In Rich Hickey's presentation "Simple Made Easy", he defines "simple" as the opposite of complex (systems unnecessarily tangled together and reliant on one another) and "easy" as something that a user or developer can quickly pick up and use without trouble. He makes the argument that many programming abstractions, with the intention of making things easy for the developer, actually make the underlying system difficult to understand and debug, costing time and energy for everyone in the long run. This is why we should value simplicity.
This is a valuable observation, not just for developing software, but also for using software. It's not quite the UNIX philosophy of "each application does one thing and does it well" - lots of applications do many things well - but rather about using tools that are reliable, interoperable, composable, and ideally work across devices.
Simplicity can be applied to every aspect of life. In fact, this collection of texts that you're looking at is the result of me wanting to make blogging more simple (after trying platforms such as Medium, Substack, Ghost, WriteFreely, Notion, Quartz, and Obsidian Publish). It's just some Markdown files, hosted on a website that I don't have to build, maintain, or style, written in a format where I don't feel any pressure to consistently provide updates or "market" myself. Is it flashy, interactive, engaging? No. But it works, because it's simple.
This is my favorite app of all time. At its core, it is just a nice-looking WYSIWYG Markdown text editor. But once you understand its simple primitives - tags, wikilinks, and properties - you can transform it into a powerhouse. I use it to organize my thoughts, gather sources, and connect ideas in ways I never could have done otherwise.
- Platforms: Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android
- Reliability: Unfortunately it is not open source, so technically it could become abandonware and no one would be able to carry on its legacy (at least not in the form of its codebase). However, development is highly unlikely to stop anytime soon. There's a passionate community around it, the lead developer Steph Ango cares a lot about the project, and the team seems to be making good money via their Sync and Publish services and through donations. Plus, worst case scenario, you can just use a different Markdown editor! You can't say the same for data stored in Google Docs, Notion, or Apple Notes.
- Composability: Again, It's just Markdown, so you can use any tool alongside it (or build your own) to edit or analyze your files in any way you like. The pages in this repo were written in Markdown files using both Obsidian and Visual Studio Code, and uploaded directly to GitHub. No APIs, no file conversions, no hassle.
- Security: It's not open source, which would be ideal for inspecting whether our data (including personal notes!) are being sent anywhere. However, I feel at ease knowing that the company has proudly passed multiple independent security audits. Their business strategy isn't built around harvesting personal data like most other tech companies are, so I don't see this changing anytime soon.
- Ethics: Not made by an evil company.
- An interesting balance: You'll notice that Obsidian is not open source but still doesn't lock you into its ecosystem. Closed yet flexible. Capitalistic yet kind. This is the sweet spot between the idealism of Universal Compassion and the practicality of Stability, and the proof of that can be seen directly in how well-loved and culturally successful this app is compared to similar tools.
An incredible platform for buying music from independent artists and small record labels, providing most popular audio formats including FLAC (the best one), ALAC, WAV, and MP3. Artist pages are customizable and expressive, and it's just a fun website to browse and discover new music that you can't find in many other places.
Quite frankly, I will not purchase a piece of music if I can't find it on Bandcamp, because I want to keep my music purchasing workflow simple.
Admittedly, I still listen to most of my music through Spotify because it's the best user experience for creating, organizing, and listening to playlists on any OS including Linux (which most streaming platforms still don't support). I make tons of playlists, so Spotify's UX is an essential part of my listening workflow. But I always buy my favorite albums on Bandcamp to help the music scene stay afloat.
Unfortunately, because there are no digital movie storefronts that offer DRM-free titles, and because bypassing copy protections on DVDs and Blu-Rays that I own is illegal in the United States, and because GitHub's guidelines prohibit the promotion of piracy, I don't actually use Jellyfin at all. Please move on to the next section.
Ableton Live, colloquially referred to as Ableton, is the best software for making music. There are other DAWs and musicmaking tools that are technically more modular and powerful, but Ableton strikes a perfect balance between speed, flexibility, and polish, and its intuitive interface design facilitates brainstorming, jamming, composing, and producing. Even while dipping my toes into Bitwig every now and then, I always come back to Ableton because it makes the most sense to me and lets me get stuff done. Every UI element is in a logical place. It's simple, yet powerful. I just wish there was a Linux version so that I could use it on some of my other machines.