Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Alexander Obenauer

Here's how the case wraps start and finish:

They come into the bindery as a 4' wide, 24 yard long bolt of book cloth (paper-backed fabric), and end up as case wraps for the text blocks to be cased in.

November 11, 2025 at 5:21 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

This week:

Making books and tending the fire.

November 11, 2025 at 3:03 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

In this case, it's a visual (and mentally sticky!) metaphor for how we structure software as apps these days. It arcs to this enjoyable observation of present absurdity:

October 21, 2025 at 1:28 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

"A knife can cut an avocado, and much more."

These kinds of sentences show up in the most fundamental papers that I return to year after year.

They sound silly out of place, but in my favorite works, they're used to build up to essential guiding ideas and insights!

October 21, 2025 at 1:28 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

Part 2 of my 2024 essay, hitting the 'net this week;

On the moral imperative for composable systems & malleable software.

October 20, 2025 at 3:28 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

This article is now public! Link in reply.

I recreated Jef Raskin's 1987 'Canon Cat' user environment and observed myself as I lived in it for a week.

Implementation details, surprises, and more in the essay.

(Why touch grass when you can read 3.2k words on user environments?)

October 15, 2025 at 2:35 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

Shipped a little refresh to the little lab site.

Also added some graphics made for the User Environments zine to the Canon Cat / Jasper essay 🙂

September 19, 2025 at 1:30 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

One syntax sugar I’ve enjoyed using in the language:

It will match on unlabeled first params for dot calls on any expression of the right type.

$One other interesting feature of Wonderful is how it handles certain kinds of dot calls. If a function has an unlabeled first parameter, that function can be used in a dot call on matching types: ```Swift func square(_ num: Int) -> Int { return num * num; } let a = 10; var b: Int; b = square(a); // standard function call b = a.square(); // same result as standard call ``` This matches on any expression of the right type, so you can even use it with literals or more complex expressions: ```Swift func square(_ num: Int) -> Int { return num * num; } var a = 10.square(); var b = (5 * 2).square(); ``` This lets us add member functions to types in the current scope with little formality. And by flipping calls around this way, we can chain the use of functions together which read from left to right: ```Swift func square(_ num: Int) -> Int { return num * num } func double(_ num: Int) -> Int { return num * 2 } func abs(_ num: Int) -> Int { return num < 0 ? -num : num } print((-3).abs().double().square()) // abs(-3)=3, double(3)=6, square(6)=36 ```$

September 18, 2025 at 2:45 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

Last month, I started a series diving into the implementation of a user environment for personal computing that I've been working on this year.

The second lab report is out now, on the environment's programming language.

DESIGNING A LANGUAGE FOR THE ITEMIZED ENVIRONMENT
September 17

In this lab report, we look at Wonderful, the language purpose-built for handling items and interfaces in the itemized operator environment.

I’m in the midst of building a new user environment with the kinds of ideas that I’ve been exploring for personal computing’s future. Over the course of several lab reports, we’re looking at how this user environment works, inside and out. In the last lab report, we explored the Item Store, a database of chronological facts that serves as our persistent storage layer in the itemized environment.

Now, we’re going to take a look at the programming language purpose-built for handling items and interfaces in this environment. It has several features that help interfaces connect to the item store, and for users to iterate on their interfaces and programs from within their normal operating spaces, interacting with code items with the same benefits they gain from the rest of their things existing in an itemized environment.

First, we’ll look at the basics of the language, then dive into some ways it serves the particulars of an itemized environment. Finally, we will look at how it is internally architected to allow the itemization of its own code — so that it can be further developed in-environment, with the benefits of an itemized IDE interface.

September 17, 2025 at 4:58 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

It's a lot of fun shipping these out all over the world.

September 10, 2025 at 3:10 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

This week:

Making books and watching turkeys.

September 10, 2025 at 3:10 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

This year, I’ve been building a user environment that reifies personal computing of the kind I’ve explored for the last several years — something I can fully live in.

I'm kicking off a series of lab reports that take a deep dive into this environment's implementation.

Building an Item Store for the itemized environment

*In this lab report, we look at the _Item Store_, a database of chronological facts that serves as the itemized environment's persistent storage.*

This year, I've been hard at work building a user environment that reifies personal computing of the kind I've explored for the last several years — something I can fully live in.

Over the next several lab reports, we're going to take a deep dive into this environment and its implementation, as well as a bit of the project's philosophy. This first report is on the environment's storage mechanism. The next one will cover the environment's programming language. After that, we'll move toward the environment's interface.

First, we will look at the kinds of ideas the Item Store was built to support. Then we will look at how the Item Store works, highlighting some key implementation details.

