Guy Raz
I revisited "How I Built This", making the book behind podcast the 13th in my collection of favorites. I managed to read it in 9 days. I listened to podcasts about Figma, Snap and also one more that I cannot recall at the moment. To me, it's a good sign that I came back to this. It's a sign of fresh energy for 2026 that I am ready to start utilizing.
free with tech
Some people in my life have started to ask me where are the videos. I took a pause to get a fresh perspective, which I also talked about in my previous Now update. Today, I got some ideas on topics to cover and I am planning to publish the 1st video of 2026 tomorrow so let's see how far I get with my intention. I am going to do this one step at a time so no big goals for now. I made some great progress last year. However, I also have a new project in the making.
fwt. echo
Since my meetup about free with tech last year, I kept revisiting this idea that someone from the audience asked me about. It was about the ability to search inside a collection of paper journals. I keep track of project ideas, but some of them naturally stick and they keep coming back. The same was true for fwt. joex & fwt. axis, both of which are now on the App Store. The same is true now for fwt. echo, and it is now officially in the making. The priority is for it to be privacy-first. Journals contain sensitive personal information that needs to be protected at all costs. The main objective for this app is to help user find relevant pages for the topic they describe, using just natural language.
Local-first paradigm
I was happy to watch this Cult.Repo mini-doc video on YT yesterday. I was aware local-first exists, but this video got me excited about it. Also, it got me thinking.. Tech Independence at free with tech is actually about the same thing! I also realized there are these layers that I keep oscillating around: human-first, analog-first, local-first. That's how tech was supposed to be from the beginning. We have work to do.
