I built Trivi because I kept skipping words.
Not complicated words — just unfamiliar ones. Terms I half-knew, expressions I'd seen but never pinned down, bash commands I couldn't quite remember. Every time I hit one, the same calculation ran in my head: Is it worth breaking my flow to look this up? The answer was usually no.
I keep noticing this new pattern in how I work, think, and make decisions. Recently, it showed up so clearly that I felt it was worth writing down.
I was trained to think economically about software work. Count your operations, mind your memory, justify your complexity — Big-O thinking does not stay in the algorithms course, it shapes how you approach everything: automate and optimise. Now I keep automation and I learn to drop optimising. I have a vision for how I want to build and evaluate, and for the first time the friction is low enough to actually follow it.
So, Jupyter Notebooks. We had some good times, didn't we?
Writing code and seeing the results instantly felt great. But over time, the quirks I once found charming became... less so. Navigating between cells to find code? Frustrating. Forget to run a cell, and dependencies laugh in your face. And the workflow... Each function, each step in an experiment, means executing cells manually, at a time. It felt like trying to bake a cake but having to preheat the oven separately for every ingredient.