Hi, I'm James

As much as I enjoy living in Toronto, I've had enough of the crazy rent prices that make saving a meaningful amount of money a truly glacial process. On top of that, as someone who's naturally a bit of a minimalist, I wanted to test myself a little and see if I'm able to actually live minimally enough that I'm able to do so with no fixed abode.

I've found that playing piano by yourself, and playing in front of other people are 2 totally different experiences. I can practice a piece to the point where I know it better than some of my oldest friends, and yet when I get up to play in front of others, none of that matters! My mind goes totally blank.

I built a library a little while ago to compliment my main shimi library. This library was made up of a number of web components to provide easy UI capabilities to apps using shimi. As time went on though, simply getting the project to build started to become an act in blind faith, and so, I did what all good developers threaten to do, and did a full rewrite.

During COVID, I developed a system for myself which radically transformed my life. Before, I'd been a chronic procrastinator, desperately trying various approaches to get myself into the habit of being productive. While this tool has served me very well, I want a version of it which I can carry on my phone.

For a while now, I've liked the idea of having my own little corner of the internet which I can tinker around with every once in a while and show the things that I'm proud of in a way that's more flexible than any of the social media platforms would allow. In the process of getting this all set up, I figured that I might as well further develop a skill in the process.

My goal when I decided to start relearning piano was to become the most rounded musician that I could be, meaning I don't care about playing the most technically advanced pieces, but could play with some level of technical proficiency, could improvise, could sight read somewhat well, and most importantly, could hear music well. To this end, I built myself my own little ear trainer.