2026-02-23 18:35:00
For some weird combination of factors, I ended up answering questions to three different people for three entirely unrelated projects, and all three interviews went live around the same time.
I answered a few questions for the Over/Under series run by Hyde. Love the concept, this was a lot of fun.
I also answered a few questions from Kai since he’s running a great series where he asks previous IndieWeb Carnival hosts to share some thoughts about the theme they chose.
And lastly, Kristoffer asked me to talk a bit more about my most recent project/newsletter, Dealgorithmed, for his Naive Weekly, another newsletter you definitely want to check out because it’s fantastic.
Click those links and check these projects; they’re all wonderful. And especially go check all the other interviews, so many wonderful people are listed on all three sites.
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2026-02-22 15:50:00
Halfway through this enjoyable life experiment, and overall, I’m very pleased with the results. As I mentioned last week, I was expecting week two usage to be a bit higher compared to week one, where I went full phone-rejection mode, but I’m still pleased with how low my usage was, even though it felt like I was using the phone a lot.
No huge spikes this week, didn’t need to use Google Maps a lot, so the time distribution is a lot more even, as you can see. The first three days of the week were pretty similar to the previous week. I moved my chats back on the phone, and that’s most of the time spent on screen since “social” is just the combination of Telegram, WhatsApp, and iMessage.
Usage went up a bit in the second part of the week, but I consider that a “healthy” use of the phone. On Thursday, I spent 20 or so minutes setting up an app, one that I’d categorise as a life utility app, like banking or insurance apps. They do have a site, but you’re required to use the phone anyway to take pictures and other crap, so it was faster to do it on the phone.
Then on Saturday, I had to use Maps as well as AllTrails to find a place out in the wild. I was trying to find a bunker that’s hidden somewhere in a forest not too far from where I live (this is a story for another time), and that’s why screen time was a bit higher than normal on that particular day.
Overall, I’m very happy with how the week went. A thing I’m particularly pleased with is the fact that I have yet to consume a single piece of media on my phone since we started this experiment. So far, I have only opened the browser a couple of times, and it was always to look up something very specific, and never to mindlessly scroll through news, videos or anything like that. My content consumption on the phone is down to essentially zero.
One fun side effect of this experiment is how infrequently I now charge my phone. I took this screenshot this morning before plugging it in, and apparently, the last time it was fully charged was Wednesday afternoon. I’m now charging it once every 3 or 4 days, which is pretty neat.
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2026-02-22 01:50:00
This is a follow-up on my previous post. After talking to a few friends and getting feedback from the kind people who decided to email me and share their thoughts, I decided that I will stop once interview number 150 is out, on July 10th. 150 is a neat number because it means I can match each interview to a first gen Pokemon. I am a 90s kid after all.
That said, my stopping on the 10th of July doesn’t mean the series also has to stop. If anyone out there is interested in picking it up and carrying it forward, I’ll be more than happy to give the series away. If that's you, send me an email. I’m also happy to part ways with the domain name if it can be of any help. Whether someone picks up the torch or not, the first 150 interviews will be archived here on my blog for as long as I have a presence on the web.
20 interviews left, 6 drafts are ready to go, a few more people have the questions, and I’m waiting to get their answers (that may or may not arrive before July 10th). It’s going to be fun to see who ends up being the final guest.
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2026-02-20 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Stefano Verna, whose blog can be found at squeaki.sh.
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I’m Stefano, I’m 40 years old, I live in Italy. I have three sons (the oldest turned 18 last week — happy birthday Ale!). I try to be a present and attentive father, and I believe I am, despite the compromises that come with divorce.
I discovered programming at 12 with a little book I found at the library featuring games in QuickBASIC… and I never stopped from there. Creating digital things has always been my greatest passion.
In my first year of university, I released one of the very first Firefox extensions, which was an immediate huge success: in no time, 2M daily users… and thousands were donating on PayPal! A huge thing for a 19-year-old. From that experience on, I kept recreating that recipe: building my own software on the web.
After many years in the web agency world, one of the many ideas I threw together in my spare time for fun, DatoCMS, was once again very successful. 10 years after the first line of code I wrote, the product continues to exist, grow, and be used all over the world. Today we’re about 15 people working on it. For me, it’s a true dream come true.
Apart from programming, which continues to be a fundamental part of my life in terms of fulfillment and satisfaction (perhaps too much so), I’m an idealist, a man of the left, and a great enthusiast of meditation, psychology, and personal growth work in general.
I’ve had various blogs in my life. The first one was as a teenager, in the full Blogger era (2004), to communicate and find friends. I even found my future wife and mother of my children there. The second was to find work and make myself known professionally (the articles are still on Github).
My current blog, squeakish, was born after a month-long vacation I took a couple of years ago in Brazil: disconnecting (for the first time in my life, actually!) from responsibilities for an extended period gave me the chance to think about many things differently. It inspired me and made me want to study and write again.
It’s called squeakish because I’m (proudly?) the exact opposite of a solid and confident person. I’m full of internal creaks, and my blog contains posts that represent “yieldings,” vulnerabilities that I feel like exploring and sharing.
Inspiration always comes from personal reflections that I feel the need to communicate. Often these are difficult things that I struggle to put out into the world. Of these reflections, only a small portion ends up on the blog. Most of them I feel are too personal in their details to be of value to someone else. This is perhaps the biggest block at the moment: understanding the threshold for when something should move from my personal journal to being shared on the blog. I should probably worry less about it?
