Trying to navigate modern life with a bit more stillness—reading books that slow time down, taking long walks without a screen, and writing code only when it has something honest to offer.
In a digital world that often feels hurried and overly loud, I treat this space as an open ledger—merging an economist's view of incentives, human action, and scarce attention with the quiet satisfaction of making things with care.
Late rain, filter brew, desk lamp on.
CURRENTLY
Caddy reverse proxy & SQLite automation scripts on private VPS
In Praise of Shadows & early 2000s web archives
Autonomous CLI agents & local Markdown notes sync
Ambient cassette tapes & nocturnal instrumental jazz
Morning V60 manual brews and phone-free evening walks
Tinkering, observing, and keeping the craft tactile.
I'm Noval. Trained in economics, I view modern software, algorithms, and digital tools through the lens of human incentives, transaction costs, and the ultimate scarcity of human attention. Most of my hours go into writing software, automating quiet chores, or drafting ideas into grid paper notebooks.
“Much of the digital landscape today feels hurried and overly loud. I find far more joy in building software that is calm, transparent, and respects your attention.”
I believe in the independent web—handcrafted corners built with human taste and care, rather than conversion funnels or algorithmic templates.
Economics & Public Choice (Austrian, Institutional, Attention Economics)
Linux VPS, SQLite, Agent Automation, Book Typography, Manual Pour-Over Coffee.
Things I gravitate toward
No percentage scores or arbitrary metrics. Just everyday fascinations.
The Independent Web
Building quiet, unhurried corners of the internet. Handcrafted HTML, zero tracking cookies, and small personal websites designed to age with dignity away from corporate algorithms.
AI & Reasoning
Local inference, small-model reasoning graphs, and autonomous agents treated as quiet cognitive partners rather than hype machines.
Analog Notebooks
Midori MD grid paper and 0.38mm pigment ink. Drafting system architecture by hand before typing a single line.
Self-Hosting on VPS
Small Linux virtual machines, Caddy reverse proxies, SQLite databases, and cron daemons running silently 24/7.
Building from Scratch
Learning systems from first principles rather than blindly layering abstractions and heavy third-party dependencies.
Clean Typefaces
Generous leading, tactile serifs, and the quiet dignity of book typography on screens.
Ambient Music
Brian Eno cassettes, Hiroshi Yoshimura, and quiet modal jazz creating acoustic focus sanctuaries.
Automation & Daemons
Writing small scripts that silently take care of boring, repetitive chores in the background.
Late-Night Ideas
Curiosities that only surface after midnight, when the ambient notification noise of the world settles down.
What I'm doing these days
These days, my hours are divided between living slowly in the physical world and following quiet curiosities behind the screen. I'm actively trying to resist digital urgency—spending more time outdoors, reading with a pencil in hand, and writing code only when it serves a genuine purpose.
- → Taking late afternoon walks through quiet streets, deliberately leaving my phone behind on the wooden desk.
- → Re-reading physical paperbacks on Stoicism, psychology, and solitude, taking slow pencil notes in margins.
- → Brewing single-origin filter coffee (V60) each morning, treating the 5-minute pour as a sacred pause.
- → Guarding sleep and weekends: saying no to hurried obligations and keeping evenings free of glowing screens.
- → Maintaining private, lightweight services on a Linux VPS—reverse proxies, SQLite databases, and cron daemons.
- → Experimenting with local AI reasoning models and persistent context graphs to explore machine cognition.
- → Collecting early 2000s web archives and exploring how indie personal sites can remain calm and tracker-free.
- → Building small CLI tools that do one job well and don't try to lock users into complex cloud ecosystems.
Life codex & reflections
Simple principles, intentional boundaries, and questions still being explored.
Honor the Morning
“Never give away the first thirty minutes of your day to other people's notifications and algorithms. Morning is a quiet sanctuary to collect your thoughts.”
The Philosophy of Enough
“Knowing when to stop adding is vastly more valuable than the compulsion to accumulate. Greed often masquerades as 'ambition'.”
Depth Over Velocity
“Finishing one small thing with patience and deliberate care means more than executing ten things in a frantic rush.”
Genuine Connection
“True friendships don't require daily validation on screens; they remain warm and authentic even across months of quiet separation.”
Stillness in Letting Go
“Most of our heaviest worries are fictions authored by an exhausted mind. Draw a sharp line between what lies within your control and what never belonged to you.”
