I graduated three days ago from Tufts. On the morning of graduation, at 6:40am, I felt compelled to take a walk around campus with my camera. I found: The main stage being set up The cannon, usually painted by students, being covered with a thi

One of the biggest things I've learned from running JumboCode this year is to stop lying to yourself about how interesting your events actually are. University clubs often host boring events Many university clubs organize events that sound good on

Embarrassingly, I got enough parking tickets in 2024 to warrant a Parking Tickets Wrapped. April 25 Amount: $30 Reason: Parking facing the wrong direction near Davis Square in Somerville. My Defense: The street is so narrow that you can't even

I seem to redesign my website 2-3 times per year. I do it at all times of the year, but I always seem to be redesigning around Christmas: in 2021, 2022, 2023, and now. December 2021 December 2022 December 2

A year ago, I wrote a list of the projects I wanted to get done over winter break. Now that we've reached my final winter break ever (!!), I have made another list. For myself: A first version of War Room v2 Planning how we'll build JumboSmash 2025

One of my favorite assignments this semester—of my entire college career, in fact—was a recent one in CS 117: Internet-scale Distributed Systems. It was called FileCopy, and the objective was to copy a folder of files from one computer to another. Y

Every semester, I see a bit more ChatGPT being used in classes. This semester, the most obvious occurrences are in my Engineering Psychology classes. Engineering Psychology is a second major that I'm doing — it's the study of how humans interact wit

Some thoughts on AI and LLMs, based on being Head of Engineering for JumboCode, a club of 180 students at Tufts University that builds software for non-profits. For context, almost all of our developers are learning web development (TypeScript, Reac

A year and a half ago, the dining hall would run out of forks every evening. My roommates and I would inevitably have to eat with spoons. Finally, I decided to do something about it: I bought 180 forks. But I had to make sure that my altruism wou

Two weeks ago, Jerome and I won Tufts' first hackathon in 5 years! We built Tufts Meal Plan Wrapped, a Spotify Wrapped for your meal plan (that also demonstrates that meal plans are a scam), and got over 500 students to use it. The final product Fi

For Christmas, I gave my parents this e-ink picture frame (built from an old e-reader) that cycles through photos from a shared iCloud photo album: It's a re-worked version of a gift that I gave to my girlfriend in October, except that one was in

This is the first time I've done a year in review. I've really never thought to do it, but I figure it may be interesting to look back on — here goes: Work In January, Justin asked if I'd like to go from irregular/flexible freelancing for Buttondow

Of the things you do in life, 5% are guaranteed to go wrong. I don't know if it's 5%. Maybe more, maybe less. But some percentage of things will go wrong. Sometimes you step out of the house and slip on a patch of ice and rip your pants. Sometimes

I finished my semester yesterday! After a busy whirlwind of a semester, I'm excited to throw myself into some projects over winter break. While I was supposed to be studying for my finals, I put together a list of projects I want to ship over this b

A few weeks ago, I got scammed buying a camera on Facebook Marketplace. I bought the camera from a profile that was created in 2017. They had some other things for sale, too. The account looked legit — lots of family photos and comments from family

I wanted to build an ask-for-help form into an app that my JumboCode team built, in case the client had questions after we handed it off: But in true fashion, I decided to over engineer it. I thought, What if I had a little site that I could use t

Greetings from Croatia! I’m on vacation here with my parents. But in the airport, in the car, and in the evenings, I’ve been tinkering with building a note-taking app. The idea was for a note-taking app where you can ask an AI assistant questions

This is an idea for JumboCode (__What is JumboCode?_) that is not a particularly good idea, and JumboCode should probably not do it, but I thought it’s interesting nonetheless._ JumboCode builds these free apps for non-profits each school year, but

JumboCode is a club at Tufts that builds apps for non-profits. They’re letting me be the Head of Engineering for it next year! So I figured I’d write one short blog post about what it is, so every time I write about it I can link back here. The clu

For the past few days, I’ve been building an app for myself called Stickies. It’s highly inspired by macOS’ own Stickies app, which allows you to place sticky notes physically around your desktop. I’ve always really loved the idea of being able t

JumboCode is a club at Tufts that I’ve written about before. They form about a dozen teams of 10ish developers, and spend the year building an app for a non-profit. Most of the developers don’t have a lot of experience building apps (mostly for the

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about my recent decision to: Major in Computer Science (this was not a recent decision) Major in Engineering Psychology Minor in German The main reasons I gave were: Lots of free space in my schedule (Computer

This year, I’m involved in a club called JumboCode at Tufts. It’s a club that spends the year building a web or mobile app for a non-profit for free, and at the end hands it off to them. I’m a tech lead for a team that consists of: 1 project manage

My favorite features that I’ve added to War Room over the past year are expansion features, features that’ve allowed people (and me) to use War Room more. Dividers You used to have one continuous list of tasks. I was “limited” to about 20 tasks, be

It’s been a long-standing request in War Room to be able to add a task directly into a “divider,” instead of creating it and then dragging it into the right divider. I was thinking of ways to do it without cluttering up the interface and adding butt

A couple months ago, I finally added the ability to set due dates for tasks in War Room. I built my own modal with a calendar-style date picker when I did that, but recently I decided to replace it with a nicer implementation that felt more lightwei

Last semester, when things were getting stressful with schoolwork and freelance work, my girlfriend Trisha took my computer and made a note for planning out my tasks for the upcoming week. It was just seven headings, one for each day of the week, an

