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Alan Mendelevich

@ailon.org
97 followers 135 following 221 posts

aka ailon ⚒️ Building marker.js, and more 🎹 Making music as Alan Jacobs 🪦 Previously: founder & CEO of AdDuplex, Microsoft MVP

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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 15/02/2026
Me: builds on Spotify’s API. Ready to launch. Spotify: lol no. blog.ailon.org/full-me-twic...
blog.ailon.org
Fool Me Twice: When an API Isn’t the Business
I’m old enough to remember days when lots of businesses were built on open APIs of the likes of Twitter just to be destroyed in a day when…
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 25/01/2026
Introducing TG Translator: Because Common Translator Apps Are So 2008 blog.ailon.org/introducing-...
blog.ailon.org
Introducing TG Translator: Because Common Translator Apps Are So 2008
If you only know one language, you probably don’t notice it. But if you know two or more and interact with a couple more, you would agree…
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 15/12/2025
Another year in music. To my own surprise not a single rap track and only minimal amount of rapping in one or two. Also, not a single BMTH song, but 7(!) that have some BMTH affiliated writer/producer. Enjoy! open.spotify.com/playlist/3Di...
open.spotify.com
Top 21 of 2025
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 14/12/2025
Finally, I had an opportunity to do "real vibe coding" on a real project that I most likely just wouldn't touch if it wasn't for AI. Worked out quite well! blog.ailon.org/vibecoding-o...
blog.ailon.org
Vibecoding Out of Maintenance
Many many moons ago my developer-turn-writer friend and I came up with a concept of ZMP (Zero Maintenance Project). The idea is kind of…
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 07/12/2025
An American band quits Spotify because the CEO invested in a defense company, proceeds to pay taxes in the US... Logical. Absolutely logical.
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 30/11/2025
My PC consolidation dilemma (3 to 1-2) was getting on my nerves, so I wrote all of my thoughts down and gave them to several "deep research" AIs. Perplexity's answer looked the best from both reasoning and a clear final recommendation but... the PC it recommeded doesn't exist 😂
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 19/11/2025
Say what you want about modern music but 30 years ago a popular heavy band couldn't release a track like this www.youtube.com/watch?v=pebU...
youtube.com
BAD OMENS - Impose (Official Music Video)
YouTube video by SUMERIAN
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 03/11/2025
Weird thing about working in an English-first company with virtually no native speakers is that your fluency improves with time but your grammar is getting worse. Why bother if you can take shortcuts and there's no one to correct or shame you?
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 30/09/2025
git suddenly stopped working in VS Code on the Mac. And in the terminal as well. Turns out Xcode got updated and I didn't launch it and as a consequence didn't accept the updated license text. And that broke git throughout the system. WTF?
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 13/09/2025
Hit the speed limit. Check my birthday present to you here distrokid.com/hyperfollow/...
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 27/08/2025
BopOps Lyrics is live on ProductHunt today! Help me spread the word? www.producthunt.com/products/bop...
producthunt.com
BopOps Lyrics: The ultimate tool for writing lyrics to a backing track. | Product Hunt
A tool for writing lyrics on top of a backing track. Select your track, define sections, loops sections or arbitrary fragments, adjust line timings, get help from an AI co-writer when stuck.
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 26/08/2025
A brand-new tool from me - BopOps Lyrics. Write lyrics to a backing track, loop sections, align timings, and get help from a "passive" AI co-writer when you get stuck lyrics.bopops.com
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 20/08/2025
Sometimes it's depressing how you seem to work and work for months and move almost nowhere. Other times it's amazing what you can build from scratch in just a week.
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 07/08/2025
I wondered how come Booking's prices became worse than direct 9 times out of 10 (including all the Genius Level 3 stuff) over the last year or so. Now I have the answer www.theguardian.com/business/202...
theguardian.com
Thousands of hotels in Europe to sue Booking.com over ‘abusive’ practices
Class action lawsuit argues the online travel platform distorted market with ‘best price’ clauses
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 01/08/2025
Q: can I use @markerjs.com in my React Native app? A (yesterday): nope A (today): yep!
