Hi. Glad you’re still here.

I haven’t sent out an email since 2023 which is a long time ago. If you missed it, I’ve actually been writing a lot on my website. I started this newsletter as a challenge to express as much as I could. I’m no longer in the same state as I was back in ’23, and I don’t feel the need to push myself to create anymore. Creating became the default.

Every time I think about this newsletter, I question if I should resume it. One day the answer came to me: a newsletter is a new/old form of connection.

As many of you know, I don’t use any social media (not even LinkedIn anymore). Ever since I made a conscious decision to stop posting broadly, I noticed myself sending direct messages to my friends more often. If I feel something is important enough for my friends to know, I would just message them, even when it means sometimes I’d send the same photo five times. I like that. I also appreciate some of my friends sending me downloaded TikTok videos because they know I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise.

This newsletter can be something similar - email is an old form of communication. A quick update in your inbox could be a new type of connection.

Things I played with in Jan:

• Seagull Counting Club. Check out seagullcounting.club. I’m proud of the domain name.

• Launched magical.bingo, a monthly quirky challenge disguised as a bingo board. The February edition just dropped.

• Figured out how to use Cloudflare Worker KV to track download button clicks on the site (thanks, Alex!)

• Purchased a Xteink X4 e-reader because of this review

• Joined an Eng team and started creating PRs from the command line

Things I might take on in Feb:

• More analytics added through the Cloudflare worker

• Finish one or two books

• Finish Introduction To Computer Science And Programming In Python that I started this month

Down the road:

• I’d like to build a realtime TTC Display like this one. It seems like a cool project but I have no idea how any of it works.

This being an email newsletter means you are always free to reply. If you have any thoughts/comments/ideas, I’m happy to hear about it.

Until next time.

Kexin