vogt.world

One-hundred things

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:07:29 -0500

In any organization or company, there are one-hundred things. Now, at any given moment, ten of those things are very important, thirty of those things are somewhat important, fifty are maybe a little nebulous as to their import. And then the last ten are largely inconsequential for the time being.

You really only need consensus on the top ten. You need functional disagreement and maybe a little friction on the next thirty. You need general knowledge of the fifty in the middle, as they range from good-to-know to I-don’t-know. But it’s okay to have the disagreements on those too. For the last ten, at least one person should be a fucking nutcase about at least one of those bottom ten things. But everybody else can have an indifferent opinion on those bottom ten.

Log

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:50:00 +0000

Facebook Marketplace first introduce the “ask if this is available” pre-filled message. Now they’ve introduced a setting so that listings can have AI respond to messages about availability. This feels like Product Manager KPI fraud…

08/02/2026 09:50AM

The year is 2026 and if you’re writing something online, your goal is no longer to write something well. Your goal is to write something that doesn’t have any AI tells in it. I don’t care if you for real use the phrase “[thing] is real.” Your goal is to NOT sound like AI.

Honk the horn

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0700

I’ve often heard from engineers that it’s not our job to write code, it’s our job to solve business problems. When working for a company, I suppose that’s strictly true. But it’s also okay to like the many parts of your job that are involved in that goal, or are orthogonal to it.

Once I heard someone even say it’s not your job to “solve business problems”, it’s to “write code that satisfies requirements.” Oddly enough, I’ve heard the exact opposite of this from other engineers; throw any requirements overboard if you know better. Again, I suppose these are true, but, largely pedantic.

Best practices are relative

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0700

Maybe I’m just obtuse, but whenever I read an article from a company, or programmer, or really anyone talking about “best practices”, it always seems like the examples are either obvious, and therefore un-illustrative of best-practices, or non-specific, and difficult to tell if the best-practices actually solve for the problem.

Best practices seem to range across three general categories:

Common: Practices to prevent mistakes that are very human, and very common, regardless of how experienced or “good” you are.
Training Wheels: Practices to prevent mistakes for the lowest common denominator, and not very common, but are good ideas for you if you are the lowest common denominator, or adjacent to them.
Checking: Practices that prevent mistakes that are some combination of rare in probability, easy to imagine, hard to do, but dire in their consequences.

The first category (Common) is the good one. The second one (Training Wheels) is the okay one, but it’s a hard sell. No one wants to be told that they’re the reason the rule exists, and everyone is generally trying to not be the rule.

About

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Ben Vogt and I’m a software engineer living in Chicago, IL. This site is where I write about programming and things I’ve built. Emails addressed to benjvogt@gmail.com are always welcome (though I would greatly appreciate it if you would write them by hand, not using generative AI.) My GitHub profile is github.com/vogtb.

2026-06-13-cat-shelf

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2026-06-07-door-county

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2026-05-23-back-in-chicago

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2026-03-20-surf

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2026-03-13-east-facing

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A code to code by

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:00:00 -0700

At Replo, I was trying to get a handle on how to explain what we should and shouldn’t do. We had a really solid, very extensive, and well-written Notion section of our best practices for code, support process, and RFC, but it was, well, almost too verbose. I was trying to figure out a succinct way to say “here’s a rule that lets us work with fewer rules” or rather “here’s a couple of rules that helps me not have to post about what we do/don’t do on Slack.”

2026-02-27-cal-coast

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Glade: cross-platform GUI library in Typescript that uses WebGPU

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Glade is a cross-platform GUI library for Typescript that uses WebGPU to render apps at >60fps, for browsers and native macOS.

Glade running side-by-side on native macOS (left) and in browser (right)

Glade is basically a library for writing cross-platform graphical applications with TypeScript and JavaScript. It includes an application framework and component library (text, inputs, flexbox layouts, etc.), all drawn using WebGPU. For browsers, it renders to a canvas element. For native macOS, it renders to a GLFW window via Google’s Dawn WebGPU implementation.

82ef1073

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:55:03 +0000

4e26df16b297

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:34:16 +0000

a2ecdab5

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:12:51 +0000

Bun GL Part 2: Glade, a cross-platform WebGL library

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A couple days ago I made a simple POC of using Bun and OpenGL to create a native GUI application. I decided to go a little further and write a small cross-platform library so you can write fill OpenGL/WebGL apps including keyboard/mouse events.

