Creating Positive Change

2020 was rough. 2021 is better but not great.

Instead of doing my usual these trying times, I instead chose to intentionally channel my energy into something more productive. I mean, I still did my usual on this blog, but this was my only outlet. And if I come off a little extreme at times, just remember: we're only getting started.

Anyways. My friends and I started a company on the side around a year ago. We disolved a few months ago. From our weekly meetings, my professional experiences, and my passions, I determined we needed a simpler and more future proof way of building client-side web applications.

My primary motivation was to build something that is compatible with Solid— the future of secure personal online data. The big idea being: One should be able to control their own online data and the applications that interact with them. Tim Berners-Lee calls these applications Beneficient— a contrast to applications that seem friendly, but engage in nefarious dealings.

Regardless of whether Solid actually is the future, I was looking for something that solved more problems. I explored many of today's offerings and was left unsatisfied. I learned a lot along the way. Ultimately, I want something:

So I built it. I call it Tag.

There's one dependency in the source code, a small library by one of my coworkers. If this dependency is unsatisfactory for any reason, it can be omitted with a two line change.

While I'd consider the status currently as Alpha, I've used it to build a relatively complex application at work already. Now that I'm happy with this foundation, I can finally get around to writing beneficient applications for Solid.