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Reposted by Alan Mendelevich
marker.js @markerjs.com · 01/08/2025
Introducing marker.js for React Native! blog.ailon.org/introducing-...
blog.ailon.org
Introducing marker.js for React Native
Over the years one of the most frequently asked questions about marker.js was, “Does it work with React Native?”
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 29/07/2025
Needed to look something up in my old Foursquare/Swarm checkins and discovered that quite a few of my "friends" there still check in regularly. I wonder if it's just force of habit or sunk cost fallacy or it really still is the best place to "mark" POIs in time? After all that's why I went there.
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 25/07/2025
So good! www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8CE...
youtube.com
DON BROCO - CELLOPHANE (Official Music Video)
YouTube video by Don Broco
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 23/07/2025
I suspect some BS like "cultural differences" would be their excuse, but AirBnB not policing hosts marking studio apartments as "1 bedroom" is a total fail in UX. It's been like that forever and doesn't get better no matter how fancy their design language got over that period.
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 21/07/2025
Thank you, Google, for popping a confusing Gemini dialog when my dad tried to check his email. You gave me an opportunity to visit my parents when I wasn't planning. #connectingpeople
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 20/07/2025
Heads of State is a fun mindless movie. It's funny though, how a russian director made sure that all episodic characters speak perfect russian but couldn't care less that Belarus is not on the way from London to Warsaw and that there are literally zero mountains there.
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 16/07/2025
The "regular" BMTH works fine as the background work music for me. But if you need something more mellow, they have you covered now open.spotify.com/album/34pF0w...
open.spotify.com
Lo-files
Bring Me The Horizon · Album · 2025 · 23 songs
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 16/07/2025
Random thought on Macs/macOS: every time it craps out and you want to complain, you realize that some part of your setup is not from Apple, and you don't have a right to whine, bitch! /s
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 14/07/2025
Alan's list of random firsts: ... 134. Drive a Chinese car ✅
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 14/07/2025
I understand that italians have dibs on "coffee fashion" but maybe at least for the hotel staff it wouldn't hurt to learn (or rather admit?) that when a stupid foreigner asks for latte they mean coffee and not just milk?
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 12/07/2025
Hotel manager showing us the premises of a posh Italian hotel: please keep in mind that there's a dress code for the restaurant - no shorts, flip-flops, etc. Me: even for breakfast? She: yes, please wear pants Me: OK Breakfast: 80% of men wearing shorts, including swim trunks 🤔
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 04/07/2025
A weird thing for a Windows person on macOS is that apps don't close when you close their windows. OK, fine. A different paradigm. But... why the F does the built-in Weather app close when you close its window!?
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 03/07/2025
These shoes are quite likely the most comfortable walking shoes I ever owned. Also the hardest to put on. Strained my wrist putting my shoes on yesterday 😅
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 02/07/2025
July 2nd - the first day I wear shorts this year. Exhibit A in why "climate change" is a much better term than "global warming".
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 01/07/2025
My little rant on the "openness" of macOS from the app developer's perspective... blog.ailon.org/how-open-is-...
blog.ailon.org
How open is macOS, really?
macOS is supposedly the most open part of the Apple’s ecosystem. How open is it, really?
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 01/07/2025
Hallelujah!
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 30/06/2025
Introducing TinyGoodies Mail Merge — Send Personalized Emails from Your Mailbox blog.ailon.org/introducing-...
blog.ailon.org
Introducing TinyGoodies Mail Merge — Send Personalized Emails from Your Mailbox
TL;DR: you can get TinyGoodies Mail Merge and send personalized emails from your own address here.
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 30/06/2025
macOS not having custom virtual desktop names felt like a minor shortcoming. Yesterday I somehow managed to move virtual desktops but it looked like a window ended up on the wrong desktop. Moved some windows only to realize it's the desktop that moved and it's a mess now.
