a temporary collection of permanent things
The Japanese word rinji (臨時) carries the weight of something
extraordinary that arrives without warning and departs before
you have finished admiring it.
A distributed system for preserving ephemeral digital artifacts -- capturing the fleeting beauty of web installations, generative art, and interactive experiences before they vanish into the ether of expired domains and deprecated APIs.
An annotation layer for the open web, enabling readers to leave scholarly marginalia on any page -- a modern gloss apparatus inspired by medieval manuscript traditions, where commentary lives alongside the text it illuminates.
A visual programming environment where code structures are represented as growing botanical forms -- conditionals branch like stems, loops spiral like tendrils, and functions bloom like flowers when they return their values.
A reading application that treats digital texts with the reverence of physical books -- variable typography, hand-tuned hyphenation, and a pagination system that honors the page as a unit of thought rather than an infinite scroll.
A generative ambient music system that composes based on environmental data -- weather patterns become harmonic progressions, barometric pressure shapes tempo, and the golden hour produces its own distinctive timbre each evening.
We build our cathedrals in sand. Every URL is a promise waiting to be broken, every deployment a sandcastle awaiting the tide. And yet we persist in making beautiful things for screens that will be obsolete in three years -- perhaps because the brevity of digital life makes each pixel more precious, each interaction more tender.
September 2025
The most beautiful code I ever wrote was a function that deleted itself after executing -- a digital mayfly that lived for exactly one request cycle before returning to the void from which all variables emerge.
Medieval scribes understood something that modern UI designers have forgotten: the margin is not empty space but active territory. It is where the reader becomes a writer, where the authoritative text meets its living commentary. When we reduced margins to whitespace, we amputated the conversation between reader and text.
June 2025
There is a tradition in English poetry of retreating to the countryside to find clarity. I propose a similar retreat in software development -- away from the relentless optimization of startup culture and toward a slower, more contemplative practice where code is written like prose: carefully, with attention to rhythm, and with the understanding that elegance matters more than speed.
March 2025
A well-named variable is a small poem. A well-structured module is a well-organized garden. The best codebases I have read were, in their own austere way, works of literature.
This volume was set in Cormorant Garamond for display, Lora for body text, and EB Garamond for marginalia -- three serifs from three centuries, united by their shared reverence for the printed word. The monospaced specimens are rendered in DM Mono, a typeface of geometric conviction and humanist warmth.
The palette draws from sun-faded paper, dried botanical specimens, and aged linen bookbindings: Aged Vellum, Pressed Linen, Walnut Ink, Dried Rose, Sage Pressed, and Golden Hour.
The botanical illustrations that serve as navigation are drawn in the tradition of compass-and-straightedge construction married to organic floral forms -- a five-petaled rose for Projects, a lavender sprig for Writing, and an unfurling fern frond for this very section.
The word rinji (臨時) means "temporary" or "extraordinary occasion" in Japanese. This site exists in that liminal space between permanence and ephemerality -- a developer's portfolio presented as a collection of scholarly fragments, each project annotated like marginalia in a cherished book.
Composed with care in the golden hour.