yet but it felt like a month of good progress.

After launching our closed beta for Dewlop last month, we have been working with a small group of selected beta testers. They have been very kind to jump on calls with me and share their actual workflows and documents (without any sensitive or confidential information) so that we can improve the app to handle more complex work.

The beta testers, despite being in very different industries, have two similar use cases:

1. File organization: They have files from clients and colleagues that are poorly named and not sorted. They manually open each file, check the content, rename it, move it into the right folder, and repeat this for every file. Some even hired admin staff to do this.

2. Form filling: They have documents to submit to other departments or third parties and repetitively copying information from various documents and pasting it into the main document. (This turned out to be harder than we had expected because Microsoft Word documents can be so complicated. Tables, nested tables, checkboxes, etc. We were able to improve Dewlop to handle these because our beta testers shared their documents with us.)

For the new month, I’m opening up our closed beta to a few more people. If you are interested, let's jump on a call to see if Dewlop is suitable for you.

Bring my family on a vacation ✅

We went to Perth in March.

Read at least 3 books on parenting

I completed Good Inside in April and have been mostly reading The Daily Dad. I only skimmed a few pages of The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.

I struggled to pick one favorite entry from The Daily Dad for June, so you get two!

June 6
It Takes a Team

It’s impossible to do this all, isn’t it? We have all the task, responsibilities, and aspirations we’ve always had—eating and sleeping and working and paying our taxes and taking out the trash and following our dreams—but now we have little people to care for on top of all that. Little helpless people with infinite needs. How can we do it all?

Ursula Le Guin was a full-time wrier. She was prolific, publishing twenty-three novels, thirteen children’s books, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, five essay collections, and four works of translation. Additionally, she worked as an editor and taught college undergraduate classes.

Oh… she was also the mother of three and the wife of a history professor, Charles Le Guin.

How did she do it all? How did he do it all? They didn’t.

“One person cannot do two full-time jobs,” Le Guin once explained. “Writing is a full-time job and so is children. But two people can do three full-time jobs… That’s why I’m so strong on partnership. It can be a great things.”

Parenting is so hard to do alone; so hard. For too long, too many mothers had to do it alone, were forced to sacrificed alone. But, of course, we are strong when we, our children’s parents, parent together. We go farther, together. It’s one of the only ways to make the math work—not just for the benefit of the children, but for the parents as well.

I’m genuinely surprised that most fathers in my dad’s generation don’t know how to change a diaper. Let’s do better, dads.

June 14
Keep Your Head Up and Take Another Swing

No person has a perfect track record. Certainly no parents does. We all mess up. We all fall short. We make mistakes. We lose our temper and our patience. We handle certain situations in ways we wish we hadn’t.

Is there anything worse than that feeling? Knowing that you screwed up? That you might have hurt them?

Shane Parrish, creator of the wildly popular Farnam Street blog, explained:

I remember calling my late mom one night, exhausted and feeling overwhelmed. I had lost my cool on the kids. She gave me a piece of advice that stuck with me, “If you don’t learn to let go of your mistakes today, they’ll compound tomorrow. Get some sleep and start again tomorrow.” I still remember that when I have bad parenting days. Tomorrow I’ve got to get up and start all over.

You can’t go back and undo what you did yesterday. You can’t erase from their memories that time you lost your cool or that time you said those regrettable things. But what you can do is make this just one memory among many greater, more positive ones. What you can do is show them that this one moment isn’t who you are. You can strive to get better.

Keep your head up. Step up. Try again tomorrow.

This applies to you, even if you are not a parent. Just keep showing up.

Write daily, publish monthly

My journaling streak is at 572 days, as of the end of June. I really enjoy reading my entries from one, two, and sometimes three years ago to see how far I have come. But this is only possible because I kept journaling. So, start asap!

I “only” published four essays in June (a total of 47 for the year). I was rather overwhelmed in the middle of the month when my son felt sick. Of all my commitments, I decided to cut back on publishing because it is meant to help my other commitments. Doing otherwise would be putting the cart before the horse.

Eat healthily, exercise 5x/week, sleep well

I skipped a few workouts, and we ate out a bit more. Otherwise, I feel rather healthy (except for the sick days). Like last month, I felt energized by thinking about my work, which I shared above.

My remaining goals

One-year goals (i.e. other 2025 goals)

• Help my son develop a night routine and be in bed by 8 p.m. - He has been going to bed even later, at around 10 p.m. Our night routine has been roughly the same but he seems less tired in the evening.

