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Making pebble apps in 2026
‘Member Pebble? It was one of the first smartwatches in the market, and in my personal opinion, the only one that got the concept right: it was minimal, efficient, and tinker-friendly. People could program apps for it, just like with a smartphone. Pebbles were so popular back in the day that the company died of success: took up too much investment, and ended up being bought by Fitbit, who officially discontinued the project in 1016.
The community around Pebble was naturally disappointed, to the point that a group of enthusiasts (who called themselves “the Rebble Alliance”), found a way to keep their watches alive by building their own replacement of the online services and app store, and scraped all of the existing watch apps and faces before the official ones were shut down. But ultimately, our devices ended up dying of old age.
Then last year, Pebble’s original author announced that they were resurrecting the project: and there was much rejoicing! Production took a while, but as of today you can buy a brand new Pebble watch. And whatsmore: they imported all of the old archive of apps and faces rescued by Rebble into the new app store, which are still compatible with the new watches. A success story in digital preservation!
Recently, there was a official app-making contest which served as the perfect excuse to build a couple of apps ourselves.
Read on →
One of the apps we've build: a Neko wristmate
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Minilos: a device for intentional listening in the digital age
It’s funny how in the age of digital music, vinyl sales are soaring. Sure, Spotify and the likes put all the music in the world at our grasp - but we’ve lost something along the way. We end up just listening to whatever the algorithm fancies, rather than curating our own musical choices. Which is why people are turning to the physical experience of collecting records and playing them intentionally.
That’s all very romantic, but impractical: vinyls are expensive to buy (and more so now that they have turned into collector’s items), and let’s be real, they don’t have the best sound quality (although some people actually prefer it that way).
So, we invented our own solution: minilos. A device that uses mini vinyl records as triggers to play digital music from a speaker. Read on for all the details about the implementation.
Read on →
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Pizza&Peli: personal movie session planner and tracker
At home we do a weekly movie session with the kids, which is met with high anticipation. But we’re not the kind of folks that just pop open Netflix of Disney+ and watch whatever is there - no, we take our children’s education seriously, and as hopeless geeks, that obviously includes carefully curating the selection of movies we consume, so that we expose them to cinematic gems at an age-appropriate rate.
We used to just keep a list in Obsidian with movie ideas as they came along, but as the list grew longer it became difficult to manage. Also, often other parents ask for recommendations on which movies we’ve watched and liked, but we had to rely on our memory to recall them.
So, we’ve built an app to manage both usecases: Pizza&Peli.
Read on →
Named after the way we call our movie sessions at home 🍕
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My journey as a Djangonaut - from zero to contributor in one space mission
Disclaimer: I’m a fan of open source. The spirit of openness and collaboration just makes software better, and hackers happier. The benefits of open source are noticeable even if you’re just a user - but multiply when you become a contributor as well.
However, contributing into an existing project is always daunting. Specially when it comes to popular projects, with a huge codebase and thousands of participants - such as the Django project, for example. It’s hard to know where to start, how to proceed, and how to get your changes accepted. For all the years I’ve been working as a software engineer, contributing to open source is something that has always been on my wishlist, but never got to achieve.
But as it turns out, Django has an amazing community and runs a periodic program to help aspiring contributors along their journey into their first contribution to the project: the Djangonauts program. I joined session 5, running October-November 2025.
Read on →
Similarity to the Coconauts name purely coincidental 😬
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Backup Internet Setup for Emergencies
We take so many things for granted in life when they are working fine, but when they fail, you suddenly realize they hanging by a thread - like, literally, THE INTERNET.
At home, we get our Internet from a fiber connection, which, as it turns out, it’s just light pulses coming thru a cable down the street. And this is a single point of failure, ready to be attacked by unlikely adversaries…
Read on →
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