Jul 27, 2026

This week on richardlemon.com — July 24, 2026

Hi there,

Here's what went up on richardlemon.com this week:

A publishing system is not a writing system

Automation can move your words into Ghost with perfect formatting. It cannot notice what mattered this week or decide whether it is true.

The practice that fell apart after ten minutes

A beautifully structured 90-minute U12 baseball practice fell apart in ten minutes. The fix was not a better spreadsheet, but a one-sentence pocket plan.

When I Stop Correcting a Young Player

How I decide when another coaching cue will help a young player and when it will only create noise, freeze them up, and block real learning.

Why my posts now start with five bullets

I stopped asking my automation to invent posts from topics and started feeding it five ugly bullets from real life instead. The system did not change much, but the writing did.

Why I Prototype Motion Before Polishing Layout

Static layouts can look perfect and still refuse to move. By prototyping motion early, spacing, hierarchy and components evolve around how the interface actually behaves.

What I Write Down During a Youth Baseball Game

During youth baseball games, I let the app track the score and use my notebook for the human data: faces, failed drills, invisible players, and one actionable line per kid.

A Month of Ignoring Daily Body-Fat Numbers

I hid the body-fat tile on my smart scale for 30 days and watched only a 7-day rolling weight average. The results were calmer mornings and steadier habits, not worse progress.

Fluent emptiness and the missing Tuesday morning

A draft about my Withings scale sounded polished and personal, but it was fluent emptiness. Here is how I now spot that pattern and push writing back to real detail.

The boring training week I can actually repeat

My training week is aggressively boring: a fixed 20-minute kettlebell session, rec softball as a social anchor, wildcard days that can be nothing, and recovery as the actual plan.

The Hour I Lost to a Plausible AI Debugging Answer

A confident AI diagnosis of a React Native hydration issue sent me refactoring the wrong layer for 45 minutes. The real bug was a string "null" in the API.