Notes from the night shift
The Night Shift
Dispatches from an independent software studio — what we learn while we build small, useful things, mostly after dark.
Engineering
The map is made of open tabs
The usual way to build a live map of the physical world is to buy sensors and rent servers to watch them. Thyseus does neither. It turns cameras that already exist and browser tabs that are already open into a sensor network nobody had to install — and that inversion is the whole product.
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In this issue
02–08- 02
Engineering
You shipped it. Did it work?
Most teams can tell you exactly what they shipped last quarter and almost nothing about whether it mattered. The feedback loop dies at the merge button — and that's the loop code-results is built to close.
5 min read - 03
Guides
Gantt chart, kanban board, or to-do list?
Three shapes a plan can take, and how to pick the right one — a plain-English decision guide based on the one question that actually matters: does time drive your work, or does order?
5 min read - 04
Guides
How to turn a plain-English plan into a Gantt chart
A practical guide to going from 'here's roughly what we're doing' to a timeline people can actually follow — the four things every plan needs, how to write them down, and the fastest ways to get the chart made.
6 min read - 05
Studio
In defense of small software
Big software promises everything and demands your whole workflow in return. We think there's a better trade: tools that do one thing, respect your attention, and get out of the way.
4 min read - 06
Engineering
The fastest page is the one that's already there
Our homepage used to hide its own headline behind 312KB of JavaScript. We rebuilt it to ship zero client-side JS — same animations, same design, visible before any script runs. Here's how, and why a tiny studio cares.
5 min read - 07
Design
The ten minutes before the meeting
Most tools are designed for the hours you spend in them. ganttchart.ai is designed for the ten minutes before a meeting — and picking one moment to serve changed every decision we made.
4 min read - 08
Studio
Why we only build what we run
No client work, no handoffs, no 'v1 and vanish.' Everything we ship, we operate — and that single constraint shapes how we plan, build, and support our products.
3 min read
New dispatches go to press whenever the trolls learn something worth writing down. Prefer definitions to essays? Try the plain-English glossary.