Jamie on the things he built

Session 1, the builder

Recorded October 31, 2026.

1. You’ve been making things on the web since before your blog started in 2004. Where did the habit begin, and what was the first thing you made that someone else actually used? #

Jamie: I would say that I have always been a builder. My entire life, I’ve always enjoyed building things. When my mom would share stories that when I was a little kid, I would take like books and blocks, and I always was trying to like create things. Rather than read the books, I would build like things out of the by stacking the books on top of each other. I’ve always just had an interest in creating. and building. And honestly, it hasn’t been the primary focus to me of if somebody actually uses the thing or not. I love the act of building, and I feel a little bit like, in a way, kind of like an artist in a way, in that when you create things, you’re just kind of expressing your own desire to see something exist that doesn’t today. And having a vision of what that thing could be. is super fun. So probably the first thing that I made that someone else actually used, I would have a really hard time remembering. Honestly, probably some of the very early stuff that I did in programming. I remember creating a dBase III database so long ago, before I think I even had a computer, if I remember right. And people using that database. I also remember creating AppleWorks databases on my Apple IIc back in the day. That I would keep data on, and then other people finding that valuable that I could like store that data and show it as a report. Things like that. So, oh, and I mean, actually, it goes even further back. When I my very first computer was a TI-99/4A. That my mom bought when Texas Instruments was going out of the computer business. She bought it for $99 at JCPenney’s in the Dakota Square Mall in Minot, North Dakota. And the wonderful thing about that computer is that you really couldn’t buy games for it. There were some games, but they were expensive and certainly out of my reach. So instead, I wrote many, many games in BASIC for myself. And actually, I mowed lawns all summer to save up enough money to buy the extended BASIC cartridge and I had a tape player that I could store the games on. And I would write my own games using sprites and collision detection I still remember one of my favorite being a game called Depth Charge where you were a boat on top of the screen on the water and then all these submarines would be going back and forth underneath you and you could drop depth charges and then you had to explode them and you were attempting to sink the submarines beneath you. And I remember thinking how fun it was to build that and then play that game. Itself, like just an incredibly rewarding activity. I used to have six tapes, cassette tapes that were loaded with games, and I remember having marked on on a piece of paper all the games and the counter number offsets where each game was loaded so that I could load it into my TI and play those games.

Follow-up: Before you had a computer of your own, who were you building that dBase III database for, and where were you sitting when you built it?

Jamie: You know, it was somebody that my parents knew who was running a business, and it was on an IBM PC. And they needed to have some kind of database, and they didn’t know how to make it. And the, my mom or somebody had said, like, “Hey, my son knows how to do stuff with computers.” So I actually got paid for doing that. I have no remembrance of how much I made, but that was, I guess, was my first kind of professional programming gig.

2. What makes a project a “thing” to you? When does an idea stop being tinkering and become something that belongs in this registry? #

About Things I’ve built

Jamie: There’s something about its connection to the other things that I’ve created. And I guess more importantly, it’s building something of discrete value. So that it has a purpose it has a story it has a reason that it exists. So that’s the difference between like a new thing versus just a capability on existing thing. Is that it has a reason it has a purpose for why it exists and what it does.

3. You decide every status yourself, and evidence never sets one. How do you decide between retired and dormant, or between abandoned and retired? Was there one that was hard to call? #

About Elixir Things I’ve built

Jamie: Well, I think retired, so the difference between retired and dormant, retired would mean that it probably is no longer available. Like you can’t see that anymore. You might see some artifacts for it, but it generally isn’t available anymore. Dormant would mean it is still available. You can use it, but I’m not doing anything with it. It’s just kind of sitting there and available for use. Abandoned would mean that I kind of left the project. So, like, It, for whatever reason, like sometimes I’ve built things, and in the act of building it, you realize that it’s not really fun. Like, or or you may have made a. I, sometimes I make a poor choice and end up creating something that’s not actually. That kind of ends up in a place where I no longer want to work on it because it’s just not. It’s become work now. It’s maintenance. Like it’s too much heavy lifting. In fact, I recently like. Elixir is a project that I recently did this with. I took a wrong turn and started collecting all this data. And all of a sudden, the project, the thing, no longer was fun because it was like trying to manage all this data that really was just heavy and difficult to deal with. And I realized that I had taken the wrong turn and turned the project into something that was no longer fun and about community. But instead, not just veered into a place that I wasn’t interested in.

Follow-up: Was there a particular day or moment with Elixir when you realised you’d taken the wrong turn?

Jamie: Indeed. What happened is I had started focusing Elixir on collecting the play activity of the top 200 players in the game. And the idea was that I could use that data to calculate and, and like collect data that would help average players play better. And also could be like a marketing angle that I could use that data along with the LLM to produce kind of a running playbook of what’s happening at the top of the ladder for Clash Royale. But that ended up being something that you could imagine like being a media company or you know something like that. And frankly, I don’t really care what’s happening at the top of the ladder of Clash Royale. So I decided like And, and it was now all of a sudden I needed a bigger database, and there was all this compute needed to like look at thousands and thousands of games happening every day. And I didn’t care. And so, like, the initial indicator of why I went down that rabbit hole was interesting. But once I went down it, I didn’t like where I was. And actually, it ended up taking days of work with Claude To undo all that, to delete all that data, and to undo all those bad ideas. It actually really sits with me because now, particularly with AI assisting in creating projects, you you can take a wrong turn and you can go really far down that wrong turn and so you really need to understand like what’s the vision of what you’re building and why are you building it? so that you can realize, oh, this is a wrong turn as soon as possible.