This past semester at Tufts, I added a second major: Engineering Psychology. So the current plan is to major in Computer Science and Engineering Psychology, with a minor in German. Up until this semester, my plan was to major in Computer Science and

Before this past semester I decided to put myself to a challenge: no dessert from the dining halls for the entire semester. I even made a spreadsheet to track it! And I did it! I made it for the entire semester without getting any dessert from dini

For a long time I’ve had the idea of publishing class notes on my website. I wanted to motivate myself to keep good notes (and an audience would motivate me to do that), and I wanted to have something to look back at a few years later (when I had in

At the end of my freshman year at Tufts, I wrote a recap entitled year 1. Although we’re only halfway through year 2, the time feels right for a halfway recap. I ended last year with a feeling that I had made less friends than I had expected. In se

Why a redesign? Last summer I had the idea to move away from writing daily blog posts, and to instead create one-off creative “posts” (like this one about a trip to Pittsburgh). A few months later, I realized that it wasn’t working: I just wasn’t f

Like a lot of people, I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of playing with the ChatGPT AI recently. I realized that it’s pretty good at summarizing news articles, so I decided to build a website that shows 10 NYTimes articles and short summaries of

As the first website that uses Superadmin, I built my roommate a portfolio for his art! It’s live at henrynitzberg.com. To get it working smoothly, I made a few changes to Superadmin: Being able to do one-off pages, instead of a collection of ent

I’ve spent the past two days trying to gain confidence that Kiwi will perform at scale (and tearing my hair out in the process). The largest classes that Kiwi will be used in have around 350 students. At worst, these students will all have the main

For the past few days I’ve been churning out new features on Superadmin, a CMS I built for my own projects and websites I make for people. It started with styling the entire interface — I built it September, but haven’t had the inspiration to style

There’s this tweet I came across a while ago: i guarantee you have a lot more ideas in you than you think. you don't have a lack of ideas, you have a lack of deadlines. I think that’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned by writing daily blog

I signed up for an Apple Card credit card a couple months ago because I truly am an Apple fanboy (and the Wallet app is very slick). You get 2% “Daily Cash” rewards on purchases, and Apple directs them onto your Apple Cash card in the Wallet app,

When building dark mode into a website, it’s tempting to invert the gray color scale across the site. Everything that’s white becomes black, and the in-between shades flip. This makes sense: light gray text on a white background (barely visibl

My favorite way of building web apps is to use Laravel, a PHP framework. I learned Laravel in the summer of 2020, but since then I’ve had phases of being on and off of it many times. I keep getting this feeling that other tools out there might be

I’m a really big fan of Tailwind CSS, a framework for styling websites. It took me a couple tries to get into Tailwind. I’d seen it around, but finally around two years ago I tried it again and it stuck. I think that the intimidating thing for

Bagel Institute is an app that I built for my dad. He’s a math professor, and in the summer of 2020 we were thinking about how to incorporate the nice aspects of online teaching back into the physical classroom. My dad was using Zoom’s whiteboard

I bought a new backpack for college. I didn’t mean to buy a new backpack, but I was strolling through IKEA with Trisha last summer when I found a $20 backpack. I bought it and strapped it into the back of the car for a safe ride home. A couple

When I went to Six Flags a month ago (the “Thrill Capital of New England,” as numerous announcements will remind you), I for some reason fixated on the hand signals that all the ride operators were doing. So I impulsively asked one of the ride ope

Every morning, I get an email from a bot that I created. The bot sends me links to my journal entries in past years. When I check my email first thing in the morning, these are some of the first things I read. They’re pretty short, and it feel

I’m really jealous of people who can get their first name as a username. For obvious reasons, it’s a bit difficult for me. The only thing that I can remember that I have ben as the username for is my username for Glow, the crypto wallet I’m workin

YouTubers who make videos about how to be productive all have the same job: being a YouTuber. I guess it’s an inevitability, right? You probably start off making videos in your free time, and then if you become popular you quit your job to make Yo

I’m a person who has settled favorite foods in different cuisines. Pad Thai at Thai restaurants, Saag Paneer at Indian restaurants, and Caterpillar Maki at Japanese restaurants. But Trisha tells me that I need to try new things. And she’s right, e

When two people talk, they take turns talking about each other. When three people talk, they talk about “third things.” It’s a generalization, of course, and completely based on my experiences. But I’ve found that it’s way more comfortable to talk

The driving school that I went to — the one that practically everyone at my high school went to — felt corrupt. I took my driving test at 6:15am on a Tuesday in the spring of my sophomore year of high school. I was scheduled for the previous Satur

I used to not understand when people said that they preferred one store’s bubble tea over another. To me, there were two tiers: good and awful. The awful stuff was made by stores that weren’t bubble tea stores, and everything else was good. Then I

Basecamp is the project management tool made by the people who made HEY, the email app that I use that I’ve blogged about before. I know I’ve fawned over this company before, but forgive me. One thing that I’ve always admired about Basecamp’s apps

My dad is a math professor, and I’ve talked a lot with him about the disconnect between professors and their students. One significant disconnect seems to stem from the fact that professors are highly interested in their subject, while the student

I was talking with Trisha about a new project. We were thinking of making the ratings for this project on a five-star scale. But I just didn’t love the idea of a five-star scale. But then Trisha had a fantastic idea (I can’t take any credit for it

Was the original idea of Zoom that you’d spend most of the meeting muted? The more that I think about it, I think the answer is no. The mute button just existed if you had to step off camera, burp, or your kid walked into the room. But when we

