by the way,

It is 22 June '26 as I am writing this from my airbnb in Sao Paulo. I often forget that the internet is people all the way down. You're gonna be reading this in the future, and the blog post I'm reading again later tonight is weeks of effort by that one guy in Sweden. The libraries and code I'm using to build this tooling are a result of thousands of hackers' evenings. Oof.

It's easy to miss this behind our screens. Hacking, typing, and squinting away at our pixels. We're all right there though, at least last I checked. I have heard about cold-emails, "reaching out", the entire set. I appreciate the gesture, but find something heavy in that vibe.

To contribute to that space in my own way, I present btw . It's a simple browser extension that ambiently looks up the people behind things you're paying attention to on the internet. And it gently surfaces them in case you'd like to say hi.

The idea here is I want you to say hi. Cold emails can get taxing - be specific, ask insightful questions, be impressive. It's cool, but relax dude. Send that rambly thought you have to the author while reading the blog post. Tell that person with fun weird ideas that they have fun weird ideas. Tell this other one that you're listening to their album they recorded 20 years ago, wow.

And keep it a btw. It's no big deal. That's better and more fun anyways :) We all wanna hear from each other.

(Everything is private. Accounts are optional. You can use it for free too by having your own api keys. And I follow principles of calm design, so it's nice to use.)