Hi, I’m Diego Dotta

Maker and rider of the chaos from ideation to iteration.
Building in public.

  • The NYT Is (Also) a Games Company

    I shipped a silly game to sell a keyboard, hit #4 on Product Hunt, and came away convinced the Times took this hundred-year-old playbook to another level. I just shipped a game called QWERTYS. It’s Tetris with a twist: the board is your keyboard, and pieces made of letters fall over the same keys you…

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  • Now: August 2026

    • Life
      • Still nomading and house sitting around the Bay Area, and it’s funny how proud we feel every time we tell someone that.
      • Cloverdale, on the border of Sonoma and Mendocino, taking care of Xobee, a very funny basset hound. The owners lent us their car, so we did some short trips around the area, including a visit to the Francis Ford Coppola winery.
      • A few days in Marin City with Forrest, a super sweet dog, in a tiny apartment with no wifi and a huge view. We spent the days walking and reading books (apparently that’s what people did before wifi).
      • We booked the train from SF to Chicago for September, as a little celebration of a good year so far.
      • I’m officially a multifocal lens user now, which is the polite way of saying old folk. The good news is that I can read the menu again without holding it at arm’s length.
    • Work
      • Namecheap went down one too many times (diego.horse was offline for more than 6 hours), so I started moving all my sites off WordPress to plain static pages. You’re reading the result, and I feel so relieved.
      • Bird Rise experiments, every week. My favorite learning of the month is that showing people a demo of the alarm before the paywall made things worse, not better. Now I’m testing letting people choose their wake up challenge instead.
      • Finally recorded a new batch of ad videos, which I had been postponing for way too long.
      • Started refactoring Memo Rise, which is turning into a mix of habit tracker and alarm with personalized messages. I’m really excited about this one.
      • More little games. B.O.W.E.L.S went to Reddit and Product Hunt, and I shipped In Bird Years and an endless bird jigsaw, which didn’t get much attention on itch, so the marketing homework is on me.
      • Apple rejected 2048 Rare Birds as spam, saying there are too many games like it (fair). I’m giving it a second chance with a new name, and BirDJ, my most played game on itch, is getting an iOS version too.
    • Relaxing
      • Concerts! Tune-Yards and Violent Femmes, and Patti LaBelle at Stern Grove.
      • Friday nights at OMCA (the Oakland Museum) are soo cool. We had a picnic there and watched a Korean hip hop concert.
      • A Saturday morning at a cemetery looking for Elizabeth Short’s grave, which is a normal weekend activity for us, I guess.
      • Found out Wandrer has an iOS app in beta, which saved me from building my own (I was seriously considering it).
    • Exercise
      • Better than July. In Cloverdale I ran around 30% of the city streets with Wandrer, which turns running into a little Pac Man game of eating the red lines on the map. It also led me into a dead end at 9pm with a small crowd waiting at the gate, but that’s a story for another post.
      • Morning runs beat evening runs, by far.
      • Marin City was perfect for long runs, and I barely did any 🙁
    Diego lying on a leather couch with Xobee, a brown and white basset hound, stretched across his chest with her nose pointing up at his face
    Xobee
    Selfie of Diego in a red hoodie glancing sideways at Forrest, a black and white dog curled up on a blanket just above his head
    Forrest

Build Log

A living trail of the last things I’m building, breaking, or pretending to finish.

QWERTYS

Where Tetris meets QWERTY. Have fun.

Blurry Birds

Listen and Bird ID Daily Game

Bird Rise

Wake up to a new birdsongs everyday.

Smart Keys

Fix grammar and translate in one tap.

Tiny Mario

Play the Mario in your URL bar.

Tiny Horse

Ridiculously small horse run ever.

Air Fiesta

A multiplayer game on Google Earth.

See the full log

This is where I track the chaos.

Topics

Air Fiesta Alarms Books Bragging Building in Public Cycling Food for thought Funny Games Interviews Kombi Love Lucid Dreaming Mental Health Movies Open Goals Poetry Productivity Quotes Ranting Smart Keys Sustainability Techy Travel Youper

Open Goals

2026

  • ✅Profitable App V22 new apps profitable already, yep, yep.
  • ❌Exercise every dayMissed many days already, and I'm not making this a priority.
  • ✅Live in different places
  • ❌Write once a weekFailed to keep up with this, but I want to get back to it
  • ⏳Read 50 Books

Why am I writing here?

Every time I start writing about something, I end up doing some pretty unexpected research or connecting the dots to an insight. Those things usually turn into rabbit holes, which I totally love falling into.

I wish I had written more when I was younger, especially as a teenager. I always have so much fun reading stuff I wrote 20 years ago.

It also helps me lock in some memories. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and sometimes provides closure as well, which I think is really important these days. I hope it can also help someone else on their journey.

Plus, it makes me grateful and helps me remember the people who were somehow part of it.