Yellowstone, Hus, and a Summer of Shipping
I have not written a blog post in a while. I have, however, shipped an absurd number of apps and driven a very old truck across several states with my family in it, so let's call it even and catch up.
The Land Cruiser still runs
We took the '93 Land Cruiser. I've had that truck for twenty-five years, which means it has now been in my life longer than most of the programming languages I use. It is not fast. It is not quiet. The gas mileage is a running act of penance. But it starts every single time, and there is something deeply correct about pulling into a national park in a vehicle older than the teenagers taking selfies at the trailhead.
Everybody has their spot in it. Everybody knows which window sticks. Twenty-five years in, the thing has a personality, and on a long drive it stops being transportation and starts being a small room that happens to be moving.
Hus
Here is the part of the trip that has permanently entered family canon.
We got up at 5:30 in the morning to get into Lamar Valley, because that's the deal with Lamar Valley — you go early or you go home. It was cold, it was barely light, nobody was fully awake, and there was steam coming off the grass in that way that makes you feel like you've arrived somewhere genuinely wild.
And then a single buffalo came running. Not ambling. Not doing the standard bison thing of standing in the road contemplating the void. Running, full tilt, across the valley, with what can only be described as a sense of purpose.
My daughter, without hesitation, named him Hus. Short for Hustling.
That was a month ago and we have not stopped. Somebody's late for school? "Better pull a Hus." Somebody crosses a parking lot with a little too much energy? "Look at Hus go." A single buffalo did one impressive sprint at dawn and earned himself a permanent seat at our dinner table.
He also got a motivational poster out of it, because of course he did:
The geysers deliver
Old Faithful is one of those things you half expect to be underwhelming because it's on every postcard in a four-state radius. It is not underwhelming. You sit on a bench with a few hundred strangers all quietly checking the predicted time, and then the ground opens up and throws water at the sky, and everybody makes the same noise at once. Very good. Highly recommend.
The basins around it are honestly the better show. The whole place hisses and steams and smells faintly like the inside of a chemistry set, and you walk the boardwalks realizing you're strolling across the roof of an enormous, patient volcano. The kid thought the smell was hilarious. That's a five-star review in my house.
Then the park just keeps going. The Lower Falls drops three hundred feet into a canyon the color of a creamsicle, and you stand at the railing doing the math on how much water that is and giving up.
And Yellowstone Lake, which is less a lake than a small inland sea that decided to sit at 7,700 feet, throwing weather at you from three directions at once.
Meanwhile, back at the desk
Somewhere in and around all of this, I built a lot of things. I went and looked at the commit log to write this post and even I was a little surprised.
Most of them are small Mac apps, which has become my favorite shape of project — one clear idea, no accounts, no cloud, just a thing that sits on your machine and does its job:
A Mac email client written in Rust on gpui, the same GPU-accelerated framework Zed is built on. Quarter of a million messages loaded and it still doesn't flinch.
A native IDE for DuckDB, and only DuckDB. No Electron, no web view, no twelve other database drivers you'll never touch.
A terminal UI and Chrome extension for pass, the unix password manager. Stores nothing, caches nothing, your own gpg does all the decrypting.
A macOS window manager with two modes on one keystroke: float everything, or tile everything Hyprland-style. Switch back and every window returns exactly where it was.
Sits in the corner of the screen and quietly panics on your behalf as a meeting approaches. Pastel gradient when you're free, rising embers when you're not.
See every Docker container and every process squatting on a port, with stop and kill one click away.
Drop in a CSV, query it with DuckDB, and ask it questions in plain English through a model running on your own machine.
The whole iOS Photos adjustment set, right-click, inside Finder.
Projects, tasks, timers, timesheets and Stripe invoices, all in one SQLite file, all in the terminal.
Plus the bigger ones got proper homes on the site too:
E-signatures you send from code: Markdown contract templates, webhooks, and an MCP server so an agent can paper a deal on its own.
Image resizing where the whole API is just a URL. Crop it, convert it, hand it a srcset, never touch an SDK.
Gallery management that reports back — send a viewing room out and find out which pieces actually held the room.
The best launch of the summer wasn't mine
My daughter Nyla made three games, and they now live at Nyla's Place — LlamaSquish, Cuppa-Corn Café, and Get It, Make It, Got It! They're playable right in the browser. She has more on the way, and she's been shipping at a rate that, frankly, makes me look slow.
Building app pages for a dozen of my own projects was fun. Building one for hers was better.
So
Good summer. The truck held up, the kid saw a volcano breathe, and a buffalo gave us a family catchphrase that will outlive all of this software.
More posts soon. Or at least sooner than last time.
Hus out. 🦬