Every browser has tabs. Linear, flat, disposable. Open thirty of them researching one topic and they sit in a row with no indication that twelve of them came from the same Wikipedia article. Close the wrong one and the context is gone.

Tree is a macOS browser that replaces tabs with a tree. Every page knows its parent. Cmd+Click a link and it becomes a child node of the current page. The sidebar shows the full hierarchy: research paths branch naturally, and you can always trace back to where you started.

Our Python services ran on ubuntu:24.04 with pip-installed dependencies. It worked, but the images carried hundreds of packages we never used, Trivy scans were noisy with OS-level CVEs, and builds were slower than they needed to be. Over a couple of months we migrated to Chainguard’s Wolfi base image and uv for dependency management. This is how it went for the maps service, the one that renders static map tiles with a C++/Python hybrid stack.

Generating Mapbox GL GL style JSON from Python code instead of editing 3,000-line JSON files by hand. Hierarchical style resolution, a Django-style filter DSL, injection-based layer ordering, and a Go sprite generator called from Python via ctypes.

The problem with style JSON

A Mapbox GL GL style is a single JSON file that describes everything about how a map looks. Background color, road widths at every zoom level, label fonts, icon placement, landcover tints, building extrusion heights. All of it.

iTunes Match worked great for years: you uploaded your library, Apple matched what it could, and you had access to everything from any device. But Apple is clearly moving everyone toward Apple Music, and iTunes Match has been slowly rotting. The writing was on the wall.

I didn’t want to subscribe to Apple Music. I wanted to keep my library, my ratings, my play counts, my playlists, all the metadata accumulated over 20 years. So I built my own streaming setup: a Go backend that serves the library over HTTP, and SwiftUI apps that play it on iOS, macOS, and tvOS.