Philip I. Thomas

Journal about work in progress.

2026-03-05

Sync, phone numbers, and webhooks

A couple of weeks have passed since I last posted. If this were an email, it would start with "Sorry for the slow response." Sync A project I built just shipped at Chroma. I added Amazon S3 sync supp...

2026-02-19

A fresh coat of paint

Recently I have been watching documentaries by Gary Hustwit. It started with Rams, about the life of Dieter Rams. Next, Urbanized about city design. Then, Helvetica about the popular font. As I watche...

2026-02-13

Three-ring binder

When I was a kid, I would assemble binders with information about topics I was interested in. My favorite one was about airplanes and their specifications. I find that collecting information helps me ...

2026-01-25

Code as content, digital proprioception, and what's next

I recently launched Trivet, and I've enjoyed seeing people install it on websites ranging from personal homepages to business blogs. Before AI, Trivet would have taken me a few weeks to build. Now, Co...

2026-01-14

Chroma for Ruby

Last week, I shared a personal project I built over the holidays - Trivet, which adds Google sign-in to Ghost. Here, I'm sharing a work-focused holiday project I built: an official Ruby client for Chr...

2025-12-24

Outage, tacit knowledge, and a new project

Hello from Boulder, Colorado - where we've been dealing with power outages due to high wind. Alas, as I lost power in Boulder, my apartment in San Francisco also lost power. I knew because my Mac Mini...

2025-12-16

Digital gardening

I've been thinking about gardens this week. It started while reading the book Shopkeeping, which had a section entitled "Gardening": > A good shopkeeper will notice if a wall or section is in a slump ...

2025-12-05

Building less, tinkering more, and walking away sooner

I'm back from my vacation to Japan, slowly adjusting to California time. It was a fun and inspiring trip – I'm thinking about it now while listening to the Eric Dolphy album Out There on vinyl, which ...

2025-11-19

Disaster recovery

I'm headed off on holiday later this week. As the trip approached, I found myself thinking about how to best back up my Mac Mini home server. I've had an abnormal number of conversations about SOC 2 c...

2025-11-11

Snail mail

I’ve been getting back into analog media this year - reading paper books, listening to vinyl, subscribing to print magazines, even getting the Sunday New York Times. For some of the blogs I follow, su...

2025-10-30

Maintenance

I’m preparing to launch Workshop here as an independent newsletter within Contraption Company. I started it as an experiment, and I’m ready to graduate it from “experiment” to “project.” Before doing ...

2025-10-28

Backup plans

I’ve always been fascinated by planes. A few years ago, I took an introductory class toward a private pilot’s license - and it was less fun than I expected. The plane pretty much flies itself; the pil...

2025-10-23

GitHub syncing

Something I worked on just launched: Chroma GitHub Sync. I love the mental model of businesses having a "shadow business" - a non-obvious skill they must master to achieve their main goal. My favorite...

2025-10-01

Hacking YC (again)

I like seeing how things work. Digitally, that often means keeping the network tab open to watch how websites talk to servers. Sometimes, I find mistakes. Last month, while browsing Y Combinator’s sof...

2025-08-29

Taste-skill gaps

When I saw Craig Mod speak in San Francisco this summer, he mentioned an concept that stuck with me. I don’t remember his exact context, only that he was new to something and knew his work wasn’t good...

2025-08-27

The joys of self-hosting

When I checked my phone this morning, the first notification was that my home server "Toolbox" was down. Everything on it was offline - Postcard, Booklet, this blog, and more. I pulled out my laptop, ...

2025-08-20

Claude, Launching, and Tools

For the last week, I’ve been leaning into Claude Code for development. I used to think of it as more of a hobbyist tool, rather than a professional one. Cursor had been the main way I used AI to write...

2025-08-15

Adding a brain to my toolbox

One of my favorite projects has been using my Mac Mini as a home data center. It hosts this blog and all of my projects. After using cloud machines for decades, there's something tactile about maintai...

2025-08-14

It's time to rethink chat

Today's chat tools feel dated. It's time for a startup to rethink them. Notion is an example of a team firing on all cylinders to become AI-native. But, no communication tools seem to have cracked AI....

2025-08-09

Software is bread, not burgers

I was reading the book Richard Hart Bread last night when I came across this paragraph: > Absolute devotion to consistent methods and exact recipes is useful when you’re running a fast-food franchise ...

2025-08-05

My favorite tool for making email less stressful

Email has become a to-do list—bills, questions, scheduling requests, expense reports, and more. Opening it can induce stress. Amid these tasks were email newsletters—long-form pieces I wanted to read....

2025-08-02

Welcome to Workshop

Welcome to a new project: a members-only newsletter experiment on Contraption Company called Workshop. So far this year, 98k people have read essays on this site\1\(fn1), and more than 4k subscribe to...