I’ve used RSS to subscribe to blogs for around two years. For those who haven’t come across RSS, it’s a standard format for websites’ content. A website can spit out a page in RSS format that lists all its blog posts, and then “reader” apps that s

There’s this new dating app called Schmooze that had people advertising on Tufts’ campus a couple months ago. The idea is that you “swipe memes, not people.” Instead of seeing pictures of the person you’re potentially matching with, you see memes

Trisha makes fun of me because I’m drawn to brand-name stuff. Like I think all of my cases for my Apple devices are stupidly overpriced Apple cases. And lately I’ve been considering which add-on to use for a client’s website, and I have a choice b

In recent weeks, I’ve tried to make it a daily habit to read 5 pages each day. And it’s worked pretty well! Almost every day, I’ve read 5 pages. I’m currently reading The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, which this habit took from about-halfwa

There’s this wonderful feeling that hits when I’m working past midnight. It’s the quiet all around, the stillness, and maybe the urgency that I have run out of hours in the day to procrastinate. It feels like I’m able to sprint through open air to

In middle school, I really wanted this smartwatch called the Pebble Time. I mean, look at this beauty: I don’t quite remember why, but I had to pitch my parents on letting me get it. Perhaps they were going to pay for it. But I remember mak

Have you noticed that things seem to always go to shit after you’re through them? I’m talking about schools, summer camps, and the like. Whenever you hear about how they’re doing things nowadays, it’s always worse than when you were there. I’m

While doing college applications, I kept telling two storylines about myself: I had spent the previous summer calling random friends who I didn’t know as well out of the blue and trying to get to know them better. I really enjoy doing personal pr

From the outside, apps seem resilient. You assume that things will work, and most often they just do. Altogether, things seem fine. But when you’re building software, it seems anything but resilient. You know where all the rough edges are and wher

One of the first apps I really liked was Dark Sky. It’s a weather app with hourly forecasts for days into the future. I used it for years, and it was my favorite weather app. In 2020, Apple acquired Dark Sky. They discontinued the Android v

I’ve been writing technical blog posts since October of 2019. At this point, I’ve written 177 blog posts on programming topics. Some of them are basic, and some are more involved. In a good month, they bring 15,000 unique visitors to my website. T

I realized while buying a new pair of shoes with Trisha today that my instinct is to refuse when offered to sign up for a store’s rewards program in exchange for a discount. But as I was checking out, I realized that my instinct to refuse is proba

I recently watched a great video about the science behind habit-forming. The gist of it is that you can imagine a toddler in your brain that makes in-the-moment decisions, without regard to their future consequences. There’s also a part of your br

Today, I got an email from Tufts about their Juneteenth Observance Ceremony next week. As part of it, they’re displaying the new Gerald R. Gill Papers Exhibit. Gill was a History professor at Tufts until he passed away in 2007. His daughter donate

At the moment, I’ve accumulated a list of aspirational daily habits: Publish a daily blog post, like this one. Publish a technical blog post. Read 3 articles that I’ve saved for reading later (I use Feedbin). Read 5 pages of a physical book (cu

There’s something insane about creating apps for the web. It’s the fact that your creation is immediately available to practically anybody, anywhere around the world, without needing them to download anything. Sure, native phone apps are often smo

I think I have an eye for design. Unfortunately, this is different from being able to design. That is something that I’m not really able to do. I find it difficult to come up with new and novel designs. Or to design things that look completely

A few years ago, I watched a video that mentioned how it’s been found that people with depression perceive more neutral interactions as negative. The brain literally goes into defense mode, altering your perception of the world. I don’t think I’ve

There’s this brand of pocket notebooks called Field Notes. They release a new notebook every quarter, and I like their designs very much. Just handling their notebooks brings me a lot of joy. I first got into their notebooks in the beginning of hi

There’s a funny thing about my to-do list: when I write something down on my list, it generally gets done. Contrast this to when I just try to remember it: it generally doesn’t get done. There’s something about writing a task down that suddenly

One of my favorite mantras in life is: Your feelings are not unique. It’s the idea that, whatever you’re feeling, other people feel the same way. There’s no way that you’re the only way that feels that way. And if you feel like you’re the only on

My internship this summer at Glow has made me realize how much I love recording screenshots. They have a habit of attaching a short screen recording to batches of code that they want reviewed by other engineers, where they show what they’ve change

I often feel like my past self and my current self are different people. My past self has big, healthy plans. My current self has lazy, short-sighted plans. My past self was worried about spending the entire summer working remotely from home, and

One thing about me is that I make up answers to security questions. What was the name of your childhood pet? Pear. What was the name of the street you grew up on? Recessed Lighting. I just put in any word that pops into my mind as I’m creati

On March 2nd, 2021 — over a year ago — I was stressed out of my mind. In the fall of senior year, my friends and I all won Class Council positions. We had managed to snag every single position — president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, and

Years ago, I heard CGP Grey recommend the album All Day by Girl Talk as music that he plays in the background to get work done. It’s a 70-minute album that’s meant to be listened to as one long song, which samples over 300 songs from other artists

When I was applying to college, I imagined my future stress levels in college. There would be no more schooling to apply for (since I probably wasn’t going to apply for graduate school), and needing to do well in college admissions was the source of

I had a thought the other day: maybe one of the things that makes a teacher good is that they have enthusiasm for the subject, and convey it to their students. This idea came from thinking about my Chinese professor last semester, whom I liked ver

I use an email app called HEY. I like the workflow that it gives me, and a bunch of features add up to me enjoying email more because of the app. That’s beside the point. One thing that I really like about HEY is that they come up with fun names f

