projects · signal
The news, on my terms.
Feed readers hand you a firehose; algorithmic feeds hand you someone else's agenda. Signal is the third option: my sources, my scoring, my presentation. Feeds flow in, stories get scored and clustered, and once a day the result is typeset into a dense, image-led editorial digest — a newspaper with a staff of zero, an audience of one, and no incentive to keep me scrolling.
The product
A daily paper, not an unread count
The reading view is deliberately finite: today's digest has a story count and an estimated read time, and then it ends. Everything else — newsletters, video, archive, saved, analytics — is a section, not a stream.
- StackNext.js + React + TypeScript web · NestJS API · Drizzle + Postgres · a Python scoring pipeline over the ingestion feed
- ScoringClaude models — routed through the platform's own LLM gateway — score every story; embeddings drive the clustering; a weight optimizer tunes the blend against my actual reading
- IngestionA single curated feed source of truth — subscriptions are managed once, upstream, and Signal consumes the result
- AccessPublic behind SSO + MFA; trusted-network read surface at home
Lessons
What it taught the platform
It named the design language
The dusk ground, the crimson accent, the serif/sans editorial pair — all born here, then extracted into the shared token layer every other app consumes. The styleguide is Signal's aesthetic, generalized.
Apps with no auth still go public
Signal has no login of its own — the platform's forward-auth edge pattern wraps SSO around it without the app knowing. Auth is infrastructure, not a feature every app rebuilds.
Finite beats infinite
Give the day a front page and an ending and reading becomes a habit with a close, not a scroll with a guilty exit.