The "Learning by building” process is the most rewarding element of projects I work on. This leads me to pay a lot of attention to the tools I use, or advise my clients to use. The tools we use are completely part of the work and narrative we produce. They inherently shape our every actions by creating a context in which the project is developed and deployed.

Code describes the shape of the world. It influences every aspect of digital interactions. Ease of use/installation/development restricts the projects’ scope of choices. In the past few years, I’ve seen many websites fall derelict. This is a typically simple example. Most of the time it was by lack of means to sustain their maintenance. Whereas the maintenance should have been a prerequisite in the project’s specifications. Free software comes in fact with a cost.

These considerations led me to further rethink what it is I need to produce the work I want.

One of these outputs is Curator, the creative app designed and developed by Daniel Nordh. I helped over the past 2 years in setting the pace, strategy, product development and planning. Now that we feel Curator is ready to live a life on its own (or almost), we can pursue new projects and adventures, to discover and learn more.

There are a few technological/code based projects I want to explore in the coming months:

• The projects should challenge my programming skills—and freely explore unconventional approaches.
• I want to explore technologies potentials.
• I want to write notes, thoughts, and references using custom solution to the problems I will face.
• By facing directly publishing problems and issues, I intend to better understand users needs.
• I want to be able to publish or not those notes. I like the idea of local files (as opposed to remote, server based, file system).
• One of the first ideas to explore is to dynamically generate the pages but not necessarily using dynamic pages. I could use static HTML files on the server, but I allow myself the use of PHP to generate those files. This approach limits de-facto a whole range of intrusions and hacks on the server. It also uses less computing power on the server.
• I should not necessarily use databases. I like the idea, for example, of a Finder-based Trello/Kanban system. It’s local and easily scriptable.