In middle and high school, I was really good at the mechanics of writing. I found it easy to memorize the mechanics of capitalization and punctuation — that book titles were italicized and poem titles were written in quotation marks; that the peri

When I was a kid, my parents let me spend my own money. Where’d that money come from? To be honest, I’m not quite sure. A sizable portion of it probably came from my $5/week allowance, and then birthdays and Chinese New Year added up. But the r

I’m not a big fan of poetry. My exposure to poetry has consisted of poetry units in English classes over the years, which I’ve disliked. For me, poetry has been something to get through as quickly and painlessly as possible. Sometimes the teachers

A couple days ago, I saw someone on Twitter say that they always listen to music at 20% volume in the background to occupy the small part of their brain that wants to be distracted. They said that it helps them focus. I started doing that a couple

I was reminded today about how good the storytelling in public radio stories is. By that, I mean a tightly edited and heavily researched episode with lots of sound clips. Like This American Life or 99% Invisible or The New York Times’ The Daily.

Two weeks ago, I rewrote my personal website again. This time, I rewrote it using Laravel. My theory is that Laravel is super flexible and will let me do anything I want, so maybe I’ll stick with the framework this time. Of course, that’s been

In the summer of 2020, I spent a lot of time calling my friends. On the phone, too — not even facetime. I hadn’t done that before. But I just started calling different people out of the blue, and seeing whether they’d pick up. My idea was that

I’ve had this idea for a week or so that I should create an app called Black Hole. It would be a web app that I keep as a pinned tab in my browser, and then I dump all of my thoughts into it and have them for future searchable reference. I’ve been

37signals co-founder Jason Fried often writes about how we shouldn’t transplant in-person work directly into remote work. When a company goes remote (which was admittedly much more common in 2020), you shouldn’t continue to have the same meetings wit

I read an idea a year ago that I still think of fairly often. After graduating college, this guy created a Listserv for his college friends. (I am too young to know what Listserv is, but it seems like it was software for creating email lists for grou

Last month, I built myself a new to-do list app that I called “tmrw”. The novel idea was that each task could have a duration and time attached to it, and then you could see your tasks for the next few days laid out on a calendar. It was mo

At the beginning of the semester four months ago, I set a goal to use all 400 of my meal swipes by the end of the semester. Tufts forces freshmen to be on its most expensive and overkill meal plan for their first year, so I figured I would put that m

This semester I decided that, after eight years of taking Chinese classes, I’m not going to continue taking them next year. I’m honestly not quite sure why. I’ve heard that the next level of Chinese is significantly more difficult, and I’m not one

I’ve started wondering whether a lot of advice is flawed. Here’s the thing: advice is about telling people things before they’d naturally learn it. One person gets to the end of a journey and has a realization, and then wants to share it with peop

There have been many times in the past year that I’ve asked myself: why do I care about my grades? Because I do. I have a strong urge to get good grades, and I stress about grades. I stress about not being able to finish assignments or doing suffi

There’s this idea of parasocial relationships, where you feel like you have a relationship with someone but they don’t know who you are. It’s most often with famous people on the internet, where you feel like you know them because you’ve been given a

For most of the life that I can remember, I’ve had a strong hobby. In elementary and middle school I was obsessed with magic tricks — mostly card tricks. The first reason I ever had to use YouTube was to subscribe to YouTube channels that would te

Seeing Getir (an app for grocery delivery in 10-15 minutes) everywhere has gotten me thinking: I don’t understand this type of delivery app. There seems to be an abundance of apps that will deliver groceries to you in various promises of 10, 15, o

In freshman year of high school, my friend Christian and I made friends with a sandwich guy at school named Charles. We were new to the school, and so was he. We noticed that he was getting trained at the beginning of the year. So we started strik

For my girlfriend and I’s anniversary recently, I decided to build a gift I called the Portal. It consists of two iPhone 5S’s (purchased for cheap on Facebook Marketplace), sitting on metal charging docks (the charging dock style is one that Apple

There’s this new grocery delivery app called Getir that’s been taking Boston by storm. They promise to deliver groceries to you in 10-15 minutes, using warehouses placed throughout the city and riders on electric bikes and mopeds. After spendi

Recently, I’ve been writing my blog posts in batches. To let you in on a little secret: this is the third blog post that I’m writing on April 30th. I didn’t write it today. But I did polish it back up today. I write these blog posts in little batc

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve hung a lot of posters at Tufts to advertise 3Blue1Brown coming to speak. I’ve learned two things about hanging posters at Tufts: 1) Don’t hang posters on the first floor of Cummings. The Joyce Cummings Center i

Recently, the Tufts Math Department invited Grant Sanderson (creator of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel) to speak. My dad, who’s a professor at Tufts, organized the talk. And two weeks before the talk came around, I decided to make my own extra at

Now that I’m in college and we use Canvas, I deeply miss Google Classroom from middle and high school. Google Classroom was so good and I didn’t realize it until it was gone. You could write a Google Doc or make a presentation in Google Slides, atta

A couple years ago, Brian Lovin wrote about “incrementally correct personal websites.” It’s the idea that we put dates on blog posts and feel pressure that each blog post will be the final word on a topic, but that instead things should be iterative

In junior and senior years of high school, I ran a schedule app that ~2,100 students and teachers used. It’s a story I’ve written about before. But in the end, I decided to shut it down instead of passing it down to another student or continuing to

