In Songbook Nick Hornby writes that

Dave Eggers has a theory that we play songs over and over, those of us who do, because we have to “solve” them, and it’s true that in our early relationship with, and courtship of, a new song, there is a stage which is akin to a sort of emotional puzzlement.

Hornby goes on to say that yes, we will solve the puzzle and the magic will fade, but there will soon be another song to solve, and then another one after that, and if you stack those up over time, and find the joy in them, you will have a life worth living.

My preschool-aged son is in the early stages of this discovery, and it seems like every few weeks there’s a new song on repeat. For a while it was ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” followed by a period of Bruno Mars, then Panic at the Disco’s “High Hopes,” and now we are at peak Weezer, with each drive to school consisting of a loop through “Island in the Sun,” “Photograph,” and “A Little Bit of Love.”

There’s joy for me in watching this happen, but I have also noticed a change in my own tastes: “Island in the Sun” has, for me, gone from a just-alright Green Album song to a head-bobbing jam, and “A Little Bit of Love” is my new favorite sing-along. (“Photograph” was always and will forever be an excellent Weezer song, but it’s still great to return to it.)

I’ve found that this is one of parenting’s true joys: allowing your child to teach you something new about the forgotten and seemingly familiar.

For nearly twenty years, I have tracked and taken notes on every novel I’ve read. But the tools for doing this have all been missing something. I’ve moved from paper notebooks to DEVONThink to Day One to Goodreads to Obsidian and a number of smaller apps in between, and each has shortcomings (in this context) that irk me. Last winter, I decided to make Commonplace, which is now available (for free!) on the iOS App Store.

Commonplace has a few features that I’ve found missing in other apps:

• Notes. Notes feel like a forgotten part of nearly every book-tracking app I’ve used. Commonplace’s notes are tied to a book or story, marked with the reading phase in which you took them (before, during, after, or re-read), and displayed in their own menu item. The app will also prompt you for a note when you add a book (“How did you hear about this?”). Notes are important.
• Short fiction. I read Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Commonplace knows about these publications, and it will let you add and track full issues and individual stories from those magazines. You can add star ratings to finished stories, and you can take notes about them. If you log stories, they will appear alongside your finished books. (And if you aren’t a short fiction reader, you’ll only see books in your lists.)
• Media formats. I read print books, digital books, and audiobooks. I like to note the format(s) in which I’m reading, and Commonplace supports that.
• Import/Export/iCloud sync. Commonplace can import individual books via its web extension or full catalogs via its csv import. It also exports in json, markdown, and PDF, and it supports the Micro.blog books API, so you can post your Commonplace books to your micro.blog bookshelves.
• Privacy. No ads, no analytics, no algorithms, no gamification, no nonsense. It’s just a database of books and stories and notes that syncs to your iCloud account. As it should be.

These are, admittedly, the features that matter most to me, and this is the app I want to use. It may not work for everyone.

It took me about nine months to get to a viable version 1.0, and I’ve learned a lot along the way. There are many rough edges I’d like to polish, and I’ll continue to iterate on this over time. Book-related APIs are a headache, and this app largely relies on the iTunes & Open Library APIs. Most apps like this (including Micro.blog’s excellent Epilogue) use ISBNdb, but that isn’t free, and I don’t want a significant monthly expense for a hobby project. If the app gains popularity over time I might consider a paid service as an option, but right now I’m relying on free APIs. Those have drawbacks (including coverage), but they contain nearly every novel I’ve read in the past ten years, so they’re good enough for me right now.

Commonplace is built for my workflows and my preferences, and I don’t see that changing. But I do hope that someone else finds it useful. It’s free on the iOS App Store, and it’s been a great learning sandbox for me.

Like many software enthusiasts, I have been tinkering with Claude Code and building small applications that help me solve a problem. Last week, I created a webapp (using React & Vite) to visualize a graduate curriculum revision. In the world before Claude Code I would have done this in Excel, but I prefer working with webdev tools, and I like to pair these administrative tasks with a new technology. The work is more meaningful if I can learn something along the way.

The resulting app helped me manage multiple outcomes and variables: the curriculum has to serve disciplinary needs, the courses have to meet minimum enrollment requirements, and—because our graduate students are mostly on assistantships—the whole degree plan has to fit within a student’s awarded years of funding.

The final app offers a planning grid, a timeline, and a course details view. It also allows me to select any student and see their degree path. I added support for multiple scenarios, and I can compare various curricular proposals and analyze their possible impacts on the program.

The resulting tool is more user friendly than a spreadsheet but also offers visualizations that have been useful for explaining the curricular changes to others.

When describing Claude Code to friends, I’ve said that this feels like the most exciting technological change of my lifetime. I can now identify a problem, plan a solution, and—in an afternoon—develop a tool that helps me solve it. I’m sure that my enthusiasm is also shaped by the tool’s nascent era, and my stance on this may change as we move into the world of advertisements and upselling and vulnerabilities, which are sure to follow. But for the moment, I am having a blast.