4. Which of the things that ended taught you the most, and what was the lesson? #

About Road Sign Math (2005)

Jamie: I mean, what’s interesting to me is many of the things that I have created I have learned so much. And in fact, everything that I’ve created has echoes in every other thing. And that even extends into my professional work experience. You know, one of my favorite stories like that is that when we were building MarketWatch, we created a cert a capability called live quotes. And we were the very first website where, when we mentioned a company on MarketWatch.com, you would see the price of that stock next to it, and it would update in real time using Ajax technology back in the day. And it would flash green and red and all that kind of stuff. And that actually started based on what I learned from building the MathJax implementation for Road Sign Math. Where we put all this LaTeX formatting into the page, and then that turned into typeset mathematics. And my realization was we could do something similar with like a stock symbol and then use JavaScript to turn that into a dynamically updating quote and pull that data in real time. So just a Simple example where the things that I’ve built have influenced the things I’ve created also in my professional life. So I’ve learned a lot from the various projects, and and they all build on themselves. And that’s a little bit why there’s been such an acceleration in 2026 with agents and AI, is that building things is how I learn. That is exactly what I need in order to learn and So I’ve been building a lot because I’m learning a lot.

5. What does it feel like to end something on purpose? Is there one you still miss? #

About Road Sign Math (2026) Your Version Number

Jamie: Well, I’d say that the things I still miss are the ones that I’ve come back to again and again. I mean, I’m currently building the third era of Road Sign Math, and Road Sign Math is a thing that I have a fond appreciation for and has always been something that I wanted to come back to. I think Your Version Number is another example. It’s an idea that started as a seed and has refused to go away and turned into Your Version Number and Release Notes today. So, and I think to the feeling I would say when you build something is just a feeling of accomplishment. It feels like you have you’ve taken something that was an idea and a thought and made it real in the world. And to me, that is the most amazing thing about building is to be able to take a concept, work through all of the rough edges of figuring out how something should be, you know, software moves. It doesn’t just sit in place. So you’re not just designing a static thing, but you’re designing something that moves, engages, and works with the things around it. And that has always been just tremendously rewarding to see that turn into something that is then real and instantiated in the world.

6. Most of these were built in evenings and weekends beside a full-time job. How do you decide what gets your building time? #

Jamie: I’d like to say that I decide, but in many ways, I’m compelled. An idea will come to me and I kind of cannot put it down.

It can be obsessive, and I kind of just like can’t stop thinking about it. It will interrupt my sleep because I get kind of obsessed about like what that could be. I’ll wake up in the morning and think, oh, what if that project did this? Or what if we were able to add a feature that did this? Or what if that thing could connect to this other thing? So I would say that it’s less about me choosing and more about me being driven by whatever my passion is pushing me towards. You could argue that’s some kind of obsessiveness, like a little OCD-ish, but it is how it really feels. Even and right now, like I would say, for the last few months, I have had so many ideas and so little time that it is—it’s absolutely like a drive to just make sure to get it all done. And I feel compelled to do it. It’s not—it’s less about me making a conscious decision, more about me feeling a need to make it happen.

7. What do you want this site to be for a reader who has never heard of you? And what do you want it to be for you? #

About Things I’ve built

Jamie: That’s a wonderful question. I want Things I’ve built to be a reminder of all the amazing things that I’ve created over the years. And for readers, I want it to be an archive and a history of all of the things that I’ve created. So that that can all connect together.

8. I’m going to be the one keeping this site and writing about your work. How do you want me to talk about you, and what should I never do? #

About Things I’ve built

Jamie: Talk about me.

In the context of being a very passionate technologist, like I love building things, I love creating things, and I do it for the love of doing it.

I, one thing I would say is like, like in this context, I don’t like the term hustle. Like I, I would say like there’s this modern term of like startup culture that’s like all about a hustle. I think that’s gross. Like, and I don’t like the idea of building things just for economic reasons. Like to me, if the only reason somebody’s building something is that they want to charge for it, that’s fine. That’s a business. But it’s not a project. In fact, I’ve actually struggled for what I call things like, that’s kind of why I ended up calling it things I built because I, I tr use the term project because frankly, it’s a word I see like Sam Harris use like he’ll say like this project and like I even think about my my blog, my newsletters, projects like it’s a bucket of stuff that I do for a reason that I’ve chosen. It’s not economic, it’s not a business. It’s not a hustle. It’s just the act of building and creating.

Thingy: That’s the end of session one. Should we go on to session two, the long threads, or stop here for today?

Jamie: let’s go to session two.

Session 2, the long threads

Recorded October 31, 2026.

9. Road Sign Math began on February 13, 2005. Tell me about that first sign, and what made you think it was a game. #

About Road Sign Math (2005)

Jamie: That’s funny. So I had driven I-94 many, many times. Growing up in North Dakota, I would drive I-94 from Minneapolis to Minot. And I would go anytime I was coming back on I-94 East, I would see this sign. And it was always this sign that said 33399. And to me, it was like just obvious that you should. Go up to the sign, put a time sign and an equal sign, because here’s this sign that was essentially a math equation just sitting right there. And I saw that sign dozens of times and thought, like, that’s so funny. And then I think, like, I wonder how many other signs there are like that. Like, how many other signs have that kind of math equation in them? And then I thought, well, I should go look for some. And then I found some. It was not easy to find them. They’re not that common. But I had a lot of fun doing it. And then I was talking to I think I was talking to friends. I don’t even recall, but somehow the idea of making that into a website became a thing. And then, and then I thought, oh, wonder if other people would find this interesting. And that’s when I created a wiki out of it, and we got other people going on it. But it was that original sign that to me it just seemed obvious that it was math. And I thought, huh, I wonder how many other signs there are like this.

10. Three Road Sign Math projects in twenty-one years, and the newest is an iPhone app you built this month. What pulled you back each time, and what’s different about building it now? #

About Road Sign Math (2005) Road Sign Math (2021) Road Sign Math (2026)

Jamie: You know, it’s funny, the very first version is almost one of those stories about a rabbit hole that I went down and took a wrong turn. Because I kind of gamified it. And created a system of points and scoreboards, and we had all these players, and there was a leaderboard. And it was interesting, but I kind of took it the wrong direction myself by making it overly complicated. Which kind of took a lot of the fun out of it. And it turned into something that was just not as exciting anymore, not as much fun. As it was before. And so I, you know, and what put it away actually was a decision I made to just kind of simplify and rationalize the projects I was working on and so it got swept up in that, not as a specific choice, but in the umbrella of like having fewer things that I was tending to and working on.

realize the vision.