• Take three deep breaths whenever I’m angry or frustrated - I almost tipped over one night when my son kept screaming in the middle of the night for, I think, no good reason.

• Accompany my parents and uncle to their health appointments - Three so far.

• Cycle 10x a year - I cycle my indoor trainer once in June. 5/10 now.

• Switch from kopi (coffee) to kopi siew dai (coffee less sweet) - Like last month, I had many kopi siew dai and teh siew dai and almost an iced latte every day. I’m okay with my caffeine intake but I need to reduce my sugar intake through coffee.

• Host five dinners at home - Still 1/5 for now.

• Get a part-time cleaner for our house - I think we are still doing okay.

• No coffee after 3 p.m. - Yep.

Five-year goals

• Bring my family to Europe and New Zealand

• Create a library at home for my son - I turned our unused TV console into a mini-library for now.

• Teach my son to cycle and swim - He seems to have lost interest in swimming these few weeks, and I think that’s perfectly fine.

• Learn to play the piano

• Complete a triathlon (any distance)

Lifetime goals

• Publish a book

• Get back into drawing

• Complete an Ironman triathlon

• Bring my son somewhere to see snow (maybe Japan, Seoul, or Switzerland)

• Raise kids with integrity, compassion, and agency

• Build something with my dad

• Have a workbench for playing with hardware

• Visit Ghibli Park in Aichi, Japan, and Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, Japan

• Mentor someone

• Volunteer somewhere (maybe contribute to healthcare or education)

• Contribute somehow to Singapore (maybe through my business)

• Become rich enough to be independent, not to acquire material possessions

• Live until 100 while being physically fit and mentally sharp

• Use social media to help others, not just consume content

• Learn to speak another language (maybe Japanese)

Links

• [Life] You Are What You Won’t Do For Money by Ryan Holiday

• [Life & AI] The Gentle Singularity by Sam Altman

• [Growth] Maybe you’re not Actually Trying by

• [Design] on not changing for the sake of change by Ryo Lu

• [Branding] The Great Differentiation

It’s not that new ideas are hard to come but old ideas are hard to go.

I have been thinking about this as I reflect on the way I build and market products (but it also applies to life).

I was “brought up” at Buffer where marketing meant delivering value, specifically writing helpful long-form content and giving them away for free. That was how it built a strong brand among marketers, solopreneurs, and small businesses.

So, when we started working on Pebblely, my first instinct was to create helpful long-form content in the same style I had honed at Buffer. I did a mix of blog posts, YouTube videos, and SEO pages. What I had seen and learned at Buffer was the only way I knew how to build a brand.

But I quickly realized that wasn’t going to work for an early startup. Actually, to be precise, it was still only a product. We didn’t even know if people wanted to use or pay for Pebblely. What worked for Buffer wouldn’t work for Pebblely. In fact, when Buffer first started in 2013, cofounder Leo wrote hundreds of short articles and guest posts, not the long-form content we were known for later. New startups need to explore new ways of marketing themselves. The tried-and-proven paths for later-stage startups likely wouldn’t work for early-stage startups.

Seeing how short videos were going viral on TikTok, I pivoted to creating short videos every day. And it worked (for a while). About a month in, I had my first viral video of 1 million views (now 1.5 million!) and our revenue chart bent up several degrees.

But ultimately, I couldn’t turn our early success into a strong brand. I suspect it is because once short videos worked well and the product demand was validated, I wasn’t fast enough to figure out the next step for our branding. (Of course, reality is much more complicated than this and marketing is just a part of it. But I feel responsible for our branding.)

This is something I have been noodling on for a while, especially as we work on our latest product, Dewlop. Since Pebblely’s little success, I have a system that I repeat for new consumer products, briefly:

• Build a beautiful landing page

• Launch to my existing audiences across platforms

• Create short videos to extend our reach

• DM potential ideal customers and chat with existing customers

• Use insights from those conversations to create more content

But, to be honest, I’m not sure reusing that template all the time is the best approach. I have also been eager to try out new ways of marketing. A quick brain dump:

• It’s not that long-form content will definitely not work for any early-stage startup. But how you write it matters. Linear writes many articles that are nothing like traditional marketing content, and that seems to be doing well for them. (Of course, they also have a great product people love.) Their content also reinforces their brand’s emphasis on craftsmanship.

• Similarly, there are many ways to leverage short videos. Besides creating and posting videos ourselves, more and more brands are using creators to create UGC content. Cluely’s UGC program is apparently generating an average of 1 million views a day. It’s still early to tell if this is a successful approach but it’s definitely on-brand for them. Anthropic is also working with influencers to create a brand that feels different from OpenAI.

