Building in public
Why Whimoway exists and what it's trying to do differently. A note from the solo developer behind it.
I'm building Whimoway as a solo developer, and I've decided to build it in public — not because I think every step deserves an audience, but because the alternative (polishing in silence until a big reveal) doesn't match how I actually work or what I want this product to become.
What it is
Whimoway is a curiosity-driven content platform that sits on top of YouTube. Two things at once:
- Management — better tools for handling a subscription library that's grown past the point where the YouTube app can help. Categorisation that you control, feeds that reflect your actual interests, and overrides when automated classification gets something wrong.
- Curation — curated paths into topics, built by people instead of algorithms. Each "stash" is a deliberate sequence of videos about something specific, with curator notes explaining why each one is worth your time.
Both surfaces run on the same underlying data: a taxonomy of 17 top-level categories, per-channel and per-video classification, content-type detection, and a sizable pile of heuristics that try to do the work an algorithm otherwise would.
What it isn't
There's a list of things Whimoway deliberately won't become:
- No infinite scroll designed to keep you watching past the point of intention.
- No notifications engineered to pull you back in.
- No popularity rankings or trending feeds. Curation is supposed to do the work that algorithms do elsewhere, not compete with them on the same axis.
- No social features optimised for virality.
The thing I keep coming back to is that the current generation of content platforms have optimised so hard for engagement that they've made it genuinely difficult to engage deliberately. You can't watch one video anymore — there's always a queue building up behind you. Whimoway is small and stubborn about this: when a stash ends, it ends. "End of stash" is the whole footer.
Why a blog
Three reasons:
- For people who land here from a shared stash. If you followed a link from a friend and the product makes you curious about the person or the philosophy, this is where you find out more.
- For my own accountability. Writing forces me to articulate decisions that would otherwise stay implicit. The taxonomy-vs-tags debate, the Shorts exclusion default, the choice to make stashes public-by-intent rather than public-by-default — all of these benefit from being written down.
- For the archive. A product's early thinking is easy to lose. A handful of dated blog posts preserve the original motivation better than the commit history ever will.
Posts will be infrequent and specific. Updates when something ships or breaks. Notes on design choices that are worth explaining. Occasional rabbit holes into the stranger corners of the content-classification problem.
Thanks for being here.