Adam Rendo

A thing of beauty

Keats wrote that line in 1818 as the beginning of his epic poem Endymion, a story about questing across earth, sea, and even the underworld in pursuit of an ideal beauty.

I adopted Keats' line for my studio, because just like Keats I think that with all the terribleness in the world, we are healed through exposure to beauty, and great meaning is to be found in its pursuit.

"Some shape of beauty moves away the pall from our dark spirits"
- Keats again

Most software is built as a tool. It serves its purpose, remaining as neutral as possible. It has no character, no story beyond LinkedIn, and no color except for corporate white-blue. It's also often built to fit the machine it's running on, instead of the human that's using it. I do not think it has to be like this.

I try to make things with character, with stories, and with color. Things that have hidden details in them that you might stumble on, or you pass by. I don't believe in unnecessary flourishes, I believe in filling an empty space with a doodle, in flowers rising through the cracked pavement. A solid functional tool, with a human design, and details that delight.

A short history

I grew up in the Netherlands. When I was 11, a friend introduced me to Scratch, where you click blocks of code together into rudimentary programs, and I made about thirty of them. Hopefully none are still publicly available. Middle school brought GameMaker and my first real programming language; my biggest project there was a game I handed around to friends, with a server that told you when a new version was out. In high school I moved to Java in Eclipse and made little games, simulations, pre-LLM AI tools. At university I tried a video game again, this time in pure Java and OpenGL, and documented the whole thing on YouTube. I had a lot of fun with it. Then it became untenable and I let it go.

That turned out to be the pattern. For years I started things and stopped. A project would get going, something else would become the main event, and the project would go into the archive, joining the others.

Then several things ended at once. I finished my master's, the life I had built around someone else came apart, and I found myself living alone, done with education, and wondering where to go from there. What was left was in that archive.

For once, let's finish what I started.

So in 2025 I packed up what I had of the old video game and released it. I dusted off an old Android app and brought it up to date. I started a studio to keep everything under one name, and then I began work on a writing tracker I had started in 2019, an app called Authorlytica.

The plan was to put a minimum viable version online and see what happened. To my surprise, people actually signed up. Real people liked something I made, which I had not expected and have not entirely gotten used to. I listened to what they told me, built on what I had, and kept going.

Software is never really finished, so I've stopped treating done as the goal. What I can tell you instead is that I have improved it every month since, and that I intend to keep building. You can see the progress in my monthly logbook.

The things I have built

Both started the same way: I wanted a tool, I was unsatisfied with the existing solutions, and I thought it would be fun to build my own.

Authorlytica came out of trying to write a book and losing motivation. Then came the demise of NaNoWriMo, leaving a gap. Authorlytica makes the shape of the work visible: sessions, graphs, velocity. It also makes it fun: achievements, PRs, friends. One day I want to finish my book using Authorlytica.

Celestial Sounds is a set of hand-made soundscapes for falling asleep. It's themed after drifting through space, where each sound is crafted to fit a certain celestial body.

How I work

Slowly, and on my own. I have a stable full-time job, so nothing I make here has to grow in order to survive. It also means that what I build is what I actually wanted to make. I work on these things because it gives me great joy and fulfillment, especially when the tools spread that joy to the people using them.

None of my apps or websites (including this one) have any external ads, like banner ads or interstitial reward ads. I understand why some companies choose it as a monetization strategy, but it's a tool to turn a user's annoyance into profit. I don't use them.

Celestial Sounds is completely free. Authorlytica's free tier has every core feature, free to use forever. Everything you need to get the motivation to finish your book is in there. If you have a story, it shouldn't matter what you can afford.

There are no hidden fees, no artificial scarcity, no dynamic pricing, no email spam, no formulaic marketing copy. Those techniques work, they make money; that's why they're everywhere. But every one of these techniques makes me trust the product less, and honestly, it's insulting to me as a potential customer.

Our actions ripple out to affect the whole world. If me trying to put some delight in my work can spread a little joy to a few people, then I will have made the world a slightly better place.

The drawing

I've been drawing on and off since I was 14 years old. For me, drawing is just building something from nothing, but you can finish in a week instead of a year. When drawing, you have to pay great attention to the details, and the goal is to make something beautiful, something I carry over into the software.

I've also done some writing: I took part in NaNoWriMo around 2019 and have had an idea (and 80,000 words of a first draft) for a novel ever since. One day I want to finish it with Authorlytica.