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ben's garden

Coming Soon

blossomblossom (?) created 2025-11-15, edited 2025-11-10 | 1665 words

Summary

A list of work-in-progress projects around the garden. The higher something is in the list, the more likely I am to be daydreaming about it.

First, a note about this folder

Most of the WIP notes in this folder aren’t intended for consumption by people other than me. They’re in various states of half-doneness and may have trailing unfinished

But, I figured it’d be harmless to keep them around. Though you’re probably uninterested in 90% of what’s here, I’ll really know something is useful if someone goes through the trouble of finding and bringing it up! Poke me if something here catches your eye and I’ll fast-track it :)

Personal history

Some fun or noteworthy past experiences I haven’t yet written about

  • Studying abroad in the Netherlands
  • transit travel log
  • Hosting a hackathon
  • Thoughts and opinions on software engineering (and/or advice for new engineers)
  • Open Computing Facility retrospective
  • Participating in game jams
  • Desk/physical space makeover

Statement of Purpose

Primary inspiration: Joss Murphy’s why I do what I do page

Current sketch: Values

Figuring out how to organize my values, motivations, and short/medium/long term goals in a single easy-to-digest page will be a neat challenge. I’m still not sure how to approach it yet, but I feel like going through the process will give me some meaningful clarity around what I actually want to do with my life.

Relatedly, I’d like to draft a personal research syllabus to define the several key topics I’m interested in diving more into at the moment. I borrow this idea primarily from Arielle’s Sabbatical Syllabus (even though I do not plan to take a sabbatical just yet…) Here are a few key topics that might belong on such a syllabus:

  • Silicon Valley Anthropology
  • ML Systems
    • primary goal: Deepen my theoretical understanding of the systems and infrastructure I work on, and produce some practical literature that could be insightful to students / aspiring ML engineers.
    • final project: compile a series of reflections/annotations to the Stanford CS329S curriculum and the book that came out of its lecture notes. How much has changed in the span of 3 years, and how much does it diverge from my existing knowledge base on the topic?
  • Music

Community

Local-first or online reporting and organizing.

Music

jazz

I’ve been co-hosting regular jazz sessions with a few friends. It is of great personal interest to me to improve my theory + improv muscles so I can help make this an even more enjoyable time for everyone! And one day I might write about it…

Piano studies

I feel like my piano ability has been stagnating recently, so I’d like to practice more deliberately and make notes/progress reports on what I need to improve on.

I have two main goals:

  1. comfortably perform a new piece (or more) in public.
  2. slowly branch out into some less traditional music so I can obtain new styles for improv.
  • Chopin: Ballades 1&4, Polonaise-Fantasie
  • Liszt: Un sospiro, Sonata in B Minor
  • Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2
  • Hisaishi: Merry-Go-Round of Life
  • Kapustin: Etudes

Music production

I haven’t had time to make a whole lot of music, but I hope to get to a point where I can jam fairly effortlessly / make music to relax. It’ll take a while to get there, and I intend to document my process.

  • Building a music studio
  • DAW tips
  • Quick guides whenever I make a cool sound and want to remember how to reproduce it

Health

Figuring out how to create habits/systems to stay healthy for the rest of my life. (Run an experiment tracking everything for a month or 2 and report on the results?)

  • More rigorous sleep tracking w/ proper tagging to figure out what affects my sleep the most (e.g. melatonin, alcohol, caffeine, last meal time, last workout time…)
  • Meal/macro tracking and weight gain/loss strategies
  • Recipes for healthy meal prep that hits macro targets
  • Workout routines etc.
  • Trying to run faster
  • Skincare

Internet Trails

An exercise in discovering how and why I exist on the internet.

