Intermission dispatch

An update on the state of Code & Codex.

Peace be upon you, fellow digital wanderer.

It has been quite some time since the last Code & Codex dispatch. It was not because I ran out of things to write, far from it. There is still a lot to write about, the backlog is overflowing.

The pause was intentional. I needed a moment to step back, reflect, and reconsider what Code & Codex is to me, and where I want to take it next.

If you’ve been reading from the beginning, you’ve probably noticed the shift. The early dispatches started as personal anecdotes, stories from my e-zine days, my experience as a software engineer in a fast-growing startup that eventually IPO-ed, and other odd corners of the tech industry that I’ve wandered through.

But over time, the writing changed. The dispatches become more philosophical, more contemplative, more,.. Code & Codex. They began carrying a different frequency, blending cyberpunk vibes, and encrypted metaphors. It becomes a series of reflections on software, system, and the strange digital age we’ve living in.

I want to continue on this path.

The anecdotal, behind-the-scenes stories will still exist, but they will live elsewhere. I’ve created a second newsletter that I named “Jibone’s Fleeting Notes”, for lighter thoughts, reflections, and my ongoing return to long-form writing.

There is also another reason for the pause. I wasn’t sure whether Substack was still the right home for Code & Codex.

Substack seems to be evolving into a social network. Their new features and their messaging point strongly in that direction.

The seemingly walled garden strategy, the superficial network effects, a follow ecosystem, an algorithmic feed, the artificial inflation of engagement, the hyper-growth scale to satisfy VC investors, and the capturing of the audience relationship. All this feels awfully familiar.

It feels like “social media”.

Substack no longer feels like a pure email-first publishing platform. It is slowly but surely turning into something else.

Substack is aggressively pushing its mobile app, incentivising reading inside their ecosystem instead of your email inbox. I don’t want my readers to feel like they must become Substack users just to receive these dispatches.

And putting everything on a single platform no longer feels right. Code & Codex has always carried a decentralised, cypherpunk, anti-walled-garden spirit.

So here’s the plan:

Code & Codex will continue on Substack, but it won’t be exclusive to it. Each dispatch will also live on my personal website, jshamsul.com, on Nostr as long-form addressable event (kind:30023) transmitted through relays that implements it, and it’ll be on-chain, “mint-able” through Paragraph (formerly Mirror.xyz).

The writing will exist across multiple domains and protocols, not locked into one platform’s vision of the future.

Think of this as a small realignment. A quiet recalibration.

Thank you for staying in the loop, and through the pauses between signals.

Stay glitched, stay human.
Jibone.