Dear reader,
Thank you for spending time with this small newsletter over the past year. It began as a simple internet experiment; I shared links to things I was reading and thinking about, mostly to impose some structure on my own curiosity. Somewhere along the way, it found a small audience.
There are now just under 250 of you here, with roughly half opening an email in a typical week, assuming I manage to send one. Even more surprising, five people decided it was worth paying to read summaries of things I find interesting. That remains genuinely unexpected, and I am grateful to those of you who chose to support it.
Writing a newsletter, even a modest one, takes more time than it appears, automation notwithstanding. While I have technically published something every week, punctuality has been inconsistent, particularly towards the end of the year. More importantly, I no longer find it especially rewarding to produce regular summaries of concepts and articles.
On top of that, my focus is shifting more decisively towards building. While I do enjoy both creative processes, I definitely get more out of creating things than writing about, well, stuff. I find these words by the Roman philosopher Seneca worth reflecting on:
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements, if it were all well invested.”
In that spirit, I’m focusing more of my spare time on what I want to do more of: building software projects, distributing them, and learning more about the process.
Rather than ending this project though, I am changing the format. The overhead will be reduced. This will become a place to quickly share things I find interesting, with occasional longer, data-led pieces when I have something substantial to say and the time to say it properly, without a set schedule. The output style of the Marginal Revolution blog of “write it quickly and publish” is a good frame of reference for how this blog will function from now on.
Substack will also act as a mirror of my blog and as the subscription and email layer. All of Interessant3 now lives on both platforms. If you are curious about the mechanics, the backend system is all documented here.
I’ve also started working on another two projects which may be of interest to this audience:
- ‘EuropeVersus’ - name still subject to change - an open source repository of socioeconomic data with a focus on Europe. Data is collected from reputable sources and this website provides handy logic so users can compare how different subsets of Europe compare versus India, the USA, and China. Ever wanted to know how the Eurozone’s productivity compares vs the USA, or the life expectancy of the EEA vs China? This is the place to do it easily with beautiful visualisations. I will also be publishing data-led articles here on common discussion points regarding europe, such as on its productivity, crime rates, democratic standing, etc. You can find and contribute to the repo here, and check out the staging site here.
- VoxPopli - this is aimed at being an alternative to Twitter and Slack groups specifically for builers. Think of a social media platform with no rage-bait promoting algorithm, a downvote button, a free and working API, and a tonne of tools to help builders. You can check it out here.
I hope 2026 brings you many interesting things to discover!
Duarte
