About me · Steven's Desk

My name is Hùng. Steven is my English name, and the desk in the title belongs to both of us.

This is where I put down what I have made. Not to sell it, and not to apply for anything with it. I have been at this long enough that whole projects have gone soft in my memory, and at some point that started to bother me. So now I write them down as they happen. It turns out I like the writing as much as the remembering, which is how a filing cabinet turned into a blog.

Most of what is here will read better if you know what I spend my time making. It also says, quicker than I could explain it, what I am fond of. Jelly Audio came first, in 2010. Handmade earphones, and then custom in ear monitors cast in resin, one shell at a time. Jelly Key followed in 2015. Jelly Smith is the newest and the least serious of the three, a personal project making small EDC things that are there to be fun. That is where most of my hours went, so that is where most of the writing will point.

There are some open source projects as well, with no business behind them at all. Those exist because I wanted them to exist. Quire Ink is one of them, and it is what this blog runs on. You are reading these words through something I made, which still feels odd to write down.

Which is a good place to say plainly that I am not a designer, not a coder, not a product designer, not in the way people who trained for it are. What I have is an appetite for small details. I will spend hours on how one block sits against the next, on a gap that is a hair too wide, on the formula behind a curve that finally looks right. I like things that have been fussed over. Past that, I simply like making cheerful objects that leave the day a little less dull.

The rest of my attention goes to technology and to small objects that do nothing important. Handheld game consoles. Lego. Custom flashlights. Knives and tools, more of both than I need. Mechanical keyboards most of all, which by now should surprise nobody.

One last thing, about the English. I write all of this in Vietnamese and Claude translates it. Then I put the English back through Google Translate and read the Vietnamese that comes out, to see whether it still says what I meant.

I can read English well enough. Writing it is a different thing, and long sentences with difficult words are simply past me. So some of what you are reading is my thinking in somebody else's words, and I cannot always tell when the words have drifted.

If you catch one that has, say so in the comments. A word that means the opposite of what I intended, a sentence that reads as nonsense, anything at all. I will fix it. Being corrected costs me nothing, and leaving it wrong costs me the whole point I was trying to make.

That goes for more than the language. This is a private pleasure that happens to be in public. I write for myself first. Some of my opinions are narrower than I think they are, and I get things wrong here in front of everybody. I hope you can read past that.