We just wrapped up our final project for CS 15: Data Structures, which was called gerp. It’s based on the Linux tool grep, and allows searching for a specific word in a folder of text files. I think this is the project where I learned the most this

I used to roll my eyes when people took tons of pictures on trips. Precious moments ruined by trying to make it look good for later, I thought. But last summer, I became the person I used to roll my eyes at. At the beginning of the summer, I impulsi

Last summer I kept deleting and re-downloading TikTok. I’d go in phases of realizing how much time I was wasting on it, and then want some entertainment again so I’d re-download it. But every time I opened TikTok for the first time, I noticed the sam

The last time I had to use Microsoft Word was elementary school. We’d type up our “essays” in Word, then save them onto a flash drive to keep working at home. Those were the days when “8GB flash drive” was included on my school supplies list at the b

Last summer, I devised the Bin System that I would use to store things in my dorm. I’ve mostly forgotten that it existed as the year has gone on, but I recently realized that I really like the system. Allow me to explain the system. I realized that

This is my 100th day writing a blog post every day. I started on January 13th, when I was on winter break from college, and now the semester has almost passed. I think it’s an example of something I’ve discovered I can be good at: stubborn consisten

I realized this morning that the English idiom, You can't have your cake and eat it too doesn’t make any sense to me. Why can’t I? If I have a cake, wouldn’t I be entitled to eating it too? It seems to me that the only reason to have a cake is to

Me and the people around me got Instagram in middle or high school. The custom is to follow and be followed by almost everybody in your grade and even other grades, so most of us seemed to have amassed 400-700 followers through middle school and high

Two weeks ago, I downloaded an app on my phone that makes me to do a slow deep breath every time I want to open specific apps. I set it up on Twitter, TikTok, and my email. I can still get into these apps. It’s just a lot more of a pain. But then,

I listened to a podcast today where the hosts were talking about how they batch creating podcasts and videos. They sit down every Monday morning and record at least two episodes of the podcast for the week, and over the summers they record enough in

I started using BeReal recently. It’s an app where everybody gets a push notification once a day, and then you have two minutes to post a picture of what you’re doing in that moment. One part of the app I thought was really interesting were what the

In CS 15, we recently learned about a way of storing data called hash tables. We’re now working on an assignment that uses them — a search tool for finding a word across thousands of books. I wanted to make an attempt at explaining how hash tables wo

It’s beginning to set in that the end of freshman year at Tufts is in sight. About eight months ago, on the day I moved into my dorm, I wrote this in my journal entry: Hopefully I’ll look back at today and think about how it all went better than I e

I’ve always found it strange that it’s so easy to stay up until the next day. Like staying up until midnight isn’t that crazy, so it’s quite easy to find yourself in “haha it’s now the next day!” territory. But it’s not really true. The day really e

My roommate brought up the idea last night that Tufts often says they want you to become a change maker in the world, but that they don’t really want you to be a change maker if that change creates an existential threat to the university. If you bec

I’ve been thinking lately about what I want the Ben Content Machine to be like. I know that’s a bit crass and self-important, but it’s an interesting thing for me to think about especially since I’ve started writing every day on this blog. I’m sorry

I was building a date picker last night, and I decided to structure it as three select boxes: I’m sure there’s nicer date pickers, but this was quick and easy. But then, I wanted to add more information to the day picker: an asterisk to indicate

Pluto as seen from the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015 at a distance of 476,000 miles We all know the uproar around Pluto not being a planet anymore. A poor planet, disbanded of its planetary status to become a middling dwarf planet. I have this ve

On TikTok, it feels like everybody’s in your peer group. Maybe it’s because TikTok hand-picks content that you like to see, and often that’s from people in a similar place in life to you. It feels like most everybody whose videos you’re seeing are q

This one isn’t deep, but it’s just a thought I had: there should be trash bags in the laundry room. The worst part of communal laundry is having to move other people’s laundry out of the washer or dryer when it’s done but they aren’t coming to move

I had a thought this morning, as I was getting ready at 7:30am for a morning class: I think that waking up early makes me happy. Then, I corrected myself: I think that waking up late makes me unhappy. I think that’s the distinction. I don’t real

At the end of senior year of high school, some friends and I ran the yearly senior tradition of Assassins. It’s a game where everybody pays $10 to play and is assigned a secret target, with the goal of eliminating their target with a water gun. The l

A lot of my projects are under the domain elk.sh. When I don’t want to buy a new domain for a project, I stick it as a subdomain under elk.sh — you can even see all the projects under that domain. It’s really all about having something as short as p

I usually use a framework called Laravel to build web apps for my side projects. One nice thing about Laravel is that the team behind the free framework also built Laravel Vapor, a paid app that helps you host Laravel apps. It’s purpose-built for La

I want my website to be more like a library. Not in the sense that it’s huge and that you can look anything up. But more in the sense that it contains lots of twists and turns, and holds a record of things that’ve happened in the past. And I want it

Last summer, the summer before freshman year of college, I had this idea that I’d keep really detailed notes on my classes and then publish them somehow on a website I’d make. It was a way to flip the activity: from doing work for the class, to doin

I have a page of my website at benborgers.com/swipes that tracks my progress towards using all 400 of my meal swipes this semester. When I rewrote my website a couple months ago, I tweaked the way that the page works, and I thought it’d be interesti

There’s a lot of posters up on campus, trying to get you to come to things or apply for things or do things. And sometimes I see them, and wish that I had an opportunity to design a poster too, to see whether I could make one that successfully attrac

