I'm writing a fictional spy thriller book that takes place in the early 1990s in two countries. I'm about 100 pages in, and expect the end product to be about 200 pages long. Not sure how I'm going to publish it yet; suggestions welcome!

Here's a synopsis of the plot, redacted since I've already revealed too much :)

-----, a college student from ----- majoring in -----, graduates from university and is recruited to work for a mysterious company that has links to -----. Initially hired as a translator, his talent with electronics get noticed quickly and his superiors begin training him for a covert overseas operation in which he will visit ----- as an exchange student while really serving as a spy.

With a soft spot for ----- culture, he is excited to visit ----- for the first time. Although he is fully aware he could be killed or imprisoned there, his confidence in his ----- language skills, plus a bit of youthful naiveté, make him jump at the chance. As he carries out his mission in -----, he uncovers a tangled web of family secrets.

I am building https://www.videocrawl.dev/, an AI companion web application that enhances the video-watching and learning experience. Since I primarily learn from videos, I built this to improve my learning workflow. It is free to use.

It offers standard features like chatting with videos, summarization, FAQs, note-taking, and extracting sources mentioned in the video. We're taking it a step further by extracting relevant information from video frames and making it easily accessible.

I'm vibe coding a "social media engine."

Basically, I've noticed a bunch of social media protocols like ATProtocol, ActivityPub and Nostr are coming out and I think while having these protocols is a good idea, one thing limiting adoption is lack of differentiated social media sites on these protocols. Basically everyone keeps building twitter on a new protocol without offering anything novel. One bottleneck, I thought, is that there isn't a set of utilities to help build a new social network easily so everyone defaults to building twitter as an MVP. I wanted to make an engine, kind of like a game engine, but to make a custom social media for any particular protocol. Hypothetically this should make it so that development for these kinds of projects go way faster. Basically, like a very opinionated django rest framework. Hopefully developers will build more interesting, novel sites and increase adoption for these protocols

I have recently started working on a swi-prolog library for unit aware arithmetic[1]. It is still very bare bone (especially in documentation), but I started writing some examples[2] to showcase the library. It is essentially a port of the mp-units[3] library in c++. It was a lot of fun, and I found prolog especially well suited for manipulating symbolic representation of units and quantities.

[1] https://github.com/kwon-young/units

[2] https://github.com/kwon-young/units/blob/master/examples/spe...

[3] https://mpusz.github.io/mp-units/latest/

I've been working on extending Postgres to run on top of FoundationDB, effectively turning Postgres into a distributed database with all the modern features one would expect. Hoping to release an initial version for people to try out very soon!

(1) Photography: I did two events last month, an indoor track meet

https://www.yogile.com/strides-of-march-2025

and Dragon Day at Cornell, where I am spooling out pictures to

https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social and https://mastodon.social/@UP8

I'm excited that I'm getting paid to do an event next week because that's been one of my goals. I feel like I'm really progressing at understanding event venues to pair up interesting foregrounds with meaningful backgrounds as well as painting events in a strongly positive light when other photographers might do otherwise.

(2) Coding: I have several applications that use arangodb, a document/graph database that unfortunately, like most innovative databases of the 2010s, has a terrible license. I don't feel I can either commercialize or open source these things so I am switching them over to use JSONB support in Postgres. I am building an adaption layer that works like "python-arango"

https://docs.python-arango.com/en/main/

this is not a complete replacement because I'm not using many features like Pregel or Foxx and in some ways it is more functional because it supports primary keys being integers or uuids. Out of about 50 AQL queries I think there is just 1 that might be challenging to write in SQLAlchemy. It's interesting in that I am triangulating between the implementation being simple, being able to modify my applications if necessary, and also developing the API that I really want in the long term.

I've been working (on and off) on part 2 of my blog post series on the rigid body collisions [0] for over a year now. I burned out on it a few times and got super mega stuck on one particular section for months on end. I think I've finally broken through the worst of my writer's block, so there might be light at the end of the tunnel!

[0]: https://www.sassnow.ski/rigid-body-collisions/1

RankPic (https://www.rankpic.info) is an app to help users crowdsource their best photo. I've been building over the past 3 years. It's grown into a lovely community of people who help each other pick their best pictures for dating apps, professional photos etc.

I've seen some pretty fun novel use cases, such as (multiple!) people using it to pick out glasses, wedding invites & so on -- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rankpic-photo-ranking/id160299... (ios) -- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.rankpic.ra... (android)

Still in the earliest R&D phase, but working on a multiplayer voxel game. I don’t intend to share it widely, just something for me and family/friends to play.

I mostly wanted an excuse to play with shaders and WebRTC, but I also like the idea of being a sort of “dungeon master” but instead of writing a campaign, I populate the world through procedural rules, and adjust the rules based on how we all end up playing as we go, adding things to stumble upon and keep it fresh in an organic way.

I recently launched SpiesInDC, a Cold War history subscription service that delivers reproductions of historical documents and speeches, maps, photos, and even coins and stamps to your real mailbox. I have always loved reading about Cold War history, and I'm an avid stamp collector, so I combined the two together and people really seem to love it.

https://spiesindc.com/