Demo of events pass-through.

I called it Glade, and you can see it on GitHub: github.com/vogtb/glade-poc.

(Glade is a backronym for GL-assisted drawing environment, which seemed like a fun name for not-super-serious project.)

Bun GL Part 1: Using OpenGL via Bun's FFI

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a minimal example of using Bun’s FFI module to render a GUI using GLFW and OpenGL2.

I’ve been keeping an eye on BunJS for a while now because if its ability to compile to single file executables. Given Bun’s recent acquisition, I though it’d be interesting to explore the possibilities of writing GUIs using typescript without the DOM. This is a very basic example of using C bindings to do that.

Zig GUI from scratch (part 2)

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Some things seem like a good idea, but really aren’t. And even if you know it’s not a good idea, you can’t help but think, well, it’ll be fun at least. Or maybe it’s just me when I had the idea to use WebGPU + Dawn for this project.

Previously: Zig GUI from scratch (part 1)

Zig GUI from scratch (part 1): In Part 1, we started building a cross-platform desktop GUI app from scratch in Zig, targeting WASM, macOS, Linux, and Windows, and using OpenGL/WebGL and SDL2 for native windowing. It's some of the boring stuff like app structure, but also some of the more interesting parts of Zig, like comptime imports. We also planned out and partly implement the platform-specific modules that all use the same implicit interface, split across app, platform, graphics, and js modules. Also (not to list everything here) we worked on the the JS system call layer for wasm, using a modified version of mitchellh's zig-js extended to serialize arbitrary JSON so complex types like vertex arrays can cross the wasm-JS boundary. In the end, we've got a basic "hello canvas color" rendering on both web and native! Also had a little digression on using code gen for OpenGL bindings.

ape-no-fire-ape

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 20:49:42 +0000

ben_4121

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 16:42:41 +0000

ben_4181

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 22:48:38 +0000

IMG_8050

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 19:10:33 +0000

80ea3fd

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 20:51:35 +0000

A spreadsheet in Go

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0700

As a way to get back into a language, I like to build spreadsheet engines. I’ve gotten pretty good at it, even if I’m always missing some little feature. There’s always something that doesn’t make the cut, like formats, array-format ranges, or multi-dimensional arrays. But it’s fun, and interesting, and it’s a neat way to brush up on a programming language, in this case, Go.

You can read the source code here. github.com/vogtb/go-spreadsheet

Project constant.ts files are bad

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 12:13:09 -0700

The pattern of using a constants.ts is not a good one. The fact that a variable or some block of code is constant tells me nothing about its use. Is it configuration? Is it an environmental variable? Is it a magic number? Based on the name of the file, I couldn’t guess; it could be all of these or none of these.

We should name files after what they do. queue.ts, config.ts, env.ts, main.ts, build.ts, Toolbar.tsx all give me a pretty good idea as to what I’ll find in the file.

2025-07-19-9a7f26d

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-07-09-bf8h1e8

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-06-30-cat-desk

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-06-13-a+b+alk

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-06-13-golden-gate

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-06-13-golden-gate-park

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-06-13-seagull-alk

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-06-13-sf

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Spreadsheets and similar tools

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a review of all relevant spreadsheet-like products, services, tools, and technologies, as well as blogs, articles, news, and notes related to spreadsheets. I started this back in 2017, and I haven’t updated to it in a year or two, but it’s fairly complete. Since I’ve shared it with friends and colleagues working on spreadsheet-like interfaces, I thought I’d share it here as well. Never know who may find it useful.

IMG_5665

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:19:35 +0000

Building a music making app with Swift (part 2 of N)

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I wrote “Building a music making app with Swift (part 1 of N)” and never really followed up. I’ve been chipping away at it every now and then when the mood strikes. So here’s a couple updates on it.

A work in progress.

Expanded idea with a better layout

Scope-creep is real. But honestly, for a project like this, it’s only a problem if I’m not having fun. So with that in mind, I wanted to expand this app a bit. There are a lot (A LOT) of sampling iOS apps, or sequencing apps on the Apple App Store, but I thought it would be neat to combine some of the best ideas from them to create this sort of app that lets you switch between sampling, sequencing, and instrument creation modes in a couple of simple screens.

