bytes.zone

Projects

growing hydroponic lettuce

(October 2023, last updated December 2025)

Around October 2023, I started growing hydroponic lettuce in my basement. I first documented my setup at Kratky in the basement, but quickly switched to a four-bucket system since 25 gallons of water was far too heavy.

In 2025, I switched from 5-gallon buckets with 3 plants each to 2-gallon buckets with 2 plants each. I also switched from an off-the-shelf nutrient to a masterblend nutrient formulated for leafy greens.

The two changes together have been phenomenal! I'm now getting around 16oz/450g of harvested lettuce per week, with minimal waste when cleaning and preparing.

I never expected it, but I'm actually ahead on system cost relative to buying the same weight of lettuce!

Horizon Investments

(December 2025)

In December 2025, I joined Horizon Investments as a software engineer. The team is tiny and the product is useful, and I'm looking forward to both.

Past Projects

2024
Local-First From Scratch, a book about building local-first software (November 2024 to December 2025)
platform engineer at PayNearMe, removing friction, shipping faster (September 2024 to November 2025)
tinyping, figure out how you're spending your life (May 2024)
elm-duet, type syncing between Elm and TypeScript (April 2024 to May 2024)
thing-a-month (awareness) (March 2024 to May 2024)
thing-a-month, making cool stuff in a time-constrained way (February 2024 to May 2024)
thing-a-month (meta), setting the stage for the rest of the project (February 2024)
2023
engineering design systems at Vendr, making user experience more consistent (October 2023 to August 2024)
2022
being the wandering toolmaker, staff engineering at NoRedInk (May 2022 to October 2023)
learning Alloy, model all the things! (August 2022 to October 2023)
bold, a remote-first build system (December 2022 to January 2023)
home recycling, stop throwing away plastic (July 2022)
2021
rbt, the Roc build tool (June 2021 to December 2022)
elm-csv, a CSV parser (January 2021 to November 2021)
2020
bad-datalog, a datalog in Elm (August 2020 to June 2022)
a batch at the Recurse Center, M1 2020 (January 2020 to January 2020)