Refusing workdays packed with meetings with no uninterrupted space to read, write, and think independently.
Refusing to collect possessions to impress strangers, which inevitably cages one's freedom to choose meaningful work.
Refusing to overcomplicate code architecture or writing style just to appear intellectual to an audience.
Rejecting the romanticization of burnout. Sound sleep and physical recovery are non-negotiable prerequisites for sharp reasoning.
“How much is truly 'enough' to live peacefully without an unending undercurrent of anxiety?”
Investigating the delicate boundary between financial security and the addictive hoarding of numbers on a screen.
“How do we preserve tenderness and empathy in an era where everything is accelerated and automated?”
Ensuring algorithmic efficiency and AI do not erode our capacity to listen patiently to one another.
“Do we genuinely retain what we read online every day, or are we simply addicted to bookmarking and collecting?”
An invitation to read fewer disposable hot takes, and re-read one enduring, thoughtful book instead.
“If no one could ever see what you build on social media, would you still make it with the same quiet care?”
The litmus test of creative intent: whether we create for the joy of the craft or solely for the applause of strangers.
Digital Sovereignty
“Self-hosting, open protocols, and encryption aren't just technical hobbies—they are quiet civic defenses against surveillance capitalism.”
Resisting the Outrage Economy
“Refusing to serve as algorithmic fuel designed to polarize citizens for engagement metrics. Calmness is an act of resistance.”
Free Thought & Language
“A reminder from Arendt & Orwell: tyranny rarely begins with weapons—it begins with eroded critical reasoning and degraded language.”
The Politics of the Immediate
“True citizenship is tested not by how loudly you posture on digital timelines, but by how present and helpful you are to the people right beside you.”
Incentives Over Rhetoric
Public Choice & Selectorate
“Never evaluate political actors by their televised moral posturing. Trace campaign finance dependencies, coalition survival incentives, and discretionary budget flows.”
Principal-Agent Dilemma
Information Asymmetry
“Citizens delegate monopoly power to representatives, but representatives inevitably cultivate distinct personal goals. Without transparent friction, the agent serves the agent.”
Exit vs. Voice (Hirschman)
Albert O. Hirschman's Triad
“When institutional voice is captured, citizens either become cynical loyalists or exercise Exit. Self-hosting and independent protocols are the ultimate civic expression of Exit.”
Technocracy vs. Deliberation
Epistemic Humility & Polis
“Justice is not an engineering problem to be solved by algorithmic decree. Societal tradeoffs demand slow, messy, face-to-face civic deliberation among equals.”
Exit vs. Voice: Institutional Strategy Calculator
When a community, company, or platform you belong to deteriorates, should you organize to reform it from within (Voice), or walk away to build anew (Exit)?
How do decision-makers treat critical feedback?
How difficult is it to migrate or fork away?
What is your genuine stake in the core mission?
Attention Scarcity
Herbert A. Simon (Nobel 1978)
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes... human attention.”
Transaction Cost Theory
Ronald H. Coase (Nobel 1991)
“Firms exist because market transactions have friction. When open protocols, Linux, and AI collapse coordination costs, the sovereign artisan outpaces the corporation.”
The Axiom of Trade-Offs
Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics)
“There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. To produce anything of real craft requires sacrificing a thousand other convenient, mediocre distractions.”
Dispersed Tacit Knowledge
Friedrich A. Hayek (Nobel 1974)
“Central planning suffers from a fatal conceit: vital tacit knowledge resides in decentralized individuals on the ground, never in central algorithms or corporate monopolies.”
The Opportunity Cost Calculator: Auditing Your Scarcest Resource
Economics is the study of allocating scarce resources with alternative uses. Unlike financial capital, hours cannot be borrowed or stored. What does passive algorithmic consumption truly cost your life?
At a calm 220 words/minute, 730 annual hours equals reading the complete works of Stoicism, history, and literature.
730 uninterrupted deep work hours. Enough to build 4 sovereign software utilities or master a new discipline.
Half of Gladwell's 10,000-hour mastery threshold quietly surrendered to algorithmic ad-impression auctions.
“What is seen is a fleeting dopamine hit on a digital feed; what is not seen is the unwritten essay, the unopened book, and the quiet sovereignty of an undisturbed mind.” — Frédéric Bastiat's unseen cost.
Ideas I changed my mind about.
“When the facts change, I change my mind.” A public ledger of convictions revised through experience, reading, and watching reality unfold.