$"Deleting" in the item store is not the same as "erasing". Here's the implementation for a function that deletes a fact: ```Swift func deleteFact(_ fact: Fact) { insert(fact: Fact( factId: fact.factId, itemId: fact.itemId, attribute: fact.attribute, value: fact.value, numericalValue: fact.numericalValue, type: fact.type, flags: fact.flags ^ 1, timestamp: Date() )) } ``` When we delete a fact, we are actually inserting a new fact describing the earlier one as deleted. This means that the item store can be a complete chronology of the items it describes. We can also mark an entire item as deleted, and when we do so, we can name a successor item: ```Swift ItemStore.shared.deleteItem(itemId: "1", successorItemId: "2") ``` This creates a reference between the deleted item and the successor item, helping to describe your item graph's connections more completely. For example, when you send an email, a "draft" email item is deleted, but can be referenced by the "sent" message that succeeds it. When you view that sent message later, it can be easy to jump into its draft, to view earlier variations, this way.$

August 28, 2025 at 1:44 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

Roughly a quarter of the first ten years of Sarah and my marriage was spent on (very) long road trips.

This had the delightful effect of slowing down time, and the associations of places with times improved my (typically poor) recall: the years on the road are filled with inseparable memories.

It’s funny to have such a strong association of times with places. Lots of specific times in our lives were spent in distinct places, so my recall of memories often starts at this association. It’s also interesting to note that time slowed down when we were on the road. Particularly for the longer-than-a-year trips, when the year was packed with so many different places, each week or month holds distinct memories that don’t blur together. The gradual acceleration of life’s time was put on hold.

August 26, 2025 at 9:30 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

Prototyping zines

August 22, 2025 at 4:50 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

carpe noctem

August 18, 2025 at 6:46 AM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

This week:

Making books and watching deer.

July 30, 2025 at 4:29 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

I gave Claude Code access to my Obsidian vault and asked it to give me some questions / prompts. It asked things like:

- What forces preserve mediocre interfaces?
- How do we escape vendor-imposed constraints on our thinking?

Here's a small taste:

July 28, 2025 at 4:06 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

This Ars article from 2010 is fun to read now.

Discussion of Carbon vs. Cocoa apps, pointing out the portion of the user base eager for the Cocoa rewrite, evoking the Human Interface Guidelines in the face of unseemly UI decisions...

Such a different era.

July 22, 2025 at 5:11 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

(2/2)

I've found no driving force quite like curiosity. A rich problem can capture the mind far beyond its necessary duties; not even hunger can hold a candle to the flame, when properly lit.

**Find the gaps**. My curiosity pulls me forward when there’s something I’m not sure of, something I don’t know yet; an unanswered question. This is what makes new projects more interesting; it’s all one big gap! Lots to explore. To keep going on existing projects: find the gaps. They are certainly there; they just aren’t as obvious. Look for the gaps, point at them, and describe them. Once they bug you, you're off to the races.

**Look for good problems**. Good problems have a way of taking care of themselves, in the minds of the curious. Get to know everything you can about the problem, how people have tried to solve it before, etc. Any amount of time spent finding rich problems is also well worth it, thus justifying many of our conversations, odd explorations, and excursions into other fields (though we need no justification to do these things). Ruminating on good problems, in the background and on the foreground, is one of life's great joys, and one of the greatest sources of human progress.

**Good ideas come last.** Often, the *best* ideas hide behind the *obvious* ones. It can be helpful to write all the ideas, then wrestle with the boredom that follows, waiting on more ideas to come. One of the last ideas to arrive is often the most important. You'll know which ideas are the best: they'll generate more thought than the others, taking up more space on the page than you expected.

One must respect the fragility of early ideas and early thinking, particularly in imaginative and creative work like research, art, and entrepreneurship. Terrible ideas have a way of becoming great ones, over the shared discourse of a few curious minds; though those minds must first accept ideating off of obviously terrible ideas! Criticism shuts down these lines of creative ideation. Great things have humble beginnings.

**Leave cynical environments hastily**. One must not keep cynical minds around for long; environments too cynical to allow early ideas to bounce around must be left behind, quickly, and permanently. Ideation finds no home among those amused by swatting the serve immediately to the ground. For some reason, too many people have found it safer to use their intellect in this way. They are to be avoided at all costs.

**Embrace good distractions.** It's worth noting that all of the best things in my life — my marriage, my work (renewed many times over), etc. — have come from time spent on what would be described as 'distractions' from what I 'should' have been doing or focusing on at the time. I'm sure this has some shadow side to it, but I'll never regret giving in; these weren't distractions from my life, they were my life, budding into being.

Continuing David Bowie's quote from before:

> I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people's expectations. I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that.

July 18, 2025 at 12:57 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

Completed another trip around the sun this week. With gratitude, something to share:

Creative work is hilariously unintuitive to the adult mind. We are like beavers, blocking flow at the first sound of running water with dams made of any debris around.

Here are reminders I hold close:

(1/2)

You can do things for their own sake without having to provide justification. But if you really need one, it's this: *things lead to other things.*

Doing things opens up doors, ideas, pathways, and opportunities that couldn't have been imagined or designed without having first done those things. By definition, doing things you enjoy leads to more things you'll enjoy.

