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by Jacob O'Bryant

My Projects

Yakread is a simple, smart reader app. It organizes your newsletters, RSS feeds, and bookmarks into a daily digest email. It also has an algorithmic For You feed that's populated both from your content and from articles that other Yakread users have read.

I worked full-time on Yakread from August 2022 to May 2023, at which point I decided to get a job. I now work on Yakread and my other projects on evenings and weekends, as my kids allow.


Biff is a web framework for the Clojure programming language. I use it for Yakread and all my other projects. The first release was in 2020. In 2022 it matured from its previously experimental state and has been slowly gaining adoption since. I receive/have received sponsorship for Biff from JUXT, Clojurists Together, and various top-notch individuals.


The Sample is my most broadly-known project. It's a newsletter recommender: each day it sends you the latest issue from a ~random newsletter; if you like it, you can subscribe to that newsletter in a single click. Newsletters are sourced from submissions.

I worked full-time on The Sample from February 2021 to August 2022. It provides some side income, but it has low long-term retention and as such I was unable to make it grow past its current plateau. Hence Yakread.


Platypub is an experimental open-source publishing platform. I use it to publish this website and the accompanying newsletter; it also serves as a non-toy example project for Biff. It's meant to give you the same amount of flexibility that you'd have if you coded everything from scratch, without requiring you to actually do that.

Platypub is in a pre-alpha state, but it is genuinely useful if you know how to program in Clojure. Eventually I'd like to provide a hosted instance of it.

I write an occasional newsletter
about my work and ideas.

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