Journal

The FocusTube journal

Notes on attention, engineering, and calm software.

Essays from the project's development: why the feed fights you, how the rings were designed, what MV3 resistance looks like, and the psychology behind every nudge.

Focus · Featured

Designed for watching. Not endless scrolling.

YouTube is the greatest learning resource ever assembled — wrapped in the most effective distraction machine ever shipped. Both facts are true at once, and that's exactly why blocking tools exist.

September 10, 2026 6 min

Design8 min

Focus Rings: designing a habit system for attention

Apple Fitness solved something subtle: it made invisible effort visible without shaming the invisible days. We spent a y…

September 4, 2026

Engineering9 min

Engineering against the infinite scroll: inside FocusTube's MV3 architecture

One service worker, thirty content scripts, a single storage layer, and a platform that redesigns itself every few weeks…

August 26, 2026

Privacy7 min

Privacy-first analytics: what we track when we say “100% local”

FocusTube measures your attention without a server in sight. Here's exactly where data lives, what syncs, what never lea…

August 18, 2026

Engineering6 min

16 KB of anime: building Mika & Haru without a single model download

The companion almost didn't ship. A search for a redistributable open-source 3D anime pair with a full emotion set came …

August 12, 2026

Research7 min

“What are you here for?”: the 1999 psychology trick behind Watch Intent

Implementation intentions — specifying when, where and why before an action — doubled goal follow-through in Gollwitzer'…

August 5, 2026

Design7 min

Anti-gaming by design: the Focus Score's honest math

Any metric becomes a target, and any target gets gamed — Goodhart's law is a design constraint. How a focus score surviv…

July 28, 2026