2025-03-08-ag

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-03-08-ajl

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-03-08-ct8

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-03-08-hb

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-09-feeder

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-09-h

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-09-m

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-09-p

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-07-lesser-golf-finch

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-07-us

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-06-says-phoebe

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-06-says-phoebe-2

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-06-the-birder

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-06-tory-pines-rock

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-05-nick

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025-02-05-swim-area

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2024-11-27-crestline

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-11-16-cdf5aa

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-10-31-fence

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Zig GUI from scratch (part 1)

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 10:24:06 -0700

This is the first of hopefully many posts as I work on building a cross-platform desktop GUI application using Zig. I’m probably going to open-source this at some point, but in the mean time it’s fun and interesting to write about. Hopefully I can share the details, reasoning, and things I’ve learned along the way.

These posts are going to be informal and unceremonious, and I’m not going to ask pardon for it; the goal here is to write something, and keep the updates flowing, rather than make them perfect.

2024-10-19-cat-curtain

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-10-07-switzer-canyon

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-09-27-green-beetle

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-09-05-new-neighbor

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

56004bec

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 13:28:36 +0000

2024-09-02-cowles-mountain

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-08-28-pelican-sunset

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-08-11-4d5cc8e

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-08-11-9f4a14f

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Quick tree-sitter grammars

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 11:22:44 -0500

Quick is a formula language that I wrote a couple years back for a spreadsheet product called PT1. Tree-sitter is really great at this sort of thing, and, much easier than Antlr, which I’ve used in the past to build formula-like parsers. The basic code is one where you can execute simple calculation-like blocks, but not define vars. Was trying to stay simple here. Depending on the context, we used different implementations of functions, like when aggregating with sum() vs adding scalars with sum().

annies-canyon

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 14:08:22 +0000

welcome-utah

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 04:03:41 +0000

alcatraz-seaguls

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 15:23:37 +0000

alcatraz-seaguls-moon

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 15:16:50 +0000

alcatraz-seagul-fireplace

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 15:14:38 +0000

sf-from-alcatraz-4ef8db

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 15:12:49 +0000

alcatraz-seagul

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 08:42:30 +0000

440-n-wells-e869c0

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 21:10:16 +0000

2024-04-19-bloom

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-04-12-break

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-04-03-mx

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-04-02-chichen-itza

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-04-02-fl-tr

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-03-24-cat-brick

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-03-09-moss

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

440-n-wells-5ffd46

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 01:50:07 +0000

duck-b-2024-02-26

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 15:11:16 +0000

duck-a-2024-02-26

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 03:34:28 +0000

sf-99cd56

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 19:54:18 +0000

sketching-529e48

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 14:17:54 +0000

sketching-0fe4da8

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 14:30:35 +0000

2024-01-20-uptown

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024-01-01-new-year

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2023-12-23-IMG_2369

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-12-09-IMG_2271

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-11-27-winter-leaves

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

title: “2023-11-27-winter-leaves” description: “2023-11-27-winter-leaves” date: “2023-11-27” image: “2023-11-27-winter-leaves.jpg” thumb: “2023-11-27-winter-leaves_thumbnail.jpg” kinds: [“photos”, “jpg”] type: “photo” layout: “index”

2023-11-18-cat-radiator

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-10-08-ohare

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-10-05-the-generationals

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-09-23-garfield-park-conservatory-night

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-08-07-acadia

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-08-07-acadia-lookout

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-08-06-acadia

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-08-06-acadia-rock

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-07-13-rock-island-boat-house

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-07-13-rock-island-sunset

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-07-13-sunset

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Building a music making app with Swift (part 1 of N)

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 10:19:01 -0500

Here are some scatter thoughts on building a little music making app with Swift. I went from design to prototype in about a 10 hours of work, and maybe another 20 to get it to something a little more polished.

Physical pads, sequencers, and samplers

I started by designing the app with Figma. I wasn’t really planning on building it at first, I just wanted to design something for fun. Looking at physical synths, portable DAWs, sequencers, or samplers, it’s fun to find the patterns and see what physical constraints are useful and could be fun to adopt for the screen.

2023-06-30-the-mountain-goats

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Status update - May 2023

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 14:54:42 -0500

Smaller prototypes, SQLite WASM, and more.

Single-file tools

I’ve been trying to make smaller things lately. I have a habit of getting ahold of a fun idea, then making it not fun by biting off more than I can chew. Sometimes that’s good. It’s fun to find that something is easier than I thought. Or maybe as hard as I thought but still possible. Other times it’s just a bummer to leave something unfinished because it was just too big.