From "Move Fast" to Ten-Year Compounding
Velocity was the primary metric of a good engineer. Adopting the newest frontend frameworks, shipping fast MVPs, and rewrites every six months proved you were at the cutting edge.
True engineering elegance is durability. A single plain SQLite file, semantic HTML, and a cron job on a modest Linux box can run without maintenance for a decade. Quiet compounding beats manic sprints.
The Reality Check: Watching dozens of heavily hyped frameworks deprecate into unmaintainable abandonware within three years, while twenty-year-old Unix tools and simple websites remained completely intact.
From "Global Town Square" to Outrage Harvesting
Social media networks were the ultimate democratizing force—global public spheres where truth and shared understanding would naturally win through open network debate.
Corporate social feeds are advertising machines tuned for emotional friction and ad velocity. Real democratic deliberation requires human scale, epistemic patience, and independent web spaces.
The Reality Check: Seeing algorithmic feeds systematically amplify polarization, reward bad-faith snark, and flatten complex societal dilemmas into binary culture wars for engagement metrics.
From Total Cloud Outsourcing to Self-Hosted Independence
There was no rational reason to manage your own servers when AWS, Google Cloud, and closed SaaS platforms offered infinite push-button scale with zero operational overhead.
Self-hosting and owning your data pipeline is modern civic defense. Renting everything from a monopolistic cloud oligopoly turns digital freedom into a revocable corporate lease.
The Reality Check: Experiencing silent telemetry creep, abrupt pricing multiples, API deprecations, and watching entire independent businesses deactivated overnight by automated account flags.
From Hyper-Optimized Output to Stillness & Slowness
A successful day was measured by back-to-back calendar optimization, zero idle minutes, listening to podcasts at 2x speed, and constantly multitasking.
Creative depth and breakthroughs demand vast stretches of empty, unstructured downtime. Staring out the window, long walks without headphones, and handwritten journal sketches spark more insights than any productivity framework.
The Reality Check: Chronic mental fatigue, shallow ideas, and noticing that every meaningful architectural insight or philosophical breakthrough arrived while taking a walk or making coffee, never while rushing a sprint.
From Moral Exhortation to Structural Incentives
Corrupt or dysfunctional institutions fail simply because "bad people" are in charge, and electing or hiring more virtuous, well-meaning individuals would naturally heal the system.
Systems are driven by feedback loops and incentive architecture, not moral declarations. Good people placed inside distorted incentive structures will reliably produce dysfunctional outcomes.
The Reality Check: Studying Public Choice theory, Elinor Ostrom, and Albert Hirschman: to fix a failing community or software platform, don't lecture human nature—redesign the rules, accountability flows, and exit options.
Notes that settled in
Critical reflections on craft, patience, power, and the architecture of human institutions.
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
“The most impressive people I know are compounding over long horizons. Consistency and curiosity beat short-term velocity every time.”
“AI is probably the most profound technology humanity has ever worked on—more profound than electricity or fire. It requires thoughtful stewardship.”
“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”
“In democratic countries, the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon it.”
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, and true and false, no longer exist.”
“There is no reason to believe that bureaucrats, no matter how well-meaning, are better at solving problems than the people living them on the spot.”
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
“Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and the beautiful.”
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes... human attention.”
“A firm will tend to expand until the costs of organizing an extra transaction become equal to the costs of carrying out the transaction on the open market.”
Synthesizing Economics, Power & Craft
Drag nodes to explore dynamic tensions. Click any thinker or concept to illuminate semantic bridges linking economic theory to digital sovereignty.
Alexis de Tocqueville · Civic Association
“In democratic countries, the science of association is the mother of science...” Bottom-up voluntary associations protect citizens from centralized administrative paternalism.
Things I've made
No vanity metrics. Just tools built because I wanted them to exist.
Noval Cognitive Model
A personal experiment around AI, persistent memory, and context graph reasoning. Built to run lightweight on self-hosted machines.
Personal AI Experiments & Daemons
A loose collection of experimental agent scripts, CLI scrapers, and weird little tools designed for personal workflows.
Paper & Terminal
An open-source minimal markdown sync utility connecting physical notebook notes to local obsidian vaults.
Everyday carry & workshop gear
Tools I rely on to keep distractions low and output sharp.
Neovim + VS Code
Ghostty terminal emulator with Tokyo Night / Gruvbox contrast. Fast keystrokes, zero telemetry lag.
