For the past 5 months or so I’ve been working on Metome, a personal diary web app. Today, I decided to throw in the towel.

I started on the sketches for it after leaving a particularly crappy job. There were things I wanted to reflect on and express that I felt I had no real place for.

The design of the app was guided by the belief that a good diary is an unfiltered place of raw expressiveness. I was designing a no-pressure place for intimate, imperfect content to feel personal.

The pitch for Metome, is something I was particularly happy with:

Write for yourself and answer to no one.

A lot happened in those 5 months though. I got a new job, I made this blog, and I’ve been enjoying the paper Hobonichi Planner more than I thought I would.

But at the heart of it, working on the code just started to get depressing. It wasn’t an unmaintainable spaghetti mess or anything - it’s not so bad. And while the last straw was having yet another middleware component get deprecated without a well-documented alternative, it wasn’t that either, not really.

It just wasn’t fun anymore. I feel shitty for saying that, like I’m a quitter or something.

Rationally I know I shouldn’t feel guilty though. Nobody was depending on it yet, and I was passing on the things I wanted to do to spend time on the thing I didn’t.

I don’t think working on Metome was a sunk cost though. Diving head first into the world of servers, I learned Mongo, Socket.io, Node and a bunch of other things arguably ahead of the curve. I also gained an appreciation for the nuances of form design, software pricing, and single page apps.

This was my first large end-to-end project, and my first time with a lot of new things. Likely, future attempts will be smaller and less tumultuous, although I may end up trying something totally different next time.

Fork it on github

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Once upon a time people communicated by writing their emails on paper and putting them in envelopes. We tend to remember these personal letters as being pretty elaborate.

Dearest Nora,

I hope this letter finds you well. It is with a wistful heart that I write you. When it’s raining like this, and we’re together it feels as if we’re the only ones in the world.

Missing you,
Manuele

The shorter, snapchat equivalent is a tad more ambiguous.

Hey girl,

Less is more? Less is less!

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

While the creation of emoji for Docomo in the 90s has been well told, the history of the kaomoji only really exists in the dustiest corners of the Japanese internet. From what I could piece together (I’m a real archeologist), the first kaomoji was used in 1986 on a disability-related bulletin board.

It was this guy by the way: (^_^)

As you can probably guess, I really like kaomoji.

Sometimes I use them in code comments (mostly to myself):

var hello = "world"
// this function is demented ヽ(゜Q。)ノ？
function() {
	return "hello" + hello
}

I’ve snuck them into error messages on stuff I’ve designed:

Being expressive and easy to remix, they’re just fun to send. After the apocolypse, it’ll be beetles, .txt files, and kaomoji.

(／^)／ 　　　●　＼(^＼)

No one’s gonna argue against emoji’s (personally, I’m partial to the snowman). I think there’s a place in the world for both to sex up your correspondence.

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