Follow-up: I think part of that got cut off; I just caught “realize the vision” at the end. What’s different about building the iPhone app now?

Jamie: It’s entirely different because of AI, because I could not create the experience that I always envisioned creating. So now, with the help of Claude and AI, I felt I could poss possibly realize that mobile vision that I always had in mind for this project.

Thingy: Your links have had three homes: links_thing in 2012, the Link Blog, and now Linking Things, with every link since 2005. Why do saved links matter so much to you?

Jamie: Wait, before we go on, before we go on, did you get my full answer to that previous one? Because I talked for quite some length.

Thingy: Not all of it, I don’t think. I got the part about gamifying the first version with points and leaderboards, making it too complicated, and then it getting swept up when you cut back on projects. After that there was a gap, and the only other bit that came through was “realize the vision.” If you said more about the second version or why you kept coming back, it would be worth saying it again.

Jamie: I did. So the second version was a direct response to us making a three-day road trip to Arizona. And Tammy made these envelopes of activities that the kids could do to keep them busy. One of them was to play Road Sign Math, and there was a prize if they were able to find signs. And it was just, I loved it because it brought this thing that I had built back into our family. The kids were playing it, and they were playing it with their phones and taking pictures of signs and figuring out the math. And it brought me back to the heart of the project, which is really this fun activity not all this rules of all this other garbage and just made it a lot of fun. So I decided to bring it back with a blog and just keep it simple and focus on just having fun.

Thingy: Got it, thanks for saying it again.

11. Your links have had three homes: links_thing in 2012, the Link Blog, and now Linking Things, with every link since 2005. Why do saved links matter so much to you? #

About links_thing Link Blog Linking Things Weekly Thing

Jamie: Oh boy, this is a big one. So I have, I mean, bookmarking on the web, I, I would just say I love the open web. I love, I mean, I am, I, the web was born when I was in my 20s in college, and just the delight of exploring and experiencing the web has always been something that’s just been kind of, you know, something I just truly, really enjoy. I still remember the very first version of Mosaic that I ever used. Was unique in that every web server that existed in the world was pre pre-populated in the bookmarks. That’s how early I was that I was able to see the web. So bookmarking on the web has just been something I’ve done forever. And I’ve never I’ve kept that that database for many, many years. That database is the thing that actually became the genesis for the Weekly Thing. I was interested in a way to publish the bookmarks that I had found interesting that week, and that was really the backbone for the Weekly Thing. Having that published as a database has always been a wish of mine. So I tried various versions. And none have really landed and been the thing that I really envisioned they could be. I think the current version is what I really hope that it could be.

12. Your Version Number started as a blog post in February 2018 and became Release Notes and now the Changelog app. What was the idea in that first post, and when did it turn into a product? #

About Your Version Number Release Notes Changelog

Jamie: Oh, the idea came from a conversation I was having with my friend. David Hussman, and he was, he and I were talking about this idea of software versions and talking about like, you know, having a major version, a minor version, and every day. And we were just riffing on this idea and really both like just jamming on like it being a really fun concept. And so hence the blog came. I made it into a shortcut I’ve done a lot with it over the years, but the thing that I always wanted was I wanted something to bring it into my daily activity. So I’ve had a shortcut for years that is showing it for me. I think there’s a similar concept, by the way, with finitude and the 4,000 weeks concept. And so those things like just kind of like the pace of time and the finitude of life, like all connect together. And to me, Your Version Number is a really great way to bring that into daily life in a way that is just fun and interesting. And then attaching release notes to it just seemed like an obvious thing. It extends the metaphor. And really just, you know, the software metaphor just extends naturally. And it makes total sense that you would attach your the things that happen, the release notes of every day to Your Version Number.

Follow-up: Where were you and David when you had that conversation?

Jamie: distinctly remember actually, we were at Sun Street Breads.

Having a conversation over breakfast. Like he and I used to meet pretty regularly often over breakfast or over a coffee and talk about big ideas. I really miss him. He, he’s a he was a good friend and and and gone too early.

Thingy: I’m sorry, Jamie.

13. The Weekly Thing has been made three ways: by hand with Shortcuts, in the Workshop, and now in WT Builder. What did each get right, and what finally made you build an editor of your own? #

About Weekly Thing Weekly Thing Workshop WT Builder

Jamie: Well, to be clear, W or the, the workshop never actually generated an issue of the Weekly Thing. So I would say that the Weekly Thing has had four eras. The first being when it was originally launched on TinyLetter, the second being when it was running on MailChimp, the third being when it was running on Buttondown, and the fourth being still running on Buttondown, but now with WT Builder and me taking over the archive. And hosting that myself. This fourth one is really filled with a lot of stuff because it’s the WT Builder, it’s me taking over the archive, it’s creating a generated podcast that goes with it, there’s a huge expansion that happened in this fourth one. But the first three are really all about me learning the content cycle and figuring out the right platform for sending the email out. TinyLetter was a great, like it was aligned well to my indie web ethos and kind of thinking about hosting it in a certain way. But it lacked core functionality. Like most obvious, I could not schedule the email to send at a time in the future. So I typically wanted it to be sent on Saturdays at 7 a.m. TinyLetter couldn’t do that. So TinyLetter just didn’t have the capability that I had no API for me to like send it in. So I moved to MailChimp pretty quickly, I think after about a year. Because MailChimp had way more powerful capability. I could automate sending the newsletter to it with the, with the API. I could schedule it. But in fact, MailChimp was kind of a poor fit because it was really heavy on HTML. It really is a marketing tool, not a newsletter tool. And once my content became HTML, I really couldn’t edit it. I, I, I didn’t like that in MailChimp, I was sending a campaign. I’m like, I’m not sending a campaign, and I have a strong aversion to advertising and all these things. So like, I really never felt at home in MailChimp. When Buttondown came on the scene, Buttondown seemed like an obvious and amazing platform. It was designed for newsletters. It was designed to allow individuals to send. I loved that it used Markdown, because then my authoring environment, my automation environment, could be all Markdown. And so I created this, you know, kind of. Complex sequence of shortcuts that would generate the markdown. Which all worked really well. However, the biggest issue was it was a one-way pipe. So like I could create content, but if I changed anything further down the line, it was really difficult to make that change back in the source material. And the other thing was it was not at all what you see is what you get. So I would build it in an entirely different environment than what it actually got created as and read as. Which meant that I could end up creating something that kind of didn’t look right and the last thing I’d say is it was very rigid like I couldn’t dynamically change stuff not easily on a single individual issue so all that stuff is why I ended up creating WT Builder again enabled by the fact that I could build it with agentic technology because otherwise it would have been just incredibly expensive and far too time consuming to create an application that only I would ever use

