The Ignyte blog
Writing from the studio.
Essays and notes on building tools for creators, independence from platforms, and making software that lasts.
Subscribe via RSS →- Building Beacon
Where the tokens stop
Beacon's builder takes credentials for Hardcover and Steam. The tokens stay on the user's machine; they never reach the deployed page or a shared export bundle. The boundary is a list of field names that two functions consult.
- Teardown
Substack took four months to tell anyone
On February 6, 2026, Substack disclosed a data breach affecting roughly 697,313 user records. The breach itself happened the previous October. Substack sat on the disclosure for four months, while writers were leaving over the 10% fee anyway.
- Building Beacon
When 404 is the norm
ListenBrainz returns an MBID, not an image URL. Cover Art Archive 404s often enough that the placeholder is going to render almost as much as the real cover.
- Teardown
StreamElements raised $111M
StreamElements lost 64% of its staff between October 2025 and May 2026. The math behind a $100M SoftBank round assumed continued growth of live streaming on Twitch. The market refused, and the creators who built their setups on top are now migrating their entire operational stack.
- Building Beacon
Renaming the Last.fm tile
Beacon used to have a Last.fm tile. It now has a Now Playing tile with ListenBrainz as a second source, and the rename was the move worth writing about.
- Field Notes
I removed a glow but kept the purple
A federal judge had to rule that em dashes weren't enough to prove a student used AI. The same flattening is hitting design now. Why I cut a glow on Beacon and kept the purple, and how I tell which design choices to defend.
- Building Beacon
The 30-second undo
Beacon's import button overwrites your state file. One click, gone. So I put three things on top of it: a preview dialog, an auto-backup, and a 30-second undo toast.
- Field Notes
We're not the only ones saying this
Tyler Denk runs Beehiiv. He's making the same ownership argument I keep making about link-in-bio, just from inside a $100M competitor to Substack. That's not coincidence; it's a category emerging.
- Building Beacon
Versioning the schema I didn't have yet
I added a __schemaVersion field to Beacon's config file before there was a v2. Three weeks later, I needed it. The case for stamping a version on every stateful file you ship.
- Teardown
$219 a month, $86 in your head
The average American household pays $219 a month for subscriptions and estimates they pay $86. The gap between those two numbers is the entire subscription economy.