Changelog: Now, Monolog

There were two big motivators when I took on the Changelog project (what you're looking at now).

1. Professionally: I wanted a way to record features as they were added to an internal product
2. Personally: I wanted a way to record where I've been in life, what I've learned, and to share that with whoever is interested

The professional angle fizzled out at the expense of faster product development. So, instead of constraining Changelog as a general-purpose framework, I think it's time to dive headfirst into a Monolog that's much more personal.

Friends

Frustrations with social media

I'm in a love-hate relationship with social media. It's great because you can easily share ideas, experiences, and memes with your friends. It's horrible because your dopamine system has been hijacked by likes, ragebait, and infinite content in exchange for a shortened attention span.

Slowly I've pulled out of this trap in exchange for increased distance between me and a lot of my friends. Through Monolog, I'm hoping to reduce that distance.

Extra notes for close friends

If you're a close friend of mine, you'll now be able to login and view additional notes on each Monolog entry. Expect fun blurbs about my adventures, hobbies, ideas, and random recommendations (to name a few).

If you'd like to stay up-to-date on Monolog entries, you're welcome to register and receive email updates in the future (still working on the email delivery mechanism). When everything is ready, you'll receive a welcome email confirming your subscription preferences.

Caffeine Hackathon

Earlier this week, I participated in the Caffeine Hackathon — a 4 hour sprint to build a working, production-ready app using nothing but natural language. No IDE. No local dev. No boilerplate. Just my overdressed self, a prompt window, and an AI dev environment built on the Internet Computer.

Caffeine is a full-stack vibe coding platform (kinda). You describe what you want, and the system scaffolds it in real time. Think infrastructure, logic, UI, and data all orchestrated through a conversational interface. It's a interesting take on app development, where your ability to express intent is the primary skill.

Flexor: Personalized Mobility Routines

Out of the hackathon came Flexor, an adaptive mobility tool that creates personalized stretch routines based on how your body feels and what you've recently done.

In just 4 hours, I built something that would typically take a small team 36+ hours. It features a working LLM-enabled routine generator, body-state inputs, and an activity log.

Out of 80 total projects, Flexor placed in the top 9 overall and top 5 in the technical track.

Read the Flexor Overview included in my hackathon submission.

Tam Week

From July 7-11, I participated in Tam Week: a 5-day cycling challenge hosted by Ornot that invites riders to summit Mt. Tamalpais as many times as they can. I committed to doing it the hard way: biking from downtown San Francisco, through Sausalito and Mill Valley, to the top of West Peak — and back — every day.

In the end, I totalled over 270 miles, 15,500 ft of elevation gain, and 22 hours in the saddle. I also passed 2,500 lifetime miles on my gravel bike along the way.

Tam Week was a humbling test of my fitness and mental headspace. It was tough. For finishing all 5 days, I picked up an Ornot Park Jersey, socks, poster, and a well-deserved donut.

I guess you'll catch me pushing code... and pedals.

Changelog: New!

Purpose

To me, a changelog is an underrated way to showcase to others what you're building and why it matters. When used well, it shows that you are fast, organized, and exceptional.

A tool like this typically surrounds a company or a single product, used to communicate progress to customers and stakeholders. But I see potential in using one personally: a way to reflect, document momentum, and build in public.

Practicality

Changelog v0 was built on three tools: Lit, Next, and MDX. Lit was chosen for its framework-agnostic flexibility, allowing this template to adapt across future projects and frontends. Next provides a stable, industry-standard foundation. MDX powers the document-driven update flow, making changelog entries simple to write and publish.

Future versions will focus on email updates, extensibility, developer experience, and a changelog peer-to-peer subscriptions concept — my spin on RSS feeds. It might sound strange, but I see value in “subscribing” my personal changelog to the products I'm building alongside it. More on that soon.

The UI borrows design concepts from Linear's Changelog, Cursor's Changelog and Mark 4 (radison.io).

Mark 4: Progressively faster

Performance overhaul

Mark 4 (radison.io) is now faster than ever. The underlying architecture has been rebuilt as a Progressive Web App (PWA), bringing near-instant navigation, seamless reloads, and offline support across the entire site. Every interaction is radically fluid.

Link thumbnails

Sharing links from radison.io now generates rich, mark-4-themed thumbnails. Each page renders its own Open Graph (OG) preview image on the fly using nuxt-og-image.

Steven Olikara: Personal polish

Following Steven Olikara's run for U.S. Senate in 2022, Steven and I decided to spin the original campaign website into a intermediary personal portfolio. The personal site sat dormant for some time, as Steven (and I) focused on defining our next chapters.

Today, we're giving that portfolio a meaningful refresh. The updated site better reflects Steven's recent media work, creative direction, and public speaking momentum.

There's still plenty left to refine. Over the next couple months, we'll continue to shape the site around Steven's style, purpose, and presence.

Visit the new site at stevenolikara.com.