  • Internet Trails
  • mapping my corner of the internet: (i.e. everything this garden directly links to, and also everything those pages link to)
  • understanding the anthropology of social media
  • finding communities on bluesky and twitter
  • studying prosociality on social platforms
  • Being deliberate with internet usage (anti-doomscrolling)
  • Sentiment analysis for online communities (specifically regarding opinions on genai)

Software engineering

Some lessons from work that will probably be useful to someone out there.

Abstract topics

Synthesis pieces, future blog posts, open questions in philosophy/psychology.

  • Information asymmetry: on storytelling, Ted Chiang, and staring into the abyss
  • Sources/sinks of inspiration and creative energy
  • Opensauce, doing silly things, and increasing your surface area for luck

Homelabbing / TurtleNet S2

I published TurtleNet Season 1 back in 2023 as a beginners’ guide to running a server at home; it remains one of my most well-read posts to this day. However, it’s quite out-of-sync given how much I’ve learned since then. I’m slowly re-writing the entire series, and you can get a sneak peak over at the homelabbing folder.

I also need to build a more permanent home for the series; I think it deserves to be its own separate thing at this point. I’m not 100% satisfied with Hashnode, though I’ve been too lazy to move it off so far.

Garden Improvements

Various fixups to make this website better.

  • Custom explorer icons [completion:: 2025-06-22]
  • Make more emojis (especially for homepage headers) [completion:: 2025-06-22]
  • Comments for subpages [completion:: 2025-07-08]
  • Simple acceptance tests (page loads, private/draft pages are hidden, etc)
  • Graph to show growth in word/page count
  • More permanent top highlight banner for the homepage
  • Like/share buttons
  • 88x31 button
  • Make weather widget report time to sunset/sunrise
    • Maybe add shaders based on time of day??
    • make the weather emoji less jank
  • Add background music / jukebox
  • RAG/natural language search (aditbala.com)
  • Make spotify report local files and podcasts correctly
  • Webmention support

Recommendations

Product Recommendations

product recommendations

my many hours of scouring the depths of Capitalism might actually be helpful to someone! I struggle to find a reliable source of product reviews (the best I have are usually niche subreddits and NYT Wirecutter); aspirationally I’d like to become one if not only for my wallet’s sake. Inspiration: https://ponnekanti.net/posts/min-maxing/

  • Coffee and coffee-making equipment [completion:: 2025-08-04]
  • skincare [completion:: 2025-08-04]
  • Bedding [completion:: 2025-08-04]
  • Small phones [completion:: 2025-08-04]
  • Shoes and clothes for outdoor stuff [completion:: 2025-08-04]
  • Fonts and font foundries [completion:: 2025-08-04]

Content Recommendations

I already have some of these scattered around the internet; aggregating them in one place would be neat.

Game guides

I’m a big fan of strategy games (both tabletop and digital) and might have some words to help a beginner have a better experience.

Recipes

My recipes site from V6 is somewhat broken; I’m probably better off moving them here rather than maintaining that. There’s also some more general cooking knowledge I’ve accumulated that needs a place to live.

Misc. hobbies

A myriad of things I enjoy and probably have enough knowledge to write something interesting about.

Misc. how-tos

Things I had to figure out in some suboptimal way, and hope to spare a future stranger a bit of suffering from.

Rabbit holes

Super random and unimportant topics I want to know more about for some inexplicable reason.

Really backlogged bucket list things I want to do at some point in my life but don’t have time for right now

  • host a podcast
  • get into photography/videography/film and make cool videos and movies and stuff
  • actually be able to draw competently
  • solve a rubik’s cube blindfolded in under a minute / sighted in sub-15s
  • bike across the Netherlands
  • hike/backpack the entirety of the Bay Area Ridge Trail once it’s completed, hopefully in 10-20 years
  • Play really really nice golf courses (prerequisite: actually get good enough to play them confidently): pebble beach, spyglass, pasatiempo..
  • Design, build, and ship my own keyboard 100% from scratch
  • Make another game
  • make a map of boba shops vs coffee shops per capita in bay area cities
  • become a competitive scrabble player

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