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 24/06/2025
Copilot is fishing for our darkest secrets 😂
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 19/06/2025
I applied through the web. Was told they'll process "within 48 hours". No response in 2 weeks... So, after 15(!) days I contacted developer program support and 2 days later got a response basically saying "yeah, we couldn't charge you, forgot to tell you, cancelled enrollment, use the app, kthxbye"
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 11/06/2025
Sometimes LLMs remind me of the very sharp Michael Chrichton observation. blog.ailon.org/llms-as-the-...
blog.ailon.org
LLMs as the Ultimate Gell-Mann Amnesia Machines
I ask Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Mistral, Claude, et al all kinds of questions and, like everyone else, marvel at how within…
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 11/06/2025
One undeniable advantage for web development on the Mac is testing in Safari as you go and not as an afterthought. It's "artificial" though, as it's just Apple gatekeeping.
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 10/06/2025
Heard on some podcast about Buffet's 5/25 rule. It turned out to be "fake" but still sounded like an interesting exercise. The hardest part for me was coming up with the 25 initial goals 😂 I guess this means I have no imagination or something. www.perplexity.ai/search/what-...
perplexity.ai
What is the 5 of 25 technique or something like that allegedly attributed to...
Overview The "5 of 25" technique, often called the 5/25 Rule or Buffett’s Two Lists, is a popular productivity and prioritization method widely attributed to...
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 10/06/2025
I reluctantly switched to Mac as my work machine a little over a week ago. Here are my thoughts on the Mac Mini M4 so far blog.ailon.org/reluctant-ma...
blog.ailon.org
Reluctant Mac User’s Mac Mini M4 Review
For many years I’ve been a Windows user both by choice and by need. I developed Windows apps, I worked with Microsoft products, and I had…
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 09/06/2025
Looking forward to WWDC keynote where Apple will definitely address why my application to their Developer Program that "may take up to 48 hours to process" has been pending for a week now with zero communication. 🤷🏻‍♂️
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 06/06/2025
After a week on a Mac it's... a computer. Tried not to mess with the OS (at least early on) and use the defaults but gave up yesterday. Two keyboard things were driving me crazy and [mostly] not for "Windows user" reasons. So had to install a glorified keylogger to fix...
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 05/06/2025
Welp! Went to lunch and forgot my headphones. Feels weird hearing all the people around me.
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Reposted by Alan Mendelevich
marker.js @markerjs.com · 05/06/2025
New tutorial on marker.js events and updated event documentation. markerjs.com/docs-v3/docu...
markerjs.com
Handling events | marker.js 3 Documentation
Documentation for marker.js 3 Documentation
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 03/06/2025
OK, Mac people, explain this to me: Home/End keys go to the top/end of the doc/textbox on macOS. Yet most apps from Gmail to Google Docs to Word to VS Code override this to behave like it does on Windows (start of line/end of line). How do you cope with the inconsistency?
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 03/06/2025
It's been a while since I tried to release a "native" Windows app and never released one for macOS before, and this whole code-signing thing basically prices out all the hobbyist developers. The "scary" SmartScreen thing has an escape hatch on Windows, but on a Mac your only option is to pay Apple.
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 03/06/2025
TFW you stop RTFMing at "It is the cheapest option for code signing on Windows..." and proceed to signup 🤦🏻‍♂️
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 02/06/2025
Trying to enroll in Apple's developer program and getting this "extremely informative" error message. After reading through all the requirements and not seeing what's missing it turns out I figure I need to enter "Shipping address" for my Apple Account 🤦‍♂️
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 02/06/2025
Today is a great example in how algorithmic feeds can suck: getting lots of "news" on how Trzaskowski won presidential elections in Poland based on exit polls. When in reality he lost based on the actual results.
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 30/05/2025
Useless pro-tip: if you have 4+ people in your family and all are Apple users you can time your device upgrade cycle to buy someone a new Apple device every 3 months and have Apple TV+ for free for the time being. 😂
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Alan Mendelevich @ailon.org · 29/05/2025
Sooo... very reluctantly I got this. Let's see how it goes...
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