One thing I enjoy about my current Tufts CS class, CS 15: Data Structures, is that I’m learning the things I’ve felt like I should know but didn’t. There was a certain class of concepts that I’d hear and not understand. When I heard people mention l

I’ve got to say, my enthusiasm for Chinese class is waning again. For the past couple weeks, I’ve been finding that the class is crawling by more and more slowly. I check my watch and it’s only been 15 minutes, with another hour to go. I find mysel

I’m back at Tufts after spring break today, and realized that there are only 5 weeks left of school. Only 25 days remain — so few that I wrote out 25 numbers on a sheet of paper and hung it up, so my roommate and I can cross them out day by day. I f

Three weeks ago, I went to get dessert in the dining hall. Three weeks ago, I saw one slice of apple pie left. Three weeks ago, there was one guy in front of me in line. I had just missed it. But instead, the guy in front of me cut the last slice in

I don’t really remember a time before smartphones and the internet. I grew up completely inside that world, and it’s completely intuitive to me. How to quickly scan and navigate buttons; when to refresh a website or restart an app; how to bounce betw

I’ve taken a couple rapid Covid tests over the past couple days, and (although this is weird) I really loved the instructions that came with the BinaxNOW tests. The aforementioned BinaxNOW test, which looks like a lollipop once you’re finished. S

Since I know how to make web apps, the urge to create personal software for myself and the people around me is huge. Whenever I see a problem that I or someone else wants solved, my first instinct is that I can build an app to solve that problem. It

Years ago, I heard about the concept of subvocalization on the Hello Internet podcast. It’s the idea that you hear a voice reading to you in your head while you read something that’s been written out. Apparently, there’s theories that it’s part of t

There are people who enjoy the process of editing their writing. I am not one of those people. It’s really hard for me to sit down and actually edit my own writing. I think it comes from a place of impatience; a place of not wanting to spend more ti

The new thing for note-taking apps is that you can link your notes together with “bi-directional links” — if you link from one note to another note, the other note also indicates that it was linked to by the first note. That’s the idea behind apps l

My dad told me an interesting idea about AI that I haven’t been able to shake since. The idea is that if you want an AI to be able to distinguish between cats and dogs, you probably have to show it a hundred examples. Then, eventually, it will be ab

In December, MSCHF released a project called Tontine. It’s a game where everybody pays $10 to play, and then you have to come back each day and indicate that you’re still alive. If you don’t do that for a day, you die in the game. And the last perso

My new iPad was supposed to arrive today, but instead UPS pushed the delivery date back until next week. What’s interesting was that I immediately felt like I’d been wronged. Like they’d promised me it’d come today, and I’d been looking forward to i

In yesterday’s blog post, I linked to an op-ed about how kids should be allowed to be bored more often. The article raises an interesting point that I think I agree with, but it also had some bits that made my blood boil: Life isn’t meant to be an e

At home, I listen to a podcast or music while showering. But in college, in a communal shower, I’ve decided that I’d rather not treat everybody in the bathroom to the wonderful voices of CGP Grey and Myke Hurley. But listening to podcasts finds its

Starting in third grade, we took the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test — the MCAS. It was an important affair. In the preceding weeks, we would prep for it in English and Math class. We were usually told that we already knew the con

In elementary school, I learned 60 digits of pi by memory. I’m not sure why — I think I was just the type of kid who would do that kind of thing (perhaps I still am the type of kid who would do that kind of thing), so I decided to do it. It’s a bit

College feels a bit like the land of endless socialization. A place where, if you don’t hang out with people for a day, your life feel like it’s going wrong. A place where every meal feels like it should be shared with a friend, and every piece of ho

Traits of a good bathroom lock: It’s completely clear whether it’s currently locked or unlocked. Testing whether it’s locked or unlocked from the inside doesn’t cause it to unlock itself. Bonus: you can tell from the outside whether it’s locked or u

Heart reacts have got to be one of the best inventions in modern text-based communication. By that, I mean the ability on any platform (iMessage, Messenger, Instagram, Discord, and scores of others) to react to a message with a heart: I love hear

I wrote a couple weeks ago about how It Doesn’t Have to Be Every Day. But there are a lot of times when doing something every day is immensely helpful. It catalyzes me to do things that I otherwise wouldn’t find time to do. For example: this blog.

Today, I did a bit of investigative journalism. Freshmen are required to be on the Premium meal plan, which gives us more than four meal swipes a day. But that’s an entirely unrealistic number of meal swipes to need, so I wanted to figure out what m

When humans tell stories, they like to tell them with a redemption arc. A happy ending. In fact, I learned in middle school that you can’t have a story without a conflict. The character starts out okay, goes through some sort of conflict with someon

Do you remember Couch Guy? If you don’t have TikTok account, probably not. If that’s you, I shall explain: In September, a girl posted a video on TikTok surprise-visiting her long-distance boyfriend. People were quick to point out a lukewarm reactio

I think that one of my biggest problems is that I get overwhelmed easily. I guess a lot of us do. But every time I notice myself stressing out, it’s always that the situation is overwhelming me. Sometimes I have a lot of long-term assignments coming

A cool fact that I came across on Twitter this morning: October 5th, 1582, never existed. In fact, the Gregorian calendar (the one we use today) skips from October 4th, 1582 directly to October 15th, 1582. Turns out that the Julian calendar, which w

In CS 15 (Data Structures), we’re currently doing the second of two back-to-back projects. This one is “CalcYouLater”, whereas the previous one was “MetroSim”. I’ll admit that I half-assed MetroSim to some extent. It ended up pretty fine, but my tes

