Ways of Looking #23 (July '26)
In this issue: CloudKit, airlines, drawing lines, IVF, and biomats.
Welcome to Ways of Looking. Roughly every month, I send my friends links and summaries for anything I’ve written recently, plus a few things I’m enjoying.
Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.
What I wrote last month
A month of mostly-technical writing… but I’ve got some very fun projects in near-final stages that I look forward to writing about more accessibly in the coming months!
Developing on iOS is underrated: CloudKit and more — recently I’ve really enjoyed building iOS apps for the first time in my life — here’s why.
Copapers: the tricky bits — a technical writeup on some of the nuances of building Copapers.
AI Captain’s Log — regular thoughts, this month on connectors, the physical world, and open source.
What I’m enjoying
Book: Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos by Thomas Petzinger Jr. — unexpectedly almost couldn’t put this history of the airline industry down. It’s a page-turner written with all the drama and plot twists of great fiction but… it’s real. Great read, and I now understand the weird edges of the air travel industry much more clearly.
Product: Screen Studio. Every time I publish a nice-looking screen recording with zooming and transitions, people ask me how I made it and how long it took me to edit. The answers are 1) Screen Studio and 2) roughly 3 minutes. It’s a little pricey and there are competitors, but I’ve found it to be reliable and easy, and so have stuck with it…
Articles:
50 Hours to Draw Some Lines by Doug MacDowell. Such cool craftsmanship.
Curious cases of financial engineering in biotech by Abhishaike Mahajan. Biotech stocks and markets have never made much sense to me, and this helped explain the frameworks and intuition behind them.
Against Maximum Stimulation- Egg freezing, IVF, and the case for gentler fertility medicine by Riva Melissa-Tez. The American Way of IVF is almost certainly not optimal, and this piece does a great job explaining the issues.
Experiment: Biomat before bed. If I’m wired before bed — which I try not to be, but is sometimes unavoidable — I find that 5-10 minutes on a biomat / PEMF mat absolutely knocks me out. I go from fully-energized to staggering-to-bed-90%-asleep. The most effective setting for me seems to be 3Hz with the heat on, but anything 2-6Hz does the trick, with heat optional. I use a Healthy Wave Mat but there are many out there.
For a compilation of all past recommendations, see the Recommendations page on my site.
About me: I’m a multi-time founder (Eco, Lightwork Home Health, CoinList, Sidewire). I’m currently spending time on: a stealthy AI company, investing at Amity, Lightwork, Eco, tinkering with interface0 and other products, supporting FreeWorld, and advising great companies and founders.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.
— Andy
loved the biotech financial-engineering piece.
maybe biotech securities are fundamentally misdesigned for underlying risk? lots of overlap between biotech & compute futures tbh