270. Qiao Cun 中
The cover photo was taken over the weekend when I went to Qiao Cun for a meal, just a casual snap. Their food is great, the avocado and salmon are really tasty. Whenever a friend visits Hangzhou, I usually take them here or to Zhang’s Mansion.
Recording down-to-earth trending tech I see every week, filtered and published here. Follow this weekly newsletter to get update notifications
New Recommendation
If a friend of yours needs to update their resume soon, you have to recommend Kami to them
https://github.com/tw93/Kami
If a friend of yours needs to update their resume soon, you have to recommend Kami to them. I tuned a dedicated version carefully, so Kami alone makes writing a resume genuinely handy, good-looking, and clear. Have them get their raw source material ready in Markdown, then tell the AI /kami help me produce a resume, tweak it once or twice, and it’s pretty much done. It’s not just layout, it also helps optimize and organize your resume content, looking at the talent profile from the perspective of a technical final-round interviewer.
Product Releases
Mole’s desktop client 1.7.2 is here
https://mole.fit/
This release updates a ton of things, including support for users with accessibility needs. Status and the menu bar are faster and more stable, Software, uninstall, and updates are more complete, Clean is more thorough while still keeping review-first, the privacy check is more accurate, quieter, and smarter, Analyze, Doctor, and Clean Screen are more stable too, and there are quite a few optimizations for fan control on Apple silicon.
It’s been exactly one month since Mole’s Mac version launched, written in my spare time, and the numbers are kind of fun. In total I wrote 110,000 lines of Swift, including 36,000 lines of test code and 1,983 unit tests, shipped 8 releases, added 145 new features, and supported 9 languages. It’s the last day of the early-bird price and MOLEWEEKLY still works, so anyone interested is welcome to give it a try. More surprises to come.
Kaku has finally updated to version 0.12 as well
Kaku even has its own little official site now https://kaku.fun/, go take a look. This update brings quite a few things: it now restores session history after you reopen a window, supports AI features you can use directly once logged in with the Codex backend, opens PDFs, images, audio and video, archives, and Office documents with the system default app, and when all panels are sitting at the shell prompt, Cmd+Q quits directly, plus other fun features. Go check out the Release.
Some fun recent updates to Pake
http://github.com/tw93/Pake
Pake packages a web page into a lightweight desktop app with one command, supporting macOS, Windows, and Linux. Recently it added cmd+f content search, right-click download support, dots in desktop app names, clearer error messages when AppImage builds fail on Linux, a pnpm 11 compatibility fix, and more.
Just Chatting
I’m not an influencer, not a content creator, not a KOL, so what am I
My Twitter earnings are only a bit over 100 dollars each time, probably far less than most blue checkmarks, even lower than that friend who got burned twice by Tauri, which is kind of funny. Why so little? Haha, I should reflect on it, and along the way share my failure experience with everyone.
First off, I’m not an influencer, not a content creator, not a KOL, nothing really, just an ordinary engineer who writes a bit of hobby code. Twitter, to me, is a way to sync the changelogs of my open-source products to everyone, and to share daily life posts about where I went, what I ate, what I watched. There’s no traffic pressure at all, and no pressure to turn traffic into money, so if the earnings are small, so be it. That actually happens to make this an account I like more and more.
Content creators usually make money by taking ads, and AI companies tend to pay quite well, sharing lots of altruistic products to get more people to follow, earning their due while being helpful, which is honestly pretty nice too. But there’s usually traffic pressure: you have to keep chasing hot topics and obsessing over headlines, and the longer you do it the better you get. I just feel that’s too exhausting, and I can’t pull it off.
I actually took some ads before, but I haven’t for a long time now. I remember an agency once contacted me and said advertisers don’t like an account like mine, they prefer the kind that constantly posts AI hot takes. When I heard that, I was actually happy, haha. My account hasn’t turned into the high-quality traffic account they see it as, so I guess I’m keeping things pretty well.
I kept wondering, if I had to describe my account in one word, what would it be? I thought about it for a long time, and finally figured it out today, which is why this casual article exists: my account should be a continuously iterated “Tw93 Engineer Magazine”.
This magazine has roughly these few columns: Product Notes, recording the updates and interesting ideas behind products like Pake, Mole, and Kaku; a Tech Column, where I write about technical thoughts, thoughts on AI, and learning topics in new tech areas; Good Stuff, all tools I actually use myself, none of the paid-promotion kind; and a Just Looking Around module where you can see my daily life, what I eat, play, and watch.
Every engineer can flip through it casually, find something they’re interested in, and dive in to play with it. Friends who want to learn can also read through my long articles one by one, then head to my blog and the trending weekly to find more interesting past content.
This magazine has almost no ads, and won’t say things against my conscience just to promote my own products. Updates are pretty casual too, usually at most two posts a day, just one when I’m too busy, posting whatever comes to mind. At the same time this magazine is a continuously iterating product: through it you can see how I change year by year, like a tech friend who keeps you company, and you can also reach the magazine’s editor via DM.
The magazine is slowly growing its own side business, Mole. It sells not because the product is so great, but more because of people’s trust in the magazine itself. This made me realize that low-traffic content doesn’t mean it has no value. Not many people read it, but the trust runs deep, and that can actually bring some unexpected conversions, which is pretty magical. It’s just run rather casually, but fairly consistently.
So what am I really running? It should just be this magazine called Tw93. Whatever kind of person I am, I write that kind of content, and naturally I’ll meet that kind of reader, with no need to worry about what to write. In the end, what I most want to do is let the engineers reading this magazine and me learn from and grow with each other, but without the anxiety.