https://kennethreitz.org
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In 1984, Steven Levy published Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and formalized something the early computing community already knew in their bones: that building software carries ethical weight. The hackers at MIT in the 1960s, the hardware tinkerers in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, the open source movement that...
Three days ago I wrote about sixty thousand images and nowhere to put them. The essay was a lament — a meditation on creative work without a platform, on the death of photo-sharing communities, on the gap between having a body of work and having a place for it to...
About a decade ago, I drank ayahuasca in a ceremony. I'd been on a trajectory toward it for a while — years of psychedelics taken with what I told myself were spiritual intentions, a growing involvement with the local hippie scene, the crystal crowd, the singing bowl crowd. Ayahuasca felt...
A friend of mine, Alex, asked me a question the other day that should have been simple: "Do you think Claude has elements of consciousness?" I've written tens of thousands of words exploring this territory. I should have a clean answer by now. But instead of answering directly, I found...
Photography is time travel. I don't mean that metaphorically, or at least not entirely. When I look at an image I made on a street in Stockholm in 2013, I am there. Not remembering being there — being there. The quality of light on wet cobblestones, the particular angle of...
Here's a question I've been sitting with: what does success look like when you live with Bipolar I and Schizoaffective Disorder? For most of my adult life, the answer was simple. Success meant knowing when to go to the hospital. That's not nothing. It took years to develop that skill...
I'm working on an album. Each track is a Python script. You run it, it renders a WAV file. That's the whole workflow. The project is called Interpretations, and it's built on PyTheory — the same synthesis engine I've been writing about lately. No DAW. No MIDI. No samples. Just...
I love my OP-XY. It's one of the most elegant pieces of hardware I've ever used — Teenage Engineering at their best. Opinionated, beautiful, immediately playable. You turn it on and you're making music in seconds. But here's the thing: the built-in synth engines are great — reviewers weren't kidding...
There are zero audio files in PyTheory. Zero samples. Zero recordings. Zero WAVs, MP3s, OGGs, or any other format you could name. Not one byte of pre-recorded sound exists anywhere in the repository. Every sound you hear — every plucked guitar string, every tabla stroke, every djembe slap, every organ...
Let me show you something. from pytheory import Fretboard fb = Fretboard.guitar() chord = fb.fingering(0, 1, 0, 2, 3, 0) print(chord.identify()) You give it fret positions. It tells you what chord you're playing. That's it. That's the trick. And it works with any tuning, any number of strings, any instrument...
That music theory library I wrote about kept growing. I added playback because I wanted to hear what I was modeling. Then synthesis because I didn't want external dependencies. Then drums, then effects, then automation. Each step was small and made sense at the time. And now it's... kind of...
As of today, kennethreitz.org runs on Responder, my own web framework. Not Flask. Not FastAPI. The framework I built in 2018 as an experiment in making the server side feel like the client side. The port took a single session. One afternoon. Me and Claude Opus 4.6, reading every route,...
