Steve Simkins

It was a regular Thursday at work. I tried to open Postman for the 3rd time in a row, and yet again everything froze and nothing would load. "Fine then." That's how Cielago was born. There are plenty of other tools out there for testing or interacting with APIs, however I had a few specific requirements. I needed something that could both import an OpenAPI spec and allow me to have multiple configurations, as well as OAuth support for authentication. That combo of the two proved to be pretty…

This past week my family and I visited the Oregon coast, spending time with our friends who live in the area. It was a beautiful sunny day and a mild 65F with a steady breeze. We specifically visited Cape Kiwanda which has a breathtaking view and sample of Oregon coast geology, including a haystack and a ridge made of sandstone. By the time we got there the tide was starting to go out, and soon there was small ridges in the sand with pools of water that my kids got to play in. The receding tide…

Earlier this year we made a plan to visit our friends in Portland, Oregon and do a camping trip at Crater Lake National Park. For months our family had been looking forward to it, especially my oldest son who is obsessed with volcanoes. This past weekend the day finally arrived. We crammed everything into the cars and started the long five hour drive to the park. In the last hour, as the road began to climb into the park, we started to notice a whole lot of haze in the sky. The smell revealed…

Something I discovered several years ago, that I'm now realizing may not be popular knowledge, is that iOS shortcuts has the ability to make API calls. The action is called Get Contents of URL. It's a bit deceiving because it sounds like it only does GET requests, but in reality it can also do POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, along with JSON, Form, or File request bodies, and headers! Combining this with existing iOS shortcut actions make it a pretty powerful tool, and it's something I use with my…

I read a blog post recently saying that it was ok to hate AI. While I agree to some extent, I think it was missing some key points about how to hate AI. It’s easy to just hate something you don’t like. We as humans have a natural propensity to hate or dislike things we are not familiar with. The problem is that this approach is akin to putting your head in the sand or screaming at the clouds; it doesn’t actually help anyone. Whether you like it or not, AI is out of the bag. Pandora’s box is…

This post is about a little app called Feeds, how it has evolved and fills all my RSS needs. The Reader I’ve tried many RSS readers, but the one that stuck for a while was NetNewsWire. It has such a simple no nonsense approach to collecting and reading feeds. At the time I used it in combination with FreshRSS, and that combination worked pretty well. Ironically I built my first RSS client, Alcove, as a response to a blog post by the author of NetNewsWire. Even still, I found myself discontent…

For the longest time I’ve had a weird obsession with stationery. I love finding and collecting pens, optimizing inks and paper, collecting a billion notebooks I’ll never use, etc. Recently I got back into using and collecting fountain pens. I’ve kept a pocket notebook for over a decade, and I liked the idea of keeping a fountain pen on hand and using it regularly. Collecting and using different inks is so much fun, and one could argue way more economical than buying refillable pens. However,…

Earlier this week I quietly released an iOS app called scout, a Gemini protocol client. I built it quite a while ago but never published, and thought “why not?” Almost immediately after doing so, I read this post that really made me think about the Gemini approach in general. After some deliberation, I thought it would be good to pour more into my personal site and invest in HTTP. The results have been so much fun, and I haven’t been able to stop making changes all week! Here’s a few…

For the past month or two I’ve been experimenting with building personal, self hosted software in Rust. The apps include anything from simple note taking, a wine tracker, image resizing, even a full blown RSS aggregator to replace FreshRSS. I’m not going to go into too much detail around the apps themselves, you can check them out here if you’re really interested. Instead, I want to use this post to talk about how I got here, why Rust, and the good, the bad, and the ugly of building personal…

A journey to index a new standard for content publishing and why it matters

Once again coming back to the editor I can't shake