Blog #0187: A Few Things I've Been Working On
Source: Photo by Barn Images on Unsplash
[ED: Apologies for the radio silence. This is a catch-up post — what I've been doing, what I've shipped, and where things are headed. Light reading, no heavy tech. 1/5 hats.]
Where I've Been
If you've been following this blog — or its companion, Quantum Fax Machine — you'll have noticed that things went quiet in Q4 2025. No posts here, no link roundups on QFM, and Medium went silent too.
The honest explanation is that I got consumed by a project. Completely. The kind of consumed where you look up from your desk and three months have gone by. I owe you a catch-up, so here it is: a few things I've been working on.
The As Yet Unnamed Newco
Let's start with the thing I can say the least about. From roughly Q3 2025 onwards, the bulk of my time has been going into a new venture. For now, it's operating under the codename Appendix3. It's still in stealth mode, so I can't say much more than that — but it ate all available hours and then some.
More to come when the time is right.
Laksa — Own the Whole Widget
Over the Christmas break, I shipped the first project that had been quietly building in the background: Laksa.
Laksa is a programmer-friendly, local-first, multi-site content management system. If you're reading this on matthewsinclair.com, you're looking at Laksa in action.
The motivation was what I've been calling "owning the whole widget" — hosting and managing all of my content end-to-end, with no vendor lock-in. No Medium as the canonical source. No Substack owning the subscriber list. No Wordpress database that I can't easily move. Just files on disk, version-controlled in Git, rendered by software I control.
It's a small piece of a longer-term aspiration to push back against the way the modern web works — surveillance capitalism, walled gardens, attention farming — but that's a post for another day.
A few highlights:
- Built with Elixir/Phoenix and the Ash Framework
- Currently powering matthewsinclair.com, quantumfaxmachine.com, and five other sites
- 5,400+ content items, fully synced via Git
- Local-first: all content lives as files on disk — Markdown, images, PDFs — version-controlled and portable
- Plans to open-source once it's been battle-tested enough to not embarrass me
If any of this sounds interesting and you'd like to kick the tyres, I'm happy to share access on an all-care-no-responsibility basis. Drop me a line.
Prolix — Think Fast, Play Slow
The second Christmas break project was Prolix — a two-to-four-player, asynchronous, turn-based word puzzle game where time, not guesses, determines victory.
Think of it as a Wordle variant built for competitive play. You and an opponent both solve the same hidden word, but instead of counting guesses, the game measures how long you take to solve it. You can play at your own pace — a turn in the morning, another after lunch — but the clock is always ticking.
The "why" has a few layers:
- I wanted to reacquaint with iOS development and the App Store process after being away from it for a while
- I had an idea for a peer-to-peer Wordle variant with some UX improvements I wanted to try
- I wanted to build a pure-functional game engine as a programming experiment — the same engine powers the CLI, the web version, and the iOS app, with no side effects in the core game logic
- It was "gym work" for the As Yet Unnamed Newco... #intrigue
A few highlights:
- Live on the App Store (iPhone, iPad, Mac) and on the web at app.playprolix.com
- Built with an Elixir/Phoenix backend and a SwiftUI native frontend
- Pure functional game engine — no side effects in the core game logic, fully deterministic
- Server-authoritative timing so nobody can cheat the clock
- Pulse Bar share cards — they show your game's shape without spoiling the word
The app is deliberately paid. Part of the experiment was seeing how paid apps work in the current App Store landscape. That said, I'm happy to give away promo codes to the first 20 people who ask. Drop me a line at prolixpromocodes@matthewsinclair.com.
Catching Up — QFM & Medium
On the content side, I've got Quantum Fax Machine back on track with a fresh batch of link posts for January 2026. QFM has always been my outlet for curating interesting things I find around the web, and it feels good to have it ticking over again.
Medium will follow — it's always been a cross-post of the personal blog, and now that the blog is back in action, Medium will catch up shortly.
Back to Regular Programming
So that's the update. I'm back, the tools are sharp, and there's plenty to write about. No grand promises about posting cadence — just a signal that the lights are on again.
More soon.
Regards,
M@
Originally posted on matthewsinclair.com and cross-posted on Medium.
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