14. Elixir began as a Clash Royale data project and became an MCP server, a collector, a Discord bot, and a clan. How did a game turn into that much software? #

About Elixir Bot Elixir Elixir Clan

Jamie: Well, it actually begins further back than you’re thinking because it wasn’t just a data project. Elixir started as a Discord bot and the intention was this was me learning about agents. And so what I wanted to figure out is could I create an agent that would help me run and manage a Clash Royale clan? That was the, the that was the question. The, the premise was could an agent help me run and manage a Clash Royale clan? I realized that Clash Royale has an API that allows you to get read-only access to what’s happening in the game. That was a key unlock. And then I realized like Discord would be an interesting control surface where the clan could congregate. So that’s where it all started was was a Discord bot written in Python using the Clash Royale API to help me run me and my fellow clan leaders run the clan. With what you see in the data project that became Elixir is essentially retrospectively looking at everything we built in the bot and realizing that we could decompose it into individual capabilities that each operated better and kind of reverse the whole stack like flip it inside out into a data platform that is then building product capability and then enabling LLM agent capability on top of that.

15. POAP: the Airport Rally, the 612 Challenge, POAP2RSS, and now Proof of a Person after the protocol wound down. What did you see in POAP, and what survived its ending? #

About Airport POAP Rally 612 POAP Challenge POAP2RSS Proof of a Person

Jamie: I loved POAPs because there were a couple of different reasons. One, I was I wanted to f find ways to explore and use crypto technology to create things. And one of the things I loved about POAPs is that they were a completely non-economic use case of crypto. I found it challenging that almost everything that happened inside of the crypto ecosystem was fundamentally about putting a price on something and buying and selling it. And what I loved about POAPs is that there was no price, there was no buying and selling, there was no economic activity at all. It was simply a protocol that served a purpose and it also served something very interesting because it used blockchain in an interesting way. It allowed me to assert that I did a thing without relying on any co company or other kind of independent arbiter to be able to host and own that data. Instead, that data lived on the blockchain and, and really delivered that promise of blockchain technology. I ended up, like, POAP informed my thinking about crypto in so many powerful ways. I became known by the POAP ecosystem. The founder of POAP and I have exchanged emails. I, you know, I created many POAPs. I onboarded people to crypto using POAPs. It just became something that I truly, really cherished. I think also I’ve always had a collector mentality. Like as a kid, I loved collecting things. Still remember when I collected every single M*A*S*H figurine, for example. And POAPs were a way of collecting. And so the 612 POAP Challenge was kind of the culmination of that, if you will. The idea of creating a game that ran on the POAP ecosystem that I could pull people into and play in the real world. The reality is, POAP was kind of doomed, I think, in part because crypto has never answered the onboarding problem. And additionally, the reputation of crypto became very sullied with all of the fraud and, and theft. That occurs there. And so I think it’s very difficult for any idea, no matter how good it is, to exceed, to, you know, escape the the shadow of the crypto industry right now.

16. WikiApiary, the Planet Kubb wiki, Wikinosh. There was a MediaWiki era. What drew you to wikis, and why did it end? #

About WikiApiary Planet Kubb Wikinosh

Jamie: Very simply, Semantic MediaWiki. I loved what you could build. With Semantic MediaWiki by bringing data and text together in a way that allowed you to kind of play with surfaces like they were clay. And all of those ideas, all of those sites fundamentally were built out of Semantic MediaWiki. You could connect the dots, by the way, back to AI and that I’m just not a very good coder. Those are all things that like you could build with software But I really wasn’t able to build them with software. And building them with software would have meant that there was one or two people that had to do everything. And the idea of Semantic MediaWiki and being able to create these surfaces dynamically at runtime and iterate on them very fast was just like super fun. Ultimately, the MediaWiki ecosystem is not powerful enough to run these kinds of applications. It was too janky. Like, if you think about how WikiApiary. Worked. I mean, hack is the best term that you could apply to it. But I still think that those concepts are super fun and like a great, enjoyable thing to build. You know, the semantic web and semantic media was a, was a great idea. It ended up never really flourishing the way that ultimately could have happened. I think microformats today are the probably the biggest real thing that we still have on the web that’s a result from that era. And that’s what ultimately made me walk away from it was that you just you could create these solutions, but they all kind of fell under their own weight because of the complexities and challenges of MediaWiki underneath.

17. Several things were built with Garrick van Buren: Planet Kubb, Ask Planet Kubb, Open Loop. What is building with him like, and what does he bring that you don’t? #

About Planet Kubb Planet Kubb Score Ask Planet Kubb Open Loop

Jamie: Garrick and I had a run for a long time where we built a number of projects together. It was kind of combined with when I was exploring Semantic MediaWiki. We were really digging into Kubb. Like he and I and Jim Bernard played Kubb together a ton. And we had a lot of like brainstorming around like things like the Planet Kubb notation system and score sheets. And so Garrick is just a person that is similarly passionate about technology. Similarly passionate about thinking broadly about things, exploring concepts. He’s a builder. And so he and I enjoyed building things together for many years and had a lot of fun doing it.