I read a lot of r/AskReddit as a middle schooler. It’s a subreddit (forum) where people ask random questions, and then other people answer. The questions on the front page of the subreddit are generally quite interesting, because thousands of other p

Before last August, I would have recoiled at the idea of going to the gym. And then in August, my friend Kyuho and I decided late one night that we’d get our acts together and start going. I downloaded an app I’d heard of before called Fitbod, which

I bounce around productivity apps, and I don’t like that. I bounce from Notion to Craft to Goodnotes to Obsidian to something-I-built-myself and back again. I can’t stick to one thing. My notes are fragmented across apps. Things aren’t all in one p

In November of senior year, I added a Chick-fil-A tab to Blocks, the schedule app I built for my high school. Here’s how that came to be. In the year above me at Lexington High School we had Samuel Jefferson Andrews, who had amassed 2 million TikTok

There’s a radio station in Colorado that broadcasts the time. It’s WWVB, the station that the National Institute of Standards and Technology uses to broadcast the current time, tuned to the 60 kHz frequency. Day and night, this station diligently co

Isn't it surprising how little it takes to trigger social jealousy? Someone’s snapchat story. A passing comment. Seeing people’s shared location. Just a tiny spark can get your brain sprinting ahead, jumping to conclusions. And the biggest conclusio

A month ago, I wrote a scathing account of my first Chinese class. Which is true — that first class went quite poorly. So poorly, in fact, that of the nine students only six remained for the following class, which was mercifully in-person. But I wan

We got our next Computer Science project yesterday, named CalcYouLater (get it? Calculator?). I opened the instructions PDF last night, and saw that it was 29 pages long. I decided to go to bed instead. But this morning I read through the instructio

I’ve been seeing at a lot of errors lately in my code for CS 15: Data Structures. My errors, my friends’ errors, error error error. There’s always lots of cryptic errors. C++ is not a forgiving language, and would rather not tell you why it’s soiled

My dorm’s communal showers are already quite good. They’ve got this two-curtain design, which allows you to go into the first “airlock” compartment, get undressed and leave your clothes/towel/other prized possessions hanging, and then go into the sec

College is full of people who have information that they think is very important to you. And usually, it comes in the form of an email. For Tufts Residential Life, this information is a description of how the housing selection process for next year

You might have noticed that I have an affinity for doing things every day. This blog, for example, is something that I write every day. I’ve also written a journal entry about my day for every day since December of 2019, and I’m very proud of having

For some reason, I find it super difficult to keep things around when they’re useless. That’s a bit vague. Let me given an example. The first time I noticed this was when I was a kid, bringing a portable power bank with me in the car on a day trip

I think that one of the first web apps I ever created was an app for sending email newsletters. I stitched together Google Sheets and Google Apps Script to create an “app”, which would allow people to send email newsletters to subscribers. I think i

My dad’s always described the experience of listening to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, a Austrian-American 20th century composer who composed famously dissonant sounding “twelve-tone” music, like this: At first, it just sounds like a bunch of nois

When I moved these blog posts over to my personal website, I added something new: a small counter that reports, for the whole world to see, how many days in a row I’ve been writing these blog posts for. This one will be the 35th day in a row. The

Last September, I built a project of mine that I called “ben-edit”. It’s a simple way of enabling people I’ve built websites for to edit content on their website. For those who are programming-interested, it’s a git-backed headless Content Managemen

Over the summer, with infinite ignorance and optimism, I laid out a guideline for myself: I’d try to stick to doing work outside of my dorm room, like at the library, to maintain work-life balance. That way, my dorm room would be for fun things and s

I’ve rewritten my personal website! That’s something I tend to do a lot, but this time I wanted to do a quick rundown of the new site. The Look New design for the homepage. New design for blog posts. I’ve kept the rose-colored accents from my

There’s three different types of double and single quotation marks. Here’s an image, for your viewing pleasure: Behold. The first is a straight quote, and the next two are curly quotes (or slanted quotes, or “fancy” quotes). You’re technically

I think that meaningful conversation almost exclusively happens one-on-one. Meaningful conversation is conversation where you feel like you’re getting to know someone better. Not just getting to know their day better, or how they feel about it bette

Tufts has a radio station called WMFO, and my impression is that they have a ton of one-hour broadcasting slots to fill each week, so they have a ton of students coming into to each fill an hour of airtime. 24 hours a day, 7 hours a week. I learned

I sent my AirPods to Apple for repair on Friday, so I’ve been going for the past week with no headphones. (In my infinite technological optimism and refusal to pack bloat, I didn’t bring any other pairs of headphones to college.) It’s been a minor i

Here’s something I try to remind myself when I get stressed over school. Our brains, the most important thing humans possess, are just meat that has electricity running through it. Isn’t that insane? Electric meat powers everything that humans can

When I started exploring code in freshman year of high school, I would’ve called it coding. Perhaps even programming. But it wasn’t computer science. What I now major in is computer science — a similar sounding but utterly different thing. It’s a bi

I just got the urge yesterday to re-write my personal website, benborgers.com. Yet again. At this point, I’ve made almost 1,500 discrete changes to my personal website over the past couple years. I think I’ve re-written the code for it about ten tim

My first house was in Arlington, Massachusetts. Two years later, my family moved one town over to Lexington. The schools were better. And plus, I’d learned to walk, much to the chagrin of our grumpy downstairs neighbor. Now, I’m a freshman at Tufts

I did not have a good morning today. I woke up with a headache, stayed in bed for too long because of that (putting off going downstairs to get water to take Tylenol with), and then got caught up in a stressful frenzy of re-writing a client project.

