Journal
What we write between benches
Notes on ephemerality, anonymity, and what changes when you build an app that keeps nothing.
-
Photos that erase themselves as you watch
Ten sharp seconds, twenty seconds of pixelation, then nothing. How we added images without betraying the principle.
-
Boredom is a feature
The bench is often empty, and often silent. We stopped treating that as a bug.
-
Why ten seats
Three is fragile. Fifty is a feed. The number that works is in between.
-
The bench learns four languages
An app that only spoke French, and what changes when you translate a voice rather than strings.
-
The real benches of Brussels
A short typology of Brussels street furniture, by someone who has spent too long sitting on it.
-
GDPR when you hold no data
The right to erasure is trivial when there's nothing to erase. The rest still takes work.
-
The negative roadmap
The list of things the app won't do is more useful than the list of things it will.
-
A hundred and twenty seconds of patience
The tunnel, the lift, the phone locking itself: how not to announce a departure that isn't one.
-
One process, and that's enough
Bun, in-memory maps, a container with no volume. The whole architecture fits on one page.
-
Two hundred and eighty characters
The limit isn't technical. It's there to stop you making a speech.
-
The distance is deliberately vague
Why we round "812 metres" to "~800 m", and why it's as much a design choice as a safety one.
-
What people talk about on a bench
Eleven months of observation without reading a single message. What you learn anyway.
-
Thick borders and zero gradients
Why the app looks like a screen-printed poster rather than a messenger.
-
No notifications, ever
The most requested feature is also the only one we can't build.
-
Anonymity is not impunity
How to moderate an anonymous chat with no identity, no history and nobody behind a screen.
-
Midnight, Brussels time
One clock, one complete wipe, and the only feature nobody can turn off.
-
The bench has no radius
The algorithm fits in three lines and will happily sit you 9,400 km from home. That's deliberate.
-
Firmin, Josiane and the others
Why every name on the bench comes from another era.
-
Nothing stored, literally
No database, no files, no content logs. How you run a chat that never writes anything down.
-
Why a bench
Every social app wants you to come back. This one just wants you to sit down for five minutes.