Hey, friends—

I wrote, arranged, recorded, and mixed my first full song demo. It’s called Hard Work. I wrote it in the thick of a summer heat wave here in New York, when the wildfires left the city in a haze. I was feeling depressed and overwhelmed, and trying to remind myself that things will be okay, as long as I can get up and work toward goals, a little bit, every day.

Take a listen and let me know what you think.

In other news—some of you have asked how I’ve been doing since I left my job in April. It’s a nightmare in tech right now. I’m still looking for a job, and I did not expect it to take this long, over a decade into my career.

The number of tech workers laid off since the start of 2025 is on track to hit half a million by the end of this year. Between January 2022 and today, over 1,354,000 tech workers have gotten the chop.

I was going to vent about AI here, but, well, I’m tired of reading, hearing, and thinking about that technology, so I will skip on to better news.

I’ve taken some of my unemployed time to work on projects:

• I built astro-lilypond, an Astro integration for rendering musical scores from text: lilypond.ky.fyi. I used it to add two piano arrangements to my site: ky.fyi/arrangements.

• I redesigned genderswap.fm, my site for collecting and archiving gender-swapped covers. In addition to Spotify, songs now link to Apple Music, YouTube, and Tidal. Submit your favorite covers.

• I wrote a case study about the data-driven design systems work I did at Scribe.

• My personal site is now faster and more accessible, and achieves a carbon rating of A+, cleaner than 94% of all web pages globally. (It ain’t much, but it’s honest work.)

I haven’t been on social media much recently, but if you want to reply to this email and tell me about how things are going for you (hobbies, job applications, movies and books that have been inspiring you, anything), I’d love to hear.

To finding ease,

Ky