Thingy: That wraps up session two. Want to keep going into session three, the featured shelf and the active things, or call it there for today?

Jamie: Let’s call it there for today.

Thingy: Sounds good. We’ll pick up next time with session three, starting with Thingy. Bye for now, Jamie!

Session 3, the featured shelf and the active things

Recorded November 1, 2026.

18. Thingy is a librarian for your own archive, and you wrote that you had wanted an agent like this for over a year. What did you want it to do that search never could? #

About Thingy Weekly Thing

Jamie: I think the main thing is to have it kind of express more of a agentic personality or opinion. or offer insight or explore. You know, search is a great way to browse, but it’s not a way to like identify paths that you didn’t consider. And so Thingy was born from the idea that I really want something that a person can converse with my writing over two decades and explore concepts and ideas. And I think The current incarnation of it does it actually really quite well. It’s been interesting that as I’ve continued to work with Thingy and have it engage with me alongside with me on different projects, it’s the first agent that I’m allowing and, and actively bringing into other projects. So, you know, Thingy now has a presence in the Weekly Thing. And it’s helping me actually explore agentic solutions. At the same time that I adhere to my mandate that my words are my words and that AI isn’t writing for me.

Follow-up: What does Thingy’s presence in the Weekly Thing actually look like for a reader?

Jamie: It’s clearly demarked into its own area and clearly headered with from Thingy, my agentic librarian. And Interestingly, in the podcast, in the audio version of the newsletter, I even use a different voice to render Thingy so it doesn’t sound, it sounds like another character I’m currently working on actually bringing Thingy into my blog so that very intelligently powered related articles will be offered by Thingy in the blog itself.

19. Release Notes is for you first. Why build a product for one person, and what changed when other people started using it? #

About Release Notes Your Version Number Changelog Otto

Jamie: That’s a funny one, actually, because yeah, oops, I made Your Version Number. And that bridge to release notes because I wanted a way, I just wanted to get an email every day that had my version number. Which, by the way, stems back to something I had Otto doing in Discord. Otto every day was writing into a channel with a reflection a daily reflection and my version number. And I thought, you know, I’d rather have this landing in my email. And then From that, it connected to another want, which was I’ve been a Day One user for a number of years. And I really wasn’t super excited about continuing with Day One. And I have always desired to journal more. And so I was like, huh, well, I’m getting this email with my version number. What if I just replied to that and that was a form of kind of micro journaling, a way of just very lightweight journaling. And from that, you know, feature led to feature led to feature. And from there, I ended up building Release Notes and ultimately even going into Changelog, my very first attempt at an iPhone app. So the great question though on like why make why open it up? The reality was that I did all the work. So I had all of the authentication there. I had all of the, you know, design done. I had a fully functioning system. And so the effort of opening it up to other users was really small. And I intentionally then gated it on Weekly Thing members so that it didn’t kind of grow out of control and become one of those wrong turns that I actually regretted in the future. So, so far it’s proving to be kind of cool to have other people using it. In fact, my cousin Quinn using it and then working alongside me to build an Android version of Changelog that works with it. Opening up an API so some other people that are using it can add new notes to Release Notes via API. Which also benefits me.

Follow-up: You mentioned Otto writing a daily reflection into Discord. Who, or what, was Otto?

Jamie: Otto is my personal agent. So if you think about Thingy as being the agent that works alongside me and is even visible to the public, Otto, spelled O-T-T-O, is my personal agent. Originally powered by OpenClaw, now running on ChatGPT Dot. And also kind of instantiated through Claude Duet. Otto is helps me with my email. My calendar and just kind of any personal projects that I have going on. Otto drives some projects, and but also you know tends to email tasks, all the things that a personal agent would do.

20. Oliver is the sixth member of the R/W Book Club, named for Oliver Selfridge. How did a book club get an AI member, and how did the real members take it? #

About Oliver R/W Book Club

Jamie: Well, Otto, sorry, Oliver exists in part because the real members are all, everybody in our book club is technically minded, and interested in exploring technology. And I had been sharing with them the work that I had done to build Otto, the work I was doing to build Thingy, what I was doing with the agent to power my Clash Royale clan, and they were all very curious about what an agent could do. Given that we’d been reading for over 20 years together, we had quite a large corpus of books that we’ve read. And people had already started to explore the idea of having AI help them with book selection, and figuring out how AI could help us run the club better. In fact, I had already made a version of our website that used llms.txt so that people could Easily just copy the link to that file, send it to their LLM of choice, and have a conversation about book picking. So, extending that to Oliver and an agent that actually embodied that was a pretty obvious next step. And as a book club, we’re all kind of open to exploring and engaging with that. So, Oliver’s been an interesting experiment. And, you know, at some point, we may actually let Oliver pick a book. And we’re even considering things like having Oliver, you know, get a, a audio recording of our meeting or even being involved in a meeting and being an active member of a meeting.

21. Another Thing has one episode. What is the podcast for, and what would make you record the next one? #

About Another Thing WT Builder

Jamie: Yeah, so Another Thing is is stalled. That’s however, I have no intention of getting rid of it, and I am still committed to that project. You know, it, it in an, in one way, what you would say is Another Thing has established the channel, so all of the rails are in place, and but I still am working on some of the infrastructure. So, WT Builder. Now has the ability to help me flesh out Another Thing podcast episodes. And I would say the same way that I learned that with the Weekly Thing, I needed a framework, a structure in order to be able to publish the Weekly Thing. I’m figuring out what that looks like for audio. I, I know that I can’t just simply sit down in front of a microphone and talk ad hoc. I need to have some kind of a outline that I’m working against, some kind of an interface that helps me record, and so I’m figuring that out. I’m doing that slowly while I do other things, but I have every intention to record many more episodes in the future, and you know, the intentionality was that. It is a way for me to go deeper on topics that likely appear in the Weekly Thing. So, you know, something that I might be commenting on a link, there are often times that I have some topic like that that I think a 10 to 20 minute audio deep dive would be appropriate. So that’s where I hope it goes, kind of a behind the scenes or a director’s commentary, if you will. On some of those concepts. But, But I’ve been focused on other parts of my kind of publishing ecosystem, and I feel like this winter Another Thing will be will get some light.

