iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 26/01/2026

IT IS BAD! Nothing is good about it, the only sane platform where I get to see what people I followed shared is Bluesky. Every other platform is now total garbage, I can’t see any upside to it.

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Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 03/01/2026

Your website is the coolest! I rock with it! Love it so much I referenced it almost everyday

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Reposted by Ahmad

Lynn Fisher @lynnandtonic.com · 08/12/2025

You too can make a tiny, fixed-width website in the year of our lord 2025 ⚡️ lynnandtonic.com

lynnandtonic.com

Lynn Fisher

Lynn Fisher is a web designer, CSS developer, and artist from Phoenix, Arizona.

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Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 03/11/2025

My take on Affinity being 100% free. Of cos I am excited, but I am also skeptical. So I wrote my thought down, and will be correcting my self as time goes and their strategy reveals. open.substack.com/pub/wndrgrnd...

open.substack.com

Affinity is "free", at what cost?

Last year Canva acquired Affinity a professional design tools alternative to Adobe for several undisclosed millions of dollars, it was exciting and comes with a breathe of fresh air for the creative c...

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Reposted by Ahmad

Steve Farrugia @fasterandworse.com · 24/09/2025

Dispatch #31: Anti-Design Design to compensate for a lack of design Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3eL... Audio: pnc.st/s/faster-and... 1/x

youtube.com

Dispatch #31: Anti-Design

YouTube video by Faster and Worse

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Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 04/04/2025

Sometimes it’s good to stepped outside and watch the sun and water. Favorite part, waiting for the sunlight

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Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 30/03/2025

No, its ia.net/writer I use it for just drafting the ideas, it works just like a note app but it’s distraction free plus it comes with markups and AI assistance. Sometimes, I move the content to craft to refine it before posting it.

ia.net

iA Writer: The Benchmark of Markdown Writing Apps

Plain text. Total focus. The Industry standard Markdown text editor. Available for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows. Download it now, try it for free

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Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 29/03/2025

I think that will be the engineer, often implement not the way the designer intended

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Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 22/03/2025

No. Acclaimed design leadership made designer lazy. It all started decaying the moment tools are glorified. In business or sales, no one made PP or .xcl the center of the industry. We need to change the narrative, Figma or Sketch are just a tools, a mean. It’s not the cause.

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Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 07/03/2025

Definitely checking it out.

Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 07/03/2025

Yes. I wonder how we get to this, software used to compete on being useful.

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Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 07/03/2025

Some espresso machine. Washing machine. Mobile phone and some software that makes life easy

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Get into the habit of shipping stuff, even if it’s half-baked. You’ll learn. You’ll improve, and in the long run, you’ll have become better at those skills. But that will be hard if you’re doing ten things at the same time.

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Pick a few skills instead and “ship” your ideas to the world — which is what I planned to do myself. If you’re good at many things, lucky you—keep at it. But if the plan is to be better, focus on few things and share them with the world, even when it’s not fully formed. You’ll never be ready.

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No matter the number of information you consume, the feeling never goes away. It will only leave you stuck, unsure, not entirely bad if that’s the goal—to have an idea of that said thing. But the real work is in the output, and it is hard. It’s why a lot of us talk about it instead of doing it.

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It’s good to understand that the goad to learn everything is just an avenue to escape some feelings—a distraction, which is not entirely bad if that’s your intent. You’ll always feel like something is missing. It’s biologically written into us all from Darwinism.

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I have been in situation where I learned blender, photography, and motion graphics prior, but they’re all useless now because I don’t utilize those skill and I can barely find my way around them now if I picked them up again.

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Focusing is hard! Onward, I have decided to just stick with three areas — Business, Software Design and Technology! Because learning is so addictive, you can easily fall into the rabbit hole, biting everything without committing to it! This road leads to mediocrity.

A laptop of Ismail Ahmad writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript. With Cake and Coffee on the side.

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Keep doing simple things without direction. Shipping simple ideas knowing you may not succeed. Not seeing the clear picture and still going for the idea. You should be doing things, I know it’s hard, but try to do it anyway.

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Recent realization have thought me differently, I discovered that working on momentum is better than overly depending on vision, you don’t necessarily have to foresaw an outcome to pursue an idea fully. While you may need vision to know your direction, momentum jolt you forward and it’s better.

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This is hard if you are a visual person, you depend a lot on foreseeing, ie vision. Personally, my life has always been about visual, it’s my compass. It may not necessarily be the best route, but it’s how I have navigated life and I have seen good results.

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Johanna Sneed @johannasneed.com · 25/02/2025

"The hard part isn’t finding proof before you begin. The hard part is beginning, knowing you might not succeed." — Seth

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Reposted by Ahmad

TLDR: a personal wiki. They’re notes and ideas linked together by association. Less formal than a blog and embrace the concept of learning in public. M. Appleton’s post on the concept is often cited! Use of gen AI has made so many blogs unreadable for me, so I’m finding gardens refreshing to read.

maggieappleton.com

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web

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Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 05/02/2025

The end wasn’t where I thought I’d land, it all makes sense from there

Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 05/02/2025

We are so fixated on data-driven everything (AI) that the human side of it all is being outsourced—the art side of our work, the obsession, that instinctual hunch of it’s not there yet—is nowhere to be found.

Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 05/02/2025

The word here is not “anti-design.” It’s more like “anti-quality”—speed at the detriment of craft. Love is rarely poured into software these days, except by the crazy ones who defy the odds. Art itself is deteriorating, maybe due to all the new definitions (I could be wrong).

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Ahmad @ismailahmad.com · 01/02/2025

A lot is not going as planned, feels like chaos is all around. But this peace, this peace, where is it coming from.

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I think Google is the winner of this whole AI game.

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Alas, in just a click, the universe do knows how to put us all in our place. No one has a clue of what’s going on, absolutely no one—ask your professors, absolute nothing they can say but refer to history. I think knowing this should give us some sense of sanity.

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My hypothesis is that we are all exhausted in a way, and just looking for unification or some tranquility, something that bring us all together in a way, but the results of everything we are doing so far is breeding the opposite. The future looks exciting, and yet a little bit frightening.

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AI will kill us all, "it is so over" murmuring filled the street, while all we are just doing is manipulating a wealth of information that’s already accessible to minority and just democratizing it. All still falls under bunch of zeros and one.

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We created the buzz for Crypto to Web3, Metaverse/NFTs, Blockchain etc, and now AI. The doom, gloom, the naysayers all are yearning for one thing, feeling of something outside their control.

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