Archive • Ben Borgers • Buttondown

Donating forks and an SMS-powered blog

Hello friends! It’s been a while since the last one of these emails — almost a year, to be exact. But let's get into it. Here’s what I’ve gotten up to in the...

Oatmeal blog templates and yet another note-taking app

Hello friends! Happy Monday. Here’s what I got up to in the last week: I shipped an early version of public blogs working on Oatmeal! You can write in...

Building Oatmeal.page

Hello friends! Two-ish weeks ago, I had this idea for a tool called Oatmeal — an app for turning a Notion database into a lightweight blog site. I naturally...

New blog, and an AI-powered note-taking app

Hello friends! I’ve been on a trip to Croatia for the past week with my parents, so there’s no better time to get a bit of fun work done. And so, I got a new...

A custom iPad display on my desk

Hey friends! It’s been a few weeks since I sent a newsletter — been wrapping up the school year (done with finals on Wednesday though!) Still, I should...

Building Stickies

Hello friends! I spent some enjoyable days this week building a new app called Stickies. It’s highly inspired by macOS’ built-in Stickies app. I really like...

Naive plans for JumboCode

Happy Monday! This marks the end of spring break for me, unfortunately. I spent a few days in Montreal with my friends last week, which was a whole lot of...

Scraping university menus

Hi friends! This week, I pushed forward my tufts.lol app, which is the collection of little utilities for Tufts that I’m building (to practice writing...

Playing with SwiftUI

Hello friends! This week I found a little time to start building out an app idea I’ve had for a while: wrapping the terrible university portals for dining...

Planning tasks in War Room

Hello friends! I started a new experiment this week: a monthly journal website at ben.page. I was itching to write some more unstructured stuff and this idea...

Too much effort for a cursor

February 20, 2023

Hello!! This week, I spent way too much working on a cursor. It’s for a client, who’s building a site out for their client. I’m just doing a few small parts,...

Fun bits of War Room UI

February 13, 2023

Hello friends! For the past few weeks I’ve had a kick of motivation to work on new features for War Room, a social to-do list app that I built and use with...

Planning your week in War Room

January 23, 2023

Hi friends! It’s been a bit of a light week with working on personal projects, because I moved back to Tufts to start the semester. I have been spending a...

Personal software

January 16, 2023

Hi friends! This week I had some extra free time to tinker, so I built an app for myself called Terminal. The idea is that it’d be a catch-all piece of...

January 9, 2023

Hello friends! This was a fairly light week on coding (I went skiing for the first time instead!), but I did successfully get out a few blog posts:...

Website redesign, semester recap, and iPhone apps

January 2, 2023

Hello friends! Happy New Year! I have a few updates for you from the land of being-on-break-from-school-and-having-lots-of-time. Website redesign! I took...