Building a Bookstore, Not a Dashboard
I built InkTree in ten hours. Then I spent a hundred making it worthy of the books inside it. Before and after a design overhaul driven by craft, not speed.
Blog
On reading, taste, and building tools for readers who care.
Books Are Not Content
408 books on Goodreads. 300 rated 4 stars. Dostoevsky and Dungeon Crawler Carl, same number. The system is broken — and nobody's building a better one.
Judge a Book by Its Cover
Building a cover art pipeline for 5,500 books using free APIs — placeholder detection, rate limits, and why Google Books sometimes returns a table of contents.
What Building a Goodreads Import Taught Me About Book Data
I thought building a Goodreads import would be simple. Then I discovered editions vs works, fragmented reviews, and why book cataloguing is a rabbit hole.
Why Star Ratings Fail Readers
Star ratings compress everything a book does to you into one number. 13,000 dimensional reviews later, the data confirms what every reader already knows.
Why I Built InkTree
Three books, three completely different experiences, one number for all of them. I built InkTree because star ratings don't capture why a book matters.