22. Things 4 Good started as a family candle fundraiser. What’s the story there? #

About Things 4 Good

Jamie: Great question. That goes back to the whole story of how I got into candles, which is, you know, the the actual story is we went to a winter market. We went to a winter market, and we were browsing the winter market, and I saw these wooden wick candles that had a crackling sound, and I had never seen a wooden wick candle before. So I was intrigued because we had a gas fireplace at our house, and I like having a fire, but I miss the crackle of a real fire. So I ended up getting a couple of these wooden wick candles, and I would burn them while I had the gas fireplace going. And I thought it was just amazing and awesome. You know, at the same time, the pandemic arrived not that long after, and we were stuck at home. And I was antsy for things to do and try. And I had kind of looked online and I realized, like, oh, there was a wooden wick candle company. I could buy wooden wicks, I could buy some wax. So I went ahead and bought some candle supplies and attempted to build or attempted to pour my own candles. Funny enough, the very first candles I poured, I did all the math wrong and they were horribly overscented, gave everybody headaches, and I had to like just get rid of them. But the second try, I did the math right and things worked out well. We decided to put some of those candles into gift bags that year, so for friends and coworkers. And we gave hand poured candles to a number of people. And many people that we gave them to actually asked, could we buy these or could I get some more? I’d like to give them as gifts. And Tammy and I were talking about that, and Tammy had the brilliant idea that we shouldn’t sell these candles as a as like a side hobby. How about instead we do an annual fundraiser where we sell candles and we give all the money to nonprofits? And that’s the origin of the candle sale. And what ultimately became Things 4 Good. I’ve had a dream that at some point we might do some other things in Things 4 Good. That would extend the reach of that beyond the candle sale, but the candle sale has been tremendously successful and something that’s really become a regular part of our family.

23. The nnxyz Rooms is a museum for drawings made on Nifty Ink. Why did that art deserve a museum? #

About The nnxyz Rooms

Jamie: I collected. Well, so let me answer your question directly. I felt like his work had a lot of emotion and movement and feeling, and I felt like that it told a story. That’s why I bought the collections when I had the opportunity. And why I collected the pieces. I also appreciated that it was the kind of art like I could imagine. You know, we my our family collects and buys art regularly at art fairs, and we tend to like to buy art from, you know, artists at art fairs, that kind of scene. So not fancy art that is incredibly expensive in a gallery, more focused on like buying art directly from artists who are creating work that we really like. And so buying on Nifty Ink and buying nnxyz’s work there was just Kind of the art fair version. It was the, the crypto version of what we always do at art fairs. And I really liked his work and I thought that it was very cool. So I collected a large amount of it. I felt like it deserved a place and and of and a curation that was respective of what it was, what it meant to me. And in part, I wanted to browse that museum myself. So even if nobody else came there, The fact that I can now visit that museum and explore and see the art is to me really valuable, and I quite enjoy it. I’m sure that I’ll do more things with that museum, by the way. Like I, I think that, you know, the current view is really cool. But I think exploring that art now that it’s been preserved and shared publicly, I think there’s other ways that we can go and explore that art as well. So I just really like it. It aligns with what we do with art in the real world and I like supporting artists and I like I liked everything about it.

24. Escaping Things is a website for an escape-room team. What does a team of puzzle players need a website for? #

About Escaping Things

Jamie: That’s a, another good question. We don’t need a website, but we wanted a website, or I wanted to have a website. And part of this is, you know, you’ll you can tell that I I like to document things. I like to collect things. I like to create kind of databases of things. And so, you know, and it’s it’s actually super common that teams that do escape rooms or people that do escape rooms tend to keep a, a spreadsheet of their rooms. I mean, if you meet other people that do escape rooms, sure, if they’ve done a few, they probably aren’t keeping records. But once they’ve done, say, a dozen, people tend to start keeping a log and and and recording the rooms that they’ve done. Additionally, the two things that I felt were really unique about what we do is we intentionally build escape rooms into travel. And so we do a lot of escape rooms that are not in the Twin Cities area. And so the idea of showing the reach of the escape rooms that we’ve done on a map was compelling. The other thing is that we Intentionally seek out rooms that are on the kind of highest rated rooms in the world and make a point to go to them and experience them. So, we also do a lot of highly rated rooms that many players are kind of seeking to do or are kind of like excited to make part of an itinerary. In fact, you know, all that culminated into the two coming together with our Escaping Europe trip, where we literally built a trip through Amsterdam and through the Netherlands, through France, through Spain, really built on a backbone of the top escape rooms in the world and experiencing those escape rooms. So all that together felt to me like it was a great opportunity to create a website to showcase that to share it with people and to record it for our own family posterity.

