A friend looked at Press and asked if it was worth scattering my attention on another project.
Fair question. I lead Sirv Studio, build VibeQ and have several other things going. Then there’s this desktop image tool written in Rust. From the outside, it can look like I keep finding new ways to avoid picking one thing.
Except the main things haven’t stopped moving. That’s the part I care about: whether the work I committed to is getting done, not whether my list of interests looks tidy.
Look at what keeps moving
Over July and August, my Studio work covered product variants and billing, review workflows, Shopify onboarding and localization for suppliers and merchants. September brought the image editor, Capture One integration and a dashboard that shows each person the information and actions they need.
It also covered the dull parts. Making a failed action recoverable. Connecting a screen to the rest of a workflow. Checking permissions. Fixing something that looked finished until someone used it differently. VibeQ kept getting attention too: execution reliability, database recovery and the native app.
Press happened alongside all that. It didn’t replace any of it.
Yes, it’s all AI-assisted. I don’t use commit totals as a scoreboard. What matters is that the same projects keep getting more capable, better connected and nicer to use. My Studio case study and how I work with agents cover that side.
Doing one thing all the time gets boring
I find it pretty fucking hard to work on one thing all the time. The thing doesn’t stop mattering. I just get bored, and I keep having ideas about other things.
The usual argument assumes an hour on Press would otherwise have been an equally good hour on Studio. I wouldn’t bet on that for myself. Forcing myself to stay on something after I’m tired of it doesn’t make the work better.
I’m not offering a theory of everyone’s attention. I’m describing mine. I like variety, and I like finishing things far enough that they work. Some people relax by doing something completely different from their job. Sometimes my break is also software.
Sometimes the result is just a better keyboard
I also made Ortholinear, a Ukrainian and English keyboard for iOS, because I didn’t like the default layout. Now I have a keyboard I actually like. When something about it bugs me, I patch it.
It will never be a company. I wanted a tool to behave differently, and now it does. That’s a perfectly good outcome.
I’ve written before about keeping small projects alive. This is the other half: sometimes it’s worth making one just because you want to use it.
Focus over months, not one session
For me, the line is between changing what I’m working on and abandoning what I’m working towards.
I still have to do the hard parts of the main projects. A detour doesn’t excuse a broken promise. But having other interests isn’t proof that promises are being broken. Look at the work, not at how disciplined the arrangement looks from a distance.
Studio is the main project. Press is a detour I enjoy. The keyboard is for me.