It's another way of saying "the dots connect looking backwards", one of the three messages in Steve Jobs' (wonderful) commencement address at Stanford, but it keeps the frame in the present.

Simply following one's curiosity — even when it seems unproductive to do so — is wildly underestimated as an activity that moves the human race forward. Feynman's spinning plates led to his Nobel prize.

It's easy to lose motivation when it isn't clear how some work will contribute. But quite often, the biggest contribution something makes is the next thing it leads us into. We can't predict these paths in advance, but we can notice how much it has happened in the past, and trust that it will continue.

This is one worth repeating early and often. Things lead to other things. It's a powerful reminder in the face of creative doubts. "What if this is nothing?" Doesn't matter, it will lead to something.

In creative work, there is this frustration while mid-process that reflects the delta between where a work is and where you want it to be. When it's gone, the work is done. This means that one is always experiencing this in the ongoing activity of their creative work. There's always a next problem to be solved, or a need to get some work away from some unsatisfying place, or toward some unknown more satisfying one. It isn't always clear, in fact, it's usually unclear, where to go — that's why it's so frustrating. We live with this frustration during the whole life of a creative work.

You have to learn to embrace this frustration. The frustration sometimes feels like a despair born from fear that the work won't get better, that it won't ever meet your tastes. But it should be embraced: it's what tells you your work will get better, because it keeps your mind at the task of figuring how to improve it. It is a *good* frustration.

Once you learn to embrace this frustration, you can start to enjoy it, which helps you enjoy your work more (which helps you do harder things).

It helps to have gone through many resolutions of this frustration; that gives you the confidence to know early on in a creative project that it will, in time, dissipate, as you find your way through the nooks of creative revelation. But I've found that it seems to require revolutions in each domain; this frustration is hard to enjoy in a new field of creation, since this confidence has much less to ground itself on.

It's important to be able to identify the good frustration. Simply being able to identify it can turn it from a source of negativity to one of excitement and energy. Once identified, it can become a source of action, sometimes even direction. In particularly challenging moments, this frustration can end early work. Pointing at this frustration, describing its source, and what about the work has led to it, is often all you need to think more clearly about how to proceed.

I furiously note-take my way into the depths of a project. These notes become Ariadne's thread; when I'm deep in the details and I've lost sense of the project's purpose — which I need to color my interpretation of the details, including filtering out those that do not matter, and to direct my next actions — I can return to those notes which pull me into the right perspective again. They are also helpful when writing descriptions of the project for public consumption; once I know the inner-most details, challenges, rewarding pieces, etc., it becomes much harder to describe the project from the outside. I'm now a native to the project, and I can no longer give a newcomer directions that make any sense to them. The original notes serve this purpose wonderfully.

David Bowie:

> Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society.

I've found it necessary to document that spark from first flint to the first moment of forgetfulness.

The creator's mind can often fall into a perfectionist's trap: "It must first be *right*, then it can be." Obsession grows with something being perfect, more perfect, more than perfect. This will grind work to a halt. We hold on too tight.

In these times, it's important to reorient to experimentation and consistency. It is at these times that I must catch the down-spiral early, and instead refocus my obsession on consistent work and progress.

Striving for consistency inevitably leads to quality; striving for quality inevitably destroys consistency.

This advice does not necessarily supersede the need to acknowledge one’s seasonal creative phases or to give into good distractions. So this may not be the right advice at all times, but you'll know the times when it is, because it'll annoy you.

And it's important to remember: **Diverse inputs create rich outputs**. This happens in big ways and small. On the latter: at some surprisingly early point, doing a lot more of the work won't make it any better, but doing a lot of *other* things will. On the former: one must cultivate an interest in and understanding of many different things. Each field has different ways of seeing the world, and each person has still more nuanced takes. Adopting many lenses helps us see creative solutions to the ever-harder problems we and the world will face. Different lenses are one of the great gifts we get from reading, inquisitive conversation, and following obsessions down deep paths.

July 18, 2025 at 12:57 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

The system Smith went on to describe (for programming by demonstration) in part elicited some fascinating thoughts from Alan Kay:

July 17, 2025 at 3:14 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

Dave Smith, 2000

July 17, 2025 at 3:07 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

Updated my website to begin surfacing more of the work that's remained buried multiple clicks deep, and to finally include a small 'about me' blurb.

There's still more to bring to the surface, but I'll leave it here for now.

July 10, 2025 at 4:02 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

Enjoyed this weekend's reading of the Declaration of Independence on the very balcony from which it was first read to the American public 249 years ago in Boston

July 7, 2025 at 8:45 PM

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

I'll be doing a book making livestream, tomorrow at 1 pm edt.

Join me while I make books by hand, the old fashioned way. Have me in the background on mute while you work, or come chat about book binding and other things.

Link in reply!

June 30, 2025 at 3:11 PM

Light upyour news

Sign in to Lightnews

Sign up to start reading

Connect Bluesky

Connect with Bluesky

Light up
your news