• The Browser Company launched a unique website and crafted an exclusive invite experience for their Arc brower. They just launched their AI browser Dia with a similar waitlist approach—and a likely very expensive launch video. Similarly, Yutori launched with a production-grade parody video on April’s Fool. So did Cluely. I can’t wrap my head around such launches because of how expensive they are but that is what builds their brand and helps them stand out. (I also think there are probably even more companies that tried a similar approach and didn’t make it. Survivorship bias.)

• The cofounders at Stan used a “build-in-public” approach on LinkedIn to launch their AI agent for LinkedIn posts. Since companies like Buffer pioneered the transparent way of building, many people have followed. But not many seem to have done well. There are many entrepreneurs posting about their journey on Twitter to little avail. Stan cofounders seemed to have succeeded perhaps because it aligns well with their business. They are showing how they create a business on LinkedIn to creators on LinkedIn who want to build their own businesses.

• In my opinion, Cursor and Windsurf have largely similar products based on their features but their brands feel wildly different. Developers on Twitter love Cursor and hate Windsurf, even though Team Windsurf is as active on Twitter as Team Cursor. Subjectively, the reason seems to be that Windsurf’s approach feels marketing-heavy, which developers hate. Cursor is at $500 million in ARR—half a billion!—while Windsurf is at $40 million.

• PropertyLimBrothers started producing home tour videos in 2016 when most realtors in Singapore were using static photos. That launched their realtor business, and they eventually even created a media arm. It took them two years to hit 5,000 YouTube subscribers but their Signature Home Tours have since been driving their brand.

If you are paying attention, you might have noticed a common theme above is branding. I’m starting to suspect it is less about what you do but how you do them.

I’m still pondering about this. If you have any thoughts, let me know. I’d love to chat more about this.

Even though I was mostly talking about marketing above, thinking and doing things differently applies to many aspects of life, too.

What we do in a relationship, how we parent, how we spend our time, and so on.

Often, we get stuck on our default path even if it isn’t the best—until something shocks us out of that auto-pilot mode. Near-death experience, cancer, breakup, layoff.

It’s better to constantly reflect on whether we should do things differently and then change when we want to rather than when we are forced to.

Warmly

Hello! tl;dr: I’m looking for people who want to use AI to do tedious office work to test Dewlop and work with us to improve it. If you are interested, please let me know here.

For more backstory, read on!

I once worked as an administrative assistant in the marketing and communications department of a corporation for nine months.

There were some fun aspects; I got to help with events, taste delicious catered food, and meet interesting people. But most of my days were consumed by mind-numbing, repetitive tasks that made me question my life choices. Sitting in my cubicle at the corner of the office, I would…

• Create and update RSVP lists for events (many, many times)

• Turn RSVP lists into name tag stickers and check them individually

• Source for catering vendors and get their menus

• Research suitable venues for events and create a spreadsheet for my manager to compare

• Update an inventory spreadsheet for corporate gifts

To be fair, I was an administrative assistant hired to do such administrative tasks.

What was surprising is that my manager and her colleagues—senior staff with impressive titles, paid much more to do more important work—were also burning valuable hours on such tedious tasks. Worse still, most of them are unaware of the advanced and more efficient features in Microsoft Office.

We often laugh at corporate workers for dealing with such absurdity. But even knowledge workers in modern tech companies have their fair share of this. Notion or Google Sheets might be more user-friendly than Microsoft 365 but we still cannot escape some of the tedious tasks. I heard of a product manager who has to update a single-source-of-truth document every week based on changes in her other documents, something she wishes to automate.

If we want to unlock real productivity gains for the world, we need to free people from the mindless, soul-sucking grunt work that is eating away at their creative work and strategic thinking.

Even back then, I was looking for ways to do things more efficiently, such as using mail merge and complicated formulas in Excel. Fast forward to today, AI has improved tremendously to be able to think and act. Yet somehow, most office workers are still drowning in the office tasks that plagued me years ago.

That’s why we built Dewlop.

We believe AI should be used to do the grunt work that we don’t want to do but cannot avoid, so we can focus on the fun work we love.

Dewlop is an AI assistant that can do boring, repetitive office tasks on your computer at your request.

Dewlop isn’t just another chatbot that answers your questions in your browser. It is a desktop app. It works where you work so that it can truly take care of tasks for you.

It is intelligent enough to figure out how to complete office tasks for you, not just chat with you and answer your questions.