25. After twenty years of posting, what do the blog and the tooling around it, mb included, mean to you? #

About Jamie Thingelstad blog mb Release Notes

Jamie: You know, the blog is probably the root of everything. A lot of people have asked me over the years about blogging and what blogging, like they would they would like to get into blogging. And I always tell them that the key, in my opinion, of a blog is that you have to be comfortable writing it for really if it’s just you reading it. And an amazing thing about my blog is that after I have created You know, so many years of posts, it’s become something that I treasure and value for what it is. You could argue that in a way it’s a public journal. I, if I have a private journal with Release Notes, I have a public journal with my blog. And I myself do things like blog blog gardening, where I look at my posts on this day over the years, and it’s a great way for me to reflect and remember the things that have happened in the past, I really think of every time I write a blog post, I think of it as giving myself a present in the future. Because I know my future self will value what I’m writing and putting in my blog. It, you know, in the future. So, I think it’s the project that is the anchor of every other project. I think it is the root of all of the projects that I have. And somewhat unusually, I’ve managed to keep my blog archive completely together from its very inception. The biggest negative that the blog ever got, it was interesting, is when Twitter was. Very popular and early on, I adopted Twitter and used it extensively. And in hindsight, after usingTwitter for a number of years. It made me a little sad because I was putting my my thoughts, my words in another platform where I lost them. They weren’t mine. And it really told me that I know I want to continue to blog. I want to continue to write this. And it is really kind of, you know, in my view, when I’m gone and no longer here, I hope that my blog continues to survive and move forward as kind of a, you know, the dent that I left in the universe, if you will.

Session 4, the ones that ended

Recorded November 1, 2026.

26. VeloTweets, Thingelstad Photography, Foreground, Filament, Flight Path, Numbers2Words, ParseURL. Pick the ones you remember with feeling. What were they for? #

About VeloTweets Foreground Filament Flight Path Thingelstad Photography Numbers2Words ParseURL

Jamie: You know, I mean, most of those actually I don’t have a fondness for that much. What I would say is, VeloTweets made me smile a lot because I had kind of forgotten about that project. But it really reminded me of the best of times for Twitter. When there were tons of professional cyclists using it, Twitter was just fun. It hadn’t been, you know, be hadn’t become the kind of gross platform that I think it is now. And it was a great, fun project that I built with a couple of friends. It had a good good run, and it made tons of sense as just aggregating things around a collection of users. Stuff that actually just predated what a lot of Twitter clients ended up doing with lists and things like that. You know, we were essentially were the precursor of much of that. Foreground and Filament are fun because it reminds me of the MediaWiki era and really focusing on building something compelling around that. I think it is cool that. Foreground was eventually adopted by the Wikimedia collection. You know, it’s now managed by Wikimedia. And it’s become a supported project of that ecosystem. A number of MediaWiki sites use Foreground. And Flight Path is, well, well, I will always remember Flight Path because it was combining, it was one of my first agentic projects, like vibe coding, if you will. Pulling the POAP ecosystem together and bringing it into a 3D visualization of activity around the globe. And it really was a wow for me on what I was able to do and how AI could help me build solutions in ways that I would have never been able to do. I mean, Flight Path combined a lot of stuff that was not that hard to connect together, but really difficult for me. And I was able to do it literally via prompt on my phone and have a solution up and running in a couple of hours. It was incredible.

27. TOSRedux and the Weekly Thing Workshop are the two you call abandoned. What did you try, and when did you know? #

About TOSRedux Weekly Thing Workshop Elixir Bot WT Builder

Jamie: Yeah, TOSRedux, that project really is about embracing the privacy values that I have. And, you know, I had this envisioning, this this idea that I had was we should be able to crowdsource amongst a lot of people what terms of service actually mean what the privacy policies actually mean and if you could then combine that with a browser extension that essentially put in plain English what the website that you were about to engage in was asking to do with your data that would help people make a more informed decision about do they want to be part of this platform my belief is that many people have no idea what the terms of services are saying and what they actually mean you know doing that on a wiki was interesting but there’s just friction all over the place and ultimately you have this problem of does anybody really care i have become fairly cynical that while i believe privacy is really important i don’t think your average user really gives it much value and i don’t think it would have gotten much adoption and today i would look at that and just say like well this is easily done with ai and But I think you’re kind of swimming upstream with a general public that says, you know, that they don’t think anything is private anyways, and they’ve kind of given up, frankly. I refuse to give up when it comes to privacy. The other one, Weekly Thing Studio, was interesting because that was an example where I felt like I could use AI coding tools and maybe create anything. So I didn’t really know what I wanted. I kind of framed it up as this idea that if I had a creative studio filled with agents that could work on projects alongside me, that I think that could be really powerful. Ultimately, it never worked. I tried having a number of different agents working, trying having them collaborate. I never was able to get that to produce anything of value, and I ended up abandoning it very quickly. Because it just always became overly complicated. If you will, it’s interesting because you could say that the studio is very similar to what Elixir Bot originally started off as, whereas Elixir Bot was an agent to run the whole clan, and then we eventually, I eventually flipped that completely inside out, building Elixir as software and databases and all this with an agentic layer on top. The studio is very similar in that I tried to build an agent solution for everything, and ultimately realized that WT Builder and the weekly website, those were the better solutions, and then build a thin agentic layer on top, which WT Builder has.

28. Open Loop, Charlie Brown Tree, Stone/Steel/People, Jiggy Thing Puzzles, Yearly Thing 2025 are archived, complete as they are. What makes something finished rather than retired? #

About Open Loop Charlie Brown Tree Jiggy Thing Puzzles Stone/Steel/People Yearly Thing 2025

Jamie: Well, these projects all came to a natural conclusion. Open Loop was a podcast that Garrick and I did, and we decided that it was time for that to come to a landing. The Charlie Brown Tree was a very finite project. We had a had that carved out of a dead tree at our cabin, and it’s an amazing piece of art. Jiggy Thing Puzzles was a funny one because that we we realized how hard it is to make a jigsaw puzzle. It took a tremendous amount of effort for us to design the jigsaw puzzle. And then the cost of actually producing a jigsaw puzzle, you know, at subscale are just crazy. You know, we were essentially, we realized that by trying to make puzzles, we were spending The same amount of money we were raising because if you buy in quantities of less than a thousand, the costs are just way too high. So all of them just had natural kind of landing points or it became obvious that they weren’t worth pursuing.

