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i'm realizing i don't have a great knowledge base on like,, exactly how many people live in a suburb but would rather live in a city and vice versa. anything you can point me towards? you can make sure the whole state has access to the basic living amenities required to, say, do remote work effectively, but my gut tells me that a significant number of people are drawn to urban areas for the types of amenities only possible with higher population density

this is completely anecdotal, but there's a pretty cool trend i notice where urban places with reasonable renter economies tend to fall into one of three categories

1) "b- to c-tier" cities that build build build build build (austin, slc, phoenix)

2) de-industrialized cities that already have the housing stock (chicago, baltimore, detroit, pittsburgh, philly, worcester)

3) struggling smallish towns and cities that leaned into building better downtowns (there's a billion of em)

that's really dope, but i'm not sure if it'll work out the same way nowadays. i think we're in a weird stage where momentum REALLY matters in a way that it didn't 10 years ago or 5 years down the line (probably)

Location: Worcester, MA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: React, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript, WebGPU, WebGL

GitHub: https://github.com/notsoli

Résumé/CV: https://samranda.com/files/sr-resume.pdf

Email: work@samranda.com

Web developer and UX designer with 1 year of experience in graphics, creative tooling, security research, and products/platforms with rich or unusual interactivity. I've built photo editors (mint.photo), social platforms (tile.music), domain-specific game engines (carddomain.mosaiq.dev), web tools, and data viz experiments.

this is a very cute anecdote, thank you. my parents have three dogs, so i've had similar thoughts. i believe they're just truly used to the dead space in a day. it makes sense once i think about it, but it feels so far away

Location: Worcester, MA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: React, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript, WebGPU, WebGL

GitHub: https://github.com/notsoli

Résumé/CV: https://samranda.com/files/sr-resume.pdf

Email: work@samranda.com

Web developer and UX designer with 1 year of experience in graphics, creative tooling, security research, and products/platforms with rich or unusual interactivity. I've built photo editors, social platforms, domain-specific game engines, web tools, and data viz experiments.

Location: Worcester, MA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: React, Svelte, TypeScript, JavaScript, WebGPU, WebGL

GitHub: https://github.com/notsoli

Résumé/CV: https://samranda.com/files/sr-resume.pdf

Email: work@samranda.com

Web developer and UX designer with 1 year of experience in graphics, creative tooling, security research, and products/platforms with rich or unusual interactivity. I've built photo editors, social platforms, domain-specific game engines, web tools, and data viz experiments.

first off: this is a beautiful article! but, it got me thinking about how many times i found an interest that would then become a core part of my identity by having a really cool piece of media relating to said interest essentially force-fed to me by algorithmic feeds. i got into rhythm games by seeing a livestream of osu! pop up on twitch, got into archival fashion by seeing a really incredible outfit on reddit, got into experimental pop by having clarence clarity's "no now" come across my spotify feed.

as someone who grew up in a fairly insulated & isolated suburb, i think those types of experiences were really important in turning me from an unconfident, kinda angry kid into the aesthetically-engaged, witty, openly-gay man w/ a pretty big breadth of creative interests i ended up being. i'm truly not sure if i would've turned out this way if most of the internet remained as undiscoverable as it was ~20 years ago.

though i have more appreciation for the slow web nowadays, where my identity is a bit more solidified, i still feel a pretty strong pull towards "the platform", and my visions for a healthier internet include it. but, that's about as far as i've gotten.

2025 Letter 7 months ago

he makes enough odd claims about cities and countries in the beginning that i can only assume aren't really meant to be taken seriously, so i'm at a bit of a loss for how i should be reading this

I'm just having fun 7 months ago

this is gonna sound antagonistic but i promise it's not: you're absolutely right! but people do go into the settings and disable auto-capitalization, and it's pretty much how young and/or queer people type nowadays

Backing up Spotify 7 months ago

this is a really incredible effort. but, for the developers and analysts currently working with music metadata in a world where so much of music is being consumed thru streaming services that keep a tight hold on how their metadata and album art can be used, i am constantly yearning for a way to link streaming releases to public metadata sources that can be manipulated, embedded, and queried. i've done my best to build my own w/o a background in data science, but it's a hole that desperately needs filling to enable the new generation of scrobbling/music listening habit exploration.

I'm just having fun 7 months ago

i think it's either the result of a stream of consciousness into one's phone hastily formatted into a blog post, or something constructed to resemble that. the rushed construction slash abrasive rhetorical tool kinda matches the message it's trying to send, imo. it's often that the amount of time i've spent thinking about something (a lot) is totally disproportionate to the time i spend typing my thoughts up (a little). the graphics feel like someone sending an image in between chat messages