scriptease.dev
Blume
The Pet Projects saga: 1. The Vault I Could Finally Give Away · 2. Blume · 3. Improving the Tool That Builds the Tools · 4. My New Slick CLI
Blume is German for flower. That was the initial joke when I put a 🌼 on our company's links page.
It started as a joke
Our team has a links page. One web page with the websites and tools we use. Little tags at the top narrow the list by customer, country, or whether something is live or still being worked on. I built the first version in 2020. It has grown ever since.
The notes for one of my internal projects live in Obsidian, a notes app that keeps everything as plain text files in a folder. I share the folder through Blume, a tool that turns notes into a small website. When I added its link to the page, I gave it a tag. Not a customer, not a country. A flower.
Nobody asked about it. It just stayed there.
It fit for a second reason, too. My name is Florian. It comes from the same stem as flower.
"Where do you find the iOS app?"
Then a colleague asked me where to find the app of one of our customers.
The obvious answer was the links page. The problem: every test version of an app gets its own download link. Link today's version, and the next release makes it stale.
The fix wasn't on the links page. It was on the website we built to hand out test versions of our iOS apps. Every app carries a name tag that never changes between versions. Apple calls it a bundle identifier, and it reads like a web address backwards, com.company.app. I asked Claude for a page per bundle identifier that always lists that app's releases, and for a plain "not found" when the identifier doesn't exist.
One link, right forever. I added ours to the links page and gave each one the tag of its customer.
"I think Apple is cute"
They also needed a tag of their own, one that says "iOS app". Claude suggested the mobile phone, 📱. I wrote back:
I think Apple is cute and I only already have a sunflower.
So the flower got company: 🍎.
Five pages of apples
Then I thought: why stop at test versions? The apps we put in the App Store belong there too.
App Store Connect, Apple's dashboard for developers, lists every app we publish. It shows about 45 at a time and won't let you copy the list. So I copied the whole page in five batches, scrolling in between, and pasted the mess into the chat. Claude dug 53 apps out of it, matched each to its customer, and sorted test apps from live ones by their names.
I asked whether we should keep Claude's rule for picking app names out of the copied text. Claude advised against it: Apple could change the page any day. It suggested getting the list directly from Apple and updating it automatically. I said no:
At the moment, everything is manually in there, so somebody can change the order. I don't want it automated yet.
My pet projects
The links page now has a section full of apples, more than sixty of them.
Next to it sits the flower. Click it and two links remain: the Blume site for my notes, and my own version of T3 Code, an app for working with AI assistants that write and change code. Its bundle identifier has my name in it.
The flower started as a joke about a word. Now it marks my own projects.