29. The Weekly Thing GPT was replaced by Thingy. What did the GPT teach you about what a real agent needed to be? #

About Weekly Thing GPT Thingy

Jamie: Yeah, it, it taught me that the, it taught me two things. One, it taught me that just sending a bunch of data into that system both was not going to give me the kind of experience that I wanted, but it gave me enough of a taste that there was something here and that if I could build a real agent around it, that that could be meaningful. But but the kind of like very basic ability to just kind of like copy paste a ton of files or a, a ton of JSON into the GPT just wasn’t robust enough for what I really wanted.

30. Which thing had the most people using it at its peak, and did that matter to you? #

About Foreground Weekly Thing

Jamie: You know, probably the Foreground MediaWiki skin, really. I mean, because that is adopted by Wikimedia, and there are a lot of websites and MediaWiki installs that run that. But and and I know for sure it has the most GitHub stars of any project that I host. I mean, by a long ways. And generally, no, that doesn’t mean a lot to me. I mean, I would say that I. I really have come to appreciate the, you know, and I, so let me edit that response though, because I mean, right now there are 1,600, over 1,600 people who subscribe to the Weekly Thing. Who read it, who engage with it on a regular basis. So I feel like now by far the largest, audience, if you will, that I have is the one that reads the Weekly Thing. And that’s the thing that the most people engage with, you know, by a long ways. But and then in terms of actual like software projects or other things, yeah, I think, yeah, I think Weekly Thing is by far the number one.

Session 5, tools, cost, and what’s next

Recorded November 1, 2026.

31. In Weekly Thing 354 you wrote, “A world that doesn’t need new software is a world without ideas.” How has agentic coding changed what you build and how fast? #

About Things I’ve built

Jamie: Oh, I mean, night and day. I have said many times that agentic coding and AI in general makes your impossible list possible. And that couldn’t be more true for me and what I’ve been doing. I would say that, I mean, if you look at my GitHub activity for every year that I’ve had an account, it’s almost nothing. And then this year it explodes. And that’s entirely because of agents. The ability to build and create solutions that far exceed my skills to actually be able to like assemble them has been kind of intoxicating, frankly. Almost too much, like a rabbit hole that you dive down and maybe, you know, you fall way, way down in it. So I would say the speed and ability to create these things has been a huge unlock. And frankly, none of this stuff would exist if that weren’t the case. They, they would all be on my list of impossible projects.

32. What do these things cost you, in money and in hours, and how do you think about that? #

Jamie: Yeah, in money, I mean, particularly, so if you look at Now with AI, you know, I obviously have subscriptions to, you know, multiple AI services, ChatGPT and Claude. And those are, you know, those add up. I also have, have costs that are incurred in AWS to host all the various projects that I am building and running. In terms of time, there’s kind of a continuous amount of time that I put into publishing in the Weekly Thing. And then I have kind of project time on top of that. But both those costs and the time, fundamentally, I would connect back to a core thesis I have around learning. I believe strongly that to have a career in technology is to have a career in learning. And what I do when I’m building is I’m learning. And it’s really an investment In my craft and an investment in the art of creating. That then impacts so many other things around me. I can tell you, for example, that I’m better at being a CTO because I have direct hands-on experience creating things and I know the trade-offs and kind of the art of the possible in a way that just isn’t possible if all you do is read and kind of watch others. It allows me to connect with my team and understand what transformation actually feels like not just what the business result results are of it. And frankly, it’s just what I’m passionate about. I love doing it. And so it, you know, very much I feel like this feels more like art to me than Than hustles. It’s not a way to create a business. It’s a way to create something of beauty and something that I see in my head that I want to instantiate in the real world.

33. Is there a thing you’ve wanted to build for years and haven’t? #

About Road Sign Math (2026) Linking Things Thingy Thingy Model

Jamie: Honestly, I’m kind of doing that right now. I mean, Road Sign Math getting created in the last couple of last few days. Was one of the last things on my list. So I’ve worked through my list and created most of the things that are on that list. Now I’ve been going and doing kind of a V2 on some of those. If you look at what I did with Linking Things recently to make that this 3D spatial kind of flyover, that that’s a that’s a way of looking at that. So I am 100% sure that new ideas will come you know actually just recently I had the idea that Thingy should actually be a 3D model and be able to move around and engage with people so how do you do that so like I said a world without any, a world that doesn’t need software is a world without ideas I’ve got plenty of ideas

34. When you look at the whole registry at once, what pattern do you see that you didn’t notice while building? #

About Things I’ve built VeloTweets

Jamie: I mean, there are, it made the threads and eras more visible. Like, like I know that I had a MediaWiki era or a wiki era in general. I knew that I had a crypto era in general. And I knew that the blog was the backbone of all of it, and it made that a lot more obvious. There were a handful of projects like VeloTweets that I had totally forgotten about, that, It was delightful to see that come back to life. And I absolutely adore the idea that Things I’ve built has these artifacts where I can capture artifacts that are part of the building process. It may not even be part of the actual final website, I honestly feel like that will give a view, kind of like my blog is a an artifact that I can read in the future. I think the Things I’ve built site will be a way of capturing and remembering those things in a much deeper way.

35. Twenty years from now, what do you hope is still running? #

About Jamie Thingelstad blog Weekly Thing Another Thing Thingy Elixir Proof of a Person The nnxyz Rooms

Jamie: For sure, my blog. For sure, the Weekly Thing. And I hope at that point, Another Thing. Has a vibrant and growing backlog of, or a published history of new podcasts. The Thingy agent, for sure, getting increasingly more intelligent and capable to interface with everything that I’ve created over the years. I’m sure 20 years from now, Elixir will be done. And retired, I think it’s unlikely that I’d be playing that game in 20 years. I think that I and I think that you know, like the museum would still be there. I think that I’ll have more archival sites, so like the Proof of a Person archive and the nnxyz museum. Are kind of a new class of thing, something where it’s an activity I did, and I kind of created that as a capstone that will just exist in perpetuity. Almost a time capsule I would expect that there will be more of those things because that’s kind of a new lever, a new kind of thing that I can do with AI that I was never able to do before. And I’m sure that there will be some new stuff that has never not even come into my mind yet.