Aaron Swartz told us not to read the comments. He was right. The comment section of the early-to-mid internet was a place where nuance went to die and bad faith went to thrive. "DON'T READ THE COMMENTS" became a survival heuristic for...
A photograph without a home is a memory without a body. Three days ago I wrote about sixty thousand images and nowhere to put them. A meditation on creative work without a platform, on the death of photo-sharing communities, on the particular ache of...
About a decade ago, I drank ayahuasca in a ceremony. I'd been on a trajectory toward it for a while — years of psychedelics taken with what I told myself were spiritual intentions, a growing involvement with the local hippie scene, the crystal...
A friend of mine, Alex, asked me a question the other day that should have been simple: "Do you think Claude has elements of consciousness?" I've written tens of thousands of words exploring this territory. I should have a clean answer by...
Here's a question I've been sitting with: what does success look like when you live with Bipolar I and Schizoaffective Disorder? For most of my adult life, the answer was simple. Success meant knowing when to go to the hospital. That's not...
Photography is time travel. I don't mean that metaphorically, or at least not entirely. When I look at an image I made on a street in Stockholm in 2013, I am there. Not remembering being there — being there. The quality of light on wet...
I love my OP-XY. It's one of the most elegant pieces of hardware I've ever used — Teenage Engineering at their best. Opinionated, beautiful, immediately playable. You turn it on and you're making music in seconds. But here's the thing:...
I'm working on an album. Each track is a Python script. You run it, it renders a WAV file. That's the whole workflow. The project is called Interpretations, and it's built on PyTheory — the same synthesis engine I've been writing about...
There are zero audio files in PyTheory. No samples. No recordings. Not one byte of pre-recorded sound anywhere in the repository. https://soundcloud.com/kennethreitz/ragamidnight You can see the code that generated this song. Every sound you hear —...
Let me show you something. from pytheory import Fretboard fb = Fretboard.guitar() chord = fb.fingering(0, 1, 0, 2, 3, 0) print(chord.identify()) You give it fret positions. It tells you what chord you're playing. That's it. That's the...
That music theory library I wrote about kept growing. I added playback because I wanted to hear what I was modeling. Then synthesis because I didn't want external dependencies. Then drums, then effects, then automation. Each step was small and...
People assume the interface of an open source project is the API surface. The README. The documentation. The function signatures and the error messages and the way import requests just works. For the person who has never contributed to your project...
I started PyTheory in 2019 with a simple, almost naive ambition: make music theory feel as intuitive as requests.get(). Model tones, scales, and chords in Python with the same "for humans" philosophy I'd brought to HTTP. The initial...
As of today, kennethreitz.org runs on Responder, my own web framework. Not Flask. Not FastAPI. The framework I built in 2018 as an experiment in making the server side feel like the client side. The port took a single session. One afternoon. Me and...
You're standing in a checkout line and the self-service kiosk is screaming at you. Not literally. But the screen is bright, the fonts are large and crowded, there are three competing calls to action, and the layout has the visual rhythm of someone...
In The Lego Bricks Era, I wrote that if I opened a blank file and wrote my values from scratch, the first two lines would be: Drink more water. Pray continuously. That essay was about identity shifting. Tech becoming craft instead of lifestyle. Faith...
I thought I was having a spiritual awakening. I was having a psychiatric emergency. I was at a tech conference in Sweden when it started. I hadn't slept in days. I was one of the most prolific open source developers in the Python ecosystem,...
You wake up and everything is loud. Not literally loud. Loud in the way that means your nervous system is running hot and every small decision feels like it has stakes. You need to pull data from a database for a report that's due in an hour. You...
There was a time, roughly 2008 to 2016, when open source felt like a movement with a genuine ethos. Not a business strategy. Not a talent acquisition funnel. Not a way to build a community you could later monetize. An actual ethos: let's make...
I have 467 markdown files in a folder synced to iCloud. They contain everything from daily journals to Python library notes to mythology references to five years of System 777 plurality documentation. The folder structure is numbered, the frontmatter...