My posts are always written in a single session — I want them to remain as authentic as possible to the moment they were conceived. I wait a few hours before publishing them, to be able to reread them and see if something can be improved, and then they’re online.
My creative process needs to be facilitated, first of all by taking dedicated time. This is the fundamental thing. Normally I’ve always written from home, in my usual “nest,” but lately (and even right now) I’m trying to change locations (bars, cafés). Surrounding yourself with different things helps you see things differently. I also try to avoid any kind of “aesthetic” distraction — I write in a notepad without any formatting (Paper), and only at the very end I copy on the CMS and format.
The site is in Astro and the code is available on Github: there’s a README that explains the details. I had fun learning and implementing webmentions, microformats, backfeeding from Mastodon, and I wrote a brief guide about it.
The content is on, well, DatoCMS. I didn’t want to invent anything new — it’s what I know like the back of my hand, and I know it already gives me everything I need and like, including easy image and video management.
The site is deployed on Cloudflare Pages, the domain is on Spaceship.
I tried to keep the layout as simple as possible, and even copied the Hey World layout. No distractions!
The first version of the site was in Svelte: working in the headless CMS world, in ten years I’ve really worked with all the available platforms, static site generators, and frameworks, and I’ve come to the conclusion that today Astro is the most suitable and versatile tool for producing content-driven websites. YMMV.
The name “Squeakish” still appeals to me — it has something playful about it and doesn’t take itself too seriously — but I’ve never been a fanatic about finding perfect names.
So yeah, right now I’m good with what I have!
The only cost… is for the domain ($30/year)? Cloudflare Pages is free, the DatoCMS project is on a free plan. Personally, I have no need to monetize my blog. With monetization automatically comes a sense of responsibility, and this is exactly the opposite of what I’m looking for.
I have no negative opinion about those who do it. The important thing is to avoid the enshittification that money normally brings. Personal blogs, as you well know, are the soul of the Internet, and we must try to preserve them free and sincere.
God, there are so many! My feed reader is actually publicly visible at /news and at the bottom there’s the list of people I follow. Personally, I’d go with David Celis and/or Chris!
Having your own simple feed reader publicly available inside your own website is something I haven’t seen anywhere else, but it’s simple to build and I feel gives a nice high-level view into what one person is currently feeding himself with. I've actually wrote a bit about this.
I just watched a wonderful film, so I feel the need to share it: O Filho de mil Homens.
Finally, I’d like to use this space to offer my experience (personal? professional?) to anyone who might need it: if you’d like to have a chat, and you think I might be able to help you with something, reach out via PM on Mastodon and I’ll try to do my best!
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 129 interviews.
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2026-02-20 02:15:00
Hair. A nice beard. Savings. Debt. A house. Subscriptions to video streaming services. A piece of forest. Kids. A wife. A husband. Hands without scars. Arms without scars. Legs without scars. A face without scars. A monthly salary. Paid vacations. Happiness. Things I’m proud of. A normal dog. Social media profiles. Investments. Plans for the future. Plans for the present. Plans for the past. A camera. Concrete goals. Wisdom. Ai bots. Ai companions. Ai slaves. Fancy clothes. Colognes. Fame (although I am quite hungry). Faith. Horses in the back. 99 problems. Enlightenment. A daily routine. Willingness to write long posts.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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2026-02-15 15:05:00
First weekly recap for this fun life experiment. To remind you what this is all about: in order to help Kevin get back to a more sane use of his time in front of his phone, we decided to publicly share 4 weeks of screen time statistics from our phones and write roundups every Sunday. Yes, we’re essentially trying to shame ourselves into being more mindful about our phone usage. Let me tell you, it definitely works.
Every time I do one of these experiments, I use the first week to prove to myself that this whole phone usage situation is mostly a matter of being mindful about it, and that if I decide that I don’t want to use the phone, well, I will not use it. And it’s not very hard. Monday to Wednesday, I basically almost never picked up my phone from my desk. It was fully charged on Sunday afternoon, and I didn’t plug it in again till Thursday.
I did use it when I was outside for a couple of minor things, but as you can see from the image below, screen time is reporting 9 minutes of total usage for the first 3 days of the week.
Thursday and Friday, I logged a bit more screen time (had to do a few things that required the use of apps), but also because I started listening to a few podcasts while I was driving. I said I started because one thing I did this week was delete any app that’s related to content consumption from the phone. I think my personal goal for this month-long experiment is going to be to get back to a use of my phone that’s utility-driven and not consumption-focused. The phone should be a tool to do things and not a passive consumption device.
Friday usage spiked, and that’s because I was out on a date, so most of the time spent with the screen on was Google Maps being open while I was in the car. I still tried to be mindful of that, though. I drove about 5 hours back and forth, but I only used Google Maps for a bit more than 1 hour. I also used the browser for the first time this week to purchase a couple of tickets for a museum, and I took a few pictures.
So this is how the first week went. Not included here is last Sunday—I told Kevin we were going to start this experiment on Monday—but I clocked 11 minutes on that day. Not bad.
Now, one consideration about this first week: in order to push my phone usage this low, I had to move some of my normal phone usage over to my Mac, which is how I managed to basically never touch chat apps on my phone. I know this is pretty much cheating, but it was intentional and something I was planning to do only in this first week, and I will move that screen time back on my phone starting next week.
The goal is to find the right balance after all, and I like the process of pushing it all the way down to the extreme and then bringing it back up to some more sane levels.
If you have decided to take part in this experiment, email me a link to your post, and I’ll include it below.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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