I’ve been using a spaced repetition app to practice Chinese vocabulary for class almost every day since September. (For those curious, the app is Mochi, recommended by Benedict. Thanks Benedict!) Usually these sorts of studying habits don’t stick, b

Last night I built a feature on Ian’s blog so that he can lock certain posts behind a passphrase, so more private posts aren’t publicly accessible on the internet. I wanted to do a quick write-up of how the feature works, mostly for my own future re

I think that one of the most important things when building good software is that the user always knows where they are, relative to the app’s geography. For me, not knowing where I am in an app’s navigational structure is disorienting and overwhelmi

You’ve definitely noticed it too: every single one of those fancy tablets that you use to check out in cafes and bubble tea shops seems to have started demanding a tip. They’re called a Point of Sale terminal, or POS terminal, which could be a fittin

One thing I didn’t realize before going to college was how quickly you lose your access to personal space, and along with it your alone time. If you have a roommate, no space that you occupy is your own. Every space that you occupy either has other

We use Piazza for Computer Science classes. It’s a kind of forum for classes, where students can ask questions and other students or instructors can answer. And boy do people ask questions. Piazza famously spams everybody with more emails than they’

I recently passed a weighty milestone: 2,000 tasks in Apple’s default Reminders app checked off! It goes back about 2½ years, which comes out to a little over two reminders each day. Why so many? I’ve written before about how I believe that my me

To start: this post is written for an imaginary audience of high school seniors. You’re probably not one of those. If you are, I hope this is somewhat comforting. If you are not, I’d be interested to hear whether it resonates in some way. The beginn

As you may know, I rented an office near Tufts as an experiment. It’s a place for me to do work quietly and without distractions, and the half-hour walk to and from the office could also serve as nice exercise and putting myself in the right frame of

I just built a feature into War Room that allows people to define recurring tasks, which are re-added to their to-do list every day. For example, a task could be automatically added to your to-do list at midnight on weekdays. War Room’s interface

I love email. You should send me one! (Whether I know you or not! benborgers@hey.com) Here are some reasons: I feel in control. With texts, I use unread statuses to make sure I don’t miss texts. I’m very careful not to mark a message as read until

I’m currently sitting in the otherwise empty common room of my dorm on a Saturday night. I love this place. For a bit of background: I live in Houston Hall, which has an unexpectedly fantastic common room setup. First, the room itself is stocked wi

Every morning I fire up Snapchat and reply to a built-up pile of everybody’s snaps from the past 24 hours or so. It’s a completely meaningless activity: I open up a couple dozen photos of people’s faces, which I cannot see again after this one time

Good morning! Happy Friday. A painful first class The first meeting of my Chinese class yesterday started with a bad sign: another professor from the department was on the Zoom call, discretely telling my professor in Chinese how many students he h

👋 I’m trying the idea of morning pages, where I write three pages in the morning of whatever’s on my mind. It’s mostly for me, but I’m publishing them too because why not. Good morning! It's 7:18am and I’m sitting in bed. Remember what happened at

👋 I’m trying the idea of morning pages, where I write three pages in the morning of whatever’s on my mind. It’s mostly for me, but I’m publishing them too because why not. Good morning! I’m writing this from my twin XL bed at Tufts. It’s 7:06am, so

👋 I’m trying the idea of morning pages, where I write three pages in the morning of whatever’s on my mind. It’s mostly for me, but I’m publishing them too because why not. Good morning! Ian wrote a very nice blog post yesterday about the blog I set

👋 I’m trying the idea of morning pages, where I write three pages in the morning of whatever’s on my mind. It’s mostly for me, but I’m publishing them too because why not. Good morning! This time, it’s raining and the wind is howling. The blogs ar

I created this app called War Room where my friends and I can see each other’s to-do lists, and completed tasks go on a public feed for all your friends to see. You can react to people’s completed tasks with emojis, but for a while I’ve been frustrat

👋 I’m trying the idea of morning pages, where I write three pages in the morning of whatever’s on my mind. It’s mostly for me, but I’m publishing them too because why not. Good morning! I’m sitting in bed in 7 ºF Lexington, MA. How did yesterday’s

Tufts University requires all freshmen to be on its ✨Premium✨ meal plan, which includes 400 meal swipes per semester. Divided out, that’s 3.5 a day. But using them all is a challenge — there’s many weekends last semester when I would eat one or two

👋 I’m trying the idea of morning pages, where I write three pages in the morning of whatever’s on my mind. It’s mostly for me, but I’m publishing them too because why not. Good morning! Or actually, it’s 4pm. We drove back from the cabin in New Ham

👋 I’m trying the idea of morning pages, where I write three pages in the morning of whatever’s on my mind. It’s mostly for me, but I’m publishing them too because why not. Good morning! I’m writing this from a nice little cabin in New Hampshire. W

👋 I’m trying the idea of morning pages, where I write three pages in the morning of whatever’s on my mind. It’s mostly for me, but I’m publishing them too because why not. All-hands-on-deck this morning A couple days ago I built an API for a clien

I’ve started gathering in study rooms in the library at Tufts and doing work at night with friends. Out of this idea came War Room, a shared to-do list app with friends. You have your own to-do list in the middle, a list of everybody else on the

Blocks is a school schedule app that I created in the summer before junior year of high school, and ran for my junior and senior years. It was born from my high school switching to a six-day rotating schedule, which would be harder to memorize. Bui