From the Journal
Notes on cities, craft and looking closer.
Occasional writing about the product and the ideas behind it.
- Founder story
Why I Built Roam City
A familiar city can still contain blank spaces. Roam City started with a simple question about how much of home we actually see.
Read article - Engineering
How Territory Progress Actually Works
The hard part of a map that fills in is not drawing it. It is deciding what counts as explored, and answering the same question the same way every time.
Read article - Exploration
The Best Walk Is Not Always the Shortest
We optimise routes for time and then wonder why our cities feel small. Curiosity is allowed to take the long way.
Read article - Product
Why Roam City Has Widgets
Exploration is slow. A widget is how slow progress stays present without notifications, a feed, or opening the app.
Read article - Engineering
Shipping Real Screens on a Static Site
Replacing placeholder shots with real ones is not a content swap. On a statically exported site, every screenshot is a file the page has to carry.
Read article - Product
The Order of the Screens Is the Argument
A features page is a list, which makes it tempting to treat the order as an accident. The order is the argument the product makes before a single word is read.
Read article - Design
When the Screen Got Taller Than the Frame
A floating legend looked right for months. It broke the day the hero screenshot changed shape, because the layout had been assuming a size it never stated.
Read article