Ubuntu VPS & Docker
Cloud VPS for private reverse proxies, SQLite databases, Python daemons, and automated task runners.
Keychron & IEMs
Custom mechanical keyboard (lubed linear switches) paired with flat-response in-ear monitors for deep focus.
Grid Journal & Gel Pen
Midori MD grid notebook + 0.38mm black ink pen. For sketching system flows before writing a single line.
Morning workspace: natural daylight, mechanical keys, and an open notebook.
Jakarta, 2026$ noval --status
mode: deep-work
vps: active (latency 12ms)
daemon: context-engine [running]
coffee_level: 68%
Senior Keyboard Sleeper & Debugger
“purrr... remember to drink some water and drop your shoulders.”
"Sept 2026: trying to keep code simple. Resist adding the fifth microservice when a plain sqlite file and a cron job will do the work for the next ten years."
Books that shape perspective.
Slow reads on stillness, human nature, and how societies coordinate power and meaning. Away from fleeting feeds and algorithms.
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
A reminder that true serenity never stems from external tranquility, but from a mind resilient against things beyond our control.
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”
When we can no longer change a painful circumstance, the ultimate human challenge is the courage to transform how we respond.
In Praise of Shadows
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki
“We find beauty not in the thing itself, but in the patterns of shadows and nuance it creates.”
An invitation to cherish shadow, imperfection, and restful pauses—a vital counterweight to a modern world that is glaring, hurried, and loud.
The Courage to Be Disliked
Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga
“The courage to be happy also includes the courage to be disliked.”
The principle of separation of tasks: shedding the burden of others' expectations and centering life's energy squarely in the here and now.
Seeing Like a State
James C. Scott (1998)
“Formal order, to be effective, must always be embedded in informal, local practice.”
A critique of high-modernist schemes that collapse when they mistake simplified top-down administrative grids for the living complexity of human communities.
Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)
“The science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the rest depends upon it.”
Why decentralized civic associations and bottom-up voluntary habits are the only durable safeguard against administrative paternalism and social isolation.
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
Albert O. Hirschman (1970)
“Exit is an economic reaction, voice a political one; institutions thrive when both find balance.”
A compact framework for when people choose to stay and reform deteriorating institutions through voice, versus when they exercise the right to walk away.
Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt (1951)
“Totalitarianism thrives not by making people believe lies, but by making them cynical about truth itself.”
A rigorous dissection of atomization, propaganda, and bureaucracy—and an urgent defense of the shared public realm where diverse minds think and deliberate together.
Small Is Beautiful
E.F. Schumacher (1973)
“Economics as if people mattered. Production by the masses rather than mass production.”
A profound critique of unbridled industrial gigantism. Schumacher makes the moral case for intermediate technology, human dignity, and the philosophy of enough.
Use of Knowledge in Society
Friedrich A. Hayek (1945)
“The economic problem of society is how to utilize knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.”
The seminal essay proving that decentralized price systems aggregate tacit, fleeting local facts far more intelligently than any centralized authority or corporate planner ever could.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman (2011)
“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
A masterclass on cognitive biases, prospect theory, and bounded rationality. An essential field manual for recognizing how feeds and digital urgency hijack human intuition.
Basic Economics
Thomas Sowell (2000)
“Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses.”
Clear-eyed, jargon-free analysis of how price signals allocate capital and why moral intentions cannot overturn structural economic incentives.
Observations on slowing down.
Unfinished thoughts, counter-intuitive aphorisms, and notes from long offline walks.
“Most things stamped 'urgent' in the modern world are simply the predictable fallout of hurried planning.”
“Sometimes the finest design tool isn't a shiny new app, but a twenty-minute walk under trees without headphones.”
“Master a single tool deeply until it feels like an extension of your own hand before succumbing to collecting ten new ones.”
Soundtracks for deep focus.
Minimalist soundscapes for reading, thinking, and night engineering.
Music for Airports
Brian Eno · 1978
The foundation of intentional background listening.
Green
Hiroshi Yoshimura · 1986
Gentle FM synthesis and natural acoustic balance.
Peace Piece
Bill Evans · 1958
Unscripted modal piano improvisation late at night.
Dive
Tycho · 2011
Warm analog synthesizers and sunny drifting tempos.
“I don't always know where an idea is going. Sometimes I just want to see where it leads.”
Say hello.
If you want to talk about an idea, technology, AI, or absolutely nothing — I'm around.