Single-file application

Wed, 31 May 2023 14:31:49 -0500

tl;dr → Compile JS and CSS assets into a single .html file that can save itself, and you’ve got yourself a little portable application.

Small tools

I like writing little tools. Tools to help me do my job, tools to remember things, tools to track things, record things, update things, send reminders, send emails, save files.

Apple’s Shortcuts app is really good for this. Or at least some of these things. But they don’t plug it into any of the real useful parts of iOS. Can I create an entry in the “Share Sheet” to automatically email an article I’m reading to myself? Yes. Can I create an app to toggle notifications for one app and one app only? No. There’s room for improvement there.

2023-05-29-nylon-stitching

Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-05-27-confluence-great-blue

Sat, 27 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-05-27-confluence-with-rocks

Sat, 27 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023-05-13-alice-lake-michigan

Sat, 13 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Status update - April 2023

Tue, 09 May 2023 13:49:44 -0500

Been working with gVisor, WASM, Next and more. Trying to do more one-day-projects in my free time, but they usually end up taking a week. So maybe next month I’ll try doing more one-hour projects, and I’ll end up with something that actually takes a day.

Static git repo site generator

Built a little static git repo site generator. You can read more about it here.

gVisor, runsc

I’ve been working on some projects that involve researching virtualization techniques. gVisor has been one of the main ones. It’s surprising that right off the bat I’m seeing better numbers when compared to containerd/QEMU when testing locally. A simple nodejs test gives me a really low cold-start time using runsc.

Git static site generator tool

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 13:31:49 -0500

gshr is a simple static html site generator for multiple git repos.[0] I wrote it as a fun little project because I haven’t written Go in a while. You can browse the full code inside the gshr-generated site itself at git.vogt.world but I’ve also got it up on GitHub at vogtb/gshr.

Here’s a screenshot.

Screenshot of 'gshr' showing the commit log page

It produces a single output directory for multiple repos, with…

Excel pivot cache madness

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 13:11:42 -0600

This is exactly the sort of thing I don’t like about Excel; an archaic, 2003 / 2007 “gotcha” that is common, baffling, and a pain.

tl;dr Excel shares a hidden cache between pivot tables so changes to one pivot table can affect others.

The problem goes like this.

If I create a table, enter a bunch of data, and create a pivot table off the initial table, then Excel silently creates a pivot cache to optimize any analysis for the pivot table. So far so good, right? Well, not really.

SQLite notes

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 11:09:17 -0600

Notes, links, snippets, thoughts, and more on sqlite.

Extensions (https://www.sqlite.org/loadext.html) are the catch-all way of doing sqlite customization. There’s a guy named Ricardo who wrote about how to use Rust for extensions: https://ricardoanderegg.com/posts/extending-sqlite-with-rust/. Another person on StackOverflow outlines how you can build a custom version of sqlite that contains the extensions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30898113/how-to-compile-an-extension-into-sqlite. Some useful extensions that others have created at here https://antonz.org/sqlean/.

When writing custom functions that need access to more data than a simple argument, you can use https://www.sqlite.org/c3ref/get_auxdata.html. For example, if you’re using a regex in a function, you don’t want to compile that on each function invocation, so you can do it once, and store it using the auxiliary data setter/getter. But you could also probably use information from the argument to lookup values on your own. For example, if the regex has the same hash or checksum as the last time you used it, just save it to a thread-local.

Postgres notes

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 11:10:00 -0600

Some notes on Postgres. Sort of a part of a personal wiki I’m working on.

Run v8 inside PG for triggers, etc: https://plv8.github.io.

The pipelining feature is neat: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/libpq-pipeline-mode.html. Really helpful when you’re using a write-only pattern with multiple statements that need to be sequential.

The function unnest will unnest arrays all the way down, which can be confusing when you’re using custom types like create type element_id as (st int4, mid int8, cap int8);. Just something to know.

Makefile notes

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 15:38:00 -0500

Here’s some working notes on how I keep Makefiles. This isn’t so much a tutorial as it is a set of patterns that make sense to me for monorepo projects, or even just large projects.

There’s a subtle difference between variables and prerequisite expansion. It expands variables in the order it finds them, targets and prerequisites immediately, but rules are deferred. So you can’t do things like using variables as prerequisite names, or grouping variable dependencies into variables, unless you want to explicitly define orders of those dependencies.

2022-10-13-arches-park-near-balanced-rock