Love's Labour Lost | Stonecharioteer on Tech<br>I'm currently open to new opportunities! View my resume or connect on LinkedIn.<br>We’ve been building Merrilin for a little under four<br>months now, and we still do not know where it leads. I’m building it with<br>Abinav, who writes at Lost Stoic. We started on Feb 7,<br>and by day 90 there was already a post I meant to write and could not, because<br>we were too busy building.<br>That is the strangest part of building something in the blind: you can love the<br>work, believe in it deeply, and still have no light at the end of the tunnel.<br>No proof that anyone will care enough, no proof that it will make money, no<br>proof that the obsession is wise.<br>For me, it began a few years ago, when I told myself that the Kindle wasn’t<br>good enough. I tried Moon Reader and it felt like something was missing. I<br>tried Readera and KOReader after that, and that feeling never went away. At<br>some point, my dissatisfaction stopped being a complaint and became a problem we<br>could no longer ignore.<br>We have had a laundry list of features we wanted in an app that’s meant to empower<br>someone who reads a lot. I read at nearly 800 WPM, perhaps faster if I’m in the<br>zone. I do best when I’m not counting my reading really. I have a hate<br>relationship with Goodreads. I want to move out of it.<br>We wanted EPUBs and PDFs in the same app without one feeling like an afterthought.<br>We wanted progress, highlights, and bookmarks to sync across devices. We wanted<br>offline reading and a version of the app that did not assume the cloud, or even a<br>login. We wanted to ask questions of a book without being spoiled for what came<br>later. We wanted code snippets and technical books to feel usable. None of these<br>wants felt outrageous to us, which is perhaps why the absence of them bothered<br>us for so long.<br>When we wrote the prototype, it did not look like the thing I had in my head.<br>It was rough, unfinished, and obviously far from what we wanted. But we saw<br>glimmers of what this could be, and that was enough to make us a little<br>awestruck. Ira Glass once spoke about the gap between your taste and your<br>ability, and I think that is part of what keeps you going as a beginner: your<br>taste runs ahead of your abilities, but every now and then you catch sight of<br>the thing you are trying to make. And that was the last day I used KOReader. I<br>have not used it once since the first Android build of Merrilin was ready. I’d<br>rather not read than read on another app now.<br>I have written before about how hard dogfooding can be when the thing you are<br>building is still rough around the edges. It asks something of you. It slows you<br>down. It irritates you in fresh and inventive ways. But it has been getting<br>better. This week, I am reading The Bourne Identity on it, and Chip Huyen’s<br>AI Engineering as well. I struggled to read Ludlum as a child; I was more into<br>John Grisham back then, and I have started The Bourne Identity at least five<br>times in the years since. I wanted to use this chance to finally read it.<br>Perhaps one day, I’ll best the Malazan series too.<br>That means more to me than any roadmap ever could.<br>Feature creep is a thing though, and we don’t want to turn Merrilin into<br>Goodreads for now. We want to build the best reader app you can find, so much so<br>that I bought the cheapest iPad I could find to do this. I don’t enjoy using an<br>iPad. I can’t explain how much I prefer Android.<br>This is a labour of love. If you install Merrilin in the upcoming days and see a<br>bug, know that I know about it and it annoys me more than I can ever explain. We<br>don’t want to take your money if there are bugs that annoy us. We want this to<br>be the best damned reader app you will ever use before we even think of asking<br>people to pay for it.<br>Right now though, I don’t even know if this will make us any money. I am anxious<br>about whether it will ever pay my rent, whether it will help keep my family<br>afloat. Honestly, I would be happy just to break even on the cloud and AI<br>costs. I think twice before paying the cloud bill, before assessing infra<br>costs. I self-host our GitHub runner to save money. I do not even know what it<br>means to approach a VC with something like this, or to say that we need<br>sponsorships.<br>We’d still do it anyway, since this is a problem that has possessed us. It is<br>the great problem we have chosen to tackle.<br>We love this app because we see what it can be. We aren’t setting out to make a<br>Kindle competitor, we are making something that didn’t exist before. We wanted it<br>to be an app to read on. You don’t even need to pay us or sign in, in fact. The<br>app will sync your files between devices without a hiccup. We want to provide the<br>best damned experience for syncing a library of files across devices without<br>relying on Google Drive or Apple Cloud. Just over your local WiFi. That kind of<br>thing matters to us because reading software should get out of the way, not make<br>you...