As mentioned in an update on last week, I left my job.

After over a decade working for the company, there's a lot I'll miss. But the three at the top of my mind right now are:

1. My phenomenal coworkers, who I learned so much from over the years
2. My work notes/journals, which I no longer have access to
3. Memegen.

There's not much I can do about (1) and (3) right now, but for (2), I've started using Obsidian to keep daily notes of what I'm working on, design docs for side projects, and miscellaneous learnings as I navigate the tech stacks I'm less familiar with.

This journal entry is a collection of various interesting (to me) notes from my personal logs over the last week.

Project ideas

The hardest part of a new project is coming up something that lies in the intersection in the venn diagram of being

• An interesting idea to work on
• A tech stack that I either know really well or want to learn
• Something that others would find fun or helpful to use

I had an idea in project ideas i called Sherwalk Holmes that I've started tinkering with, since it seems like it might hit all those criteria.

The Web

I switched over to the Vivaldi browser, since I no longer work at the company and Safari and Chrome both have issues that I find aggravating.

For example, in Safari, dynamic favicons on desktop often show stale versions of themselves, due to how they're cached. See this post on Stack Overflow from 2018! Also, forward and back buttons on my mouse aren't supported. And on mobile, I'll frequently get into a state where the back button navigation is buggy.

In Chrome, more and more AI features are getting pushed into the browser layer, which is not my preference. On the other hand, Vivaldi has explicitly stated: "We don’t buy into the idea that everything needs to be powered by AI. Especially not the kind that uses your data without permission, or plagiarizes and pollutes the web with misinformation."

That said, I really like the look of the liquid glass version of mobile Safari in the iOS 26 dev beta. I might be convinced to switch back to that...

Vim keybindings

It's funny (to me) that one of the first things I have to switch over in any new text editor (Obsidian, XCode, VS Code, etc) is to vim keybindings.

I say that as I'm typing this journal entry in vim.

Muscle memory is a crazy thing.

Swift

My first impressions of developing in Swift are mostly positive. I like a lot of the syntactic sugar that it has (guard clauses, for-when, implicit member expression (aka the leading dot syntax), etc).

It sucks that I have to fallback from SwiftUI to UIKit for some seemingly obvious things (e.g. changing the tint color of indicators in a TabView).

There is a mix of really solid documentation and tutorials, and absolute garbage that hasn't been updated as functionality changes. For example, I banged my head longer than I care to admin on installing custom fonts, because the official docs are wrong! You don't specify the full path to the font. Just the filename.

If you somehow made your way to this journal post from a search just because of this issue, let me give you more details. The Fonts provided by application under Custom iOS Target Properties on the Info tab should just be the filename of your font, irregardless of where in your directory structure the file is. Also note that you have to edit it via that menu, if you update the Info.plist manually, it won't work.

What's up next?

I've got some basic data models and the intro flow of Sherwalk, as well as the ability to pull step count data from HealthKit, and some minimal mocks in Figma done already. I hope to get an end-to-end demo out this week in the hands of some of my friends for some early testing and feedback.