It can read, understand, and edit your files directly on your computer.

If you need the latest news and information, it can use the internet.

These capabilities allow you to use Dewlop for a wide range of tasks:

• File organization and management

  • Rename invoices according to their content

  • Sort documents into folders according to their content

  • Update dates across multiple documents

• Editing and formatting documents

  • Fix formatting in Word

  • Update the bibliography to a particular style

  • Update an email address in a PDF invoice

  • Check table calculations in Word

  • Compare two documents

• Extracting and processing information

  • Extract information from multiple PDFs and compile them into Word or Excel

  • Calculate a financial ratio from an annual report

• Research

  • Ask questions about PDFs

  • Research caterers for a business event and compile their contact details into a spreadsheet

  • Research a particular topic (e.g., how room temperature affects productivity) and write a report in Word

• Image manipulation

  • Use Python to crop images

There are likely many more tasks that even we haven’t thought of.

But you might!

This is where we would love your help.

Because Dewlop can be used in many different ways, we just launched our beta programme and are looking for a small group eager to test it in their daily work and to work closely with us to improve the product.

Besides being one of the first few to try Dewlop and use it for free, you’ll get:

• A private chat with me (WhatsApp, iMessage, or Slack) to quickly share feedback or report issues.

• Early access to new features before anyone else sees them.

• An inside view of our roadmap, and a say in it and Dewlop’s pricing.

We are keeping this beta small and exclusive:

1. We’re specifically looking for folks ready to put Dewlop through real-world challenges, not just play with a new AI app. We don’t want to waste your time, too!

2. It is still a beta app, likely filled with bugs and glitches. Things will break; features might not work as expected. Even though we are prepared to fix and improve the app as soon as possible, you have to be comfortable with experiencing issues and be up for testing things repeatedly to pinpoint problems clearly and verify our fixes.

If you are excited to help shape the future of AI at work, let’s chat. Since you made it all the way here, you are likely more interested than most people. Just let me know (via email or comment), and we can skip the beta registration form and jump on a call together.

Talk soon!

P.S. For the next few weeks, my main focus will be to get beta testers for Dewlop, instead of learning AI. I’m not entirely sure what I’d write about for Alfred Intelligence yet but if you have any questions or suggestions, let me know!

Technical notes

Continuing from last week’s technical notes, I learned several more frontend concepts.

• Template Refs (Vue 3.5): With Vue 3.5, we can reference a DOM element with useTemplateRef. This is a bit simpler than something like const input = ref<HTMLElement | null>(null);.

<script setup lang="ts">
import { useTemplateRef, onMounted } from 'vue'

const input = useTemplateRef('my-input')

onMounted(() => {
  // `input.value` is automatically typed as `HTMLInputElement | null`
  input.value?.focus()
})
</script>

<template>
  <input ref="my-input" />
</template>

• scrollLeft: For Dewlop’s mobile website, we scroll the demo from left to right so that you can see the full app on the little screen. I hadn’t realized there’s a native horizontal scroll property. To scroll horizontally, we can use something like this:

watch(scroll, (scroll) => {
  # Maximum number of pixels for horizontal scroll
  const maxScroll = demo.scrollWidth - demo.clientWidth
  # Map vertical scroll to horizontal scroll
  demo.scrollLeft = scroll * maxScroll
})

# scroll is a fraction between 0 to 1. We use IntersectionObserver to calculate this.

# So setting demo.scrollLeft as scroll multipled by maxScroll moves the demo horizontally. For example, if scroll is 0.5, 0.5 multipled by maxScroll moves the demo 50% across.

• IntersectionObserver is a browser API that lets us “watch” when an element enters or leaves another element (usually the viewport). For example, it allows us to do something like “if the demo is 50% visible on the screen, do X.”

• Showing a modal: Here’s a simple way to show a modal:

<template>
  <div>
    <Modal v-if="showModal" @close="showModal = false" />
  </div>
</template>

<script setup lang="ts">
const showModal = ref(false)
</script>

# The modal component could emit a "close" event, which will set showModal to false and hide the modal

Interesting links

• ChatGPT Codex is now available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers. Just to test it out, I connected the repo for my personal site and asked it to “Pick a part of the codebase that seems important and find and fix a bug.” In about a minute, it found a stray space in a <li> tag, which wasn’t causing an issue. Nevertheless, it felt like a smooth experience. Creating a PR to fix it took only one click. I’ll play with it a bit more and report back.

  

• SWE Agents Too Cheap To Meter, The Token Data War, and the rise of Tiny Teams

• Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner by

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