I've always felt that our lives in both physical and digital world are cluttered with "content" but starved of "ritual". The fast pacing of our city spikes up my adrenaline every moment to an extend that I have developed a reluctance for slowing down to whisper inward, in the fear of missing out. For the longest time I did not want to admit, but yes, I have FOMO.
Earlier in November, I was hit by a realization in the chaotic Toronto city life. When I was asked what I did a week ago, I simply could not remember. I've chosen a rhythm that prioritizes task execution and completion, and therefore must suffer the numbness. As far as I know that numbers can be meaningful, when the scale is great enough, everything seems like a data point in a compiled table of statistics, a coordinate on a sine function. My life can be easily portrayed by the ups and downs.
Just like how I orchestrate my life, most software is built to solve a problem. It wants to make you faster, feel smarter, and more efficient. But when I sat down to build LOOP, my digital ritual application, I didn't want to build a tool. I wanted to build a mirror. LOOP is a virtual sanctuary that honors the duality of human experience: the order under the daylight, and the chaos of the night.
The Philosophy: Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat
Is midnight an end or a beginning? I guess everyone has their answer. The Ouroboros is the heartbeat of the app, a navigation anchor that spins forever to connect days and nights. The concept of LOOP is simple: we go through our day when the sun is up, and we dream when it's dark.
Therefore, The Solar Mode is the architect. It's where we commit our logic. The Lunar Mode is the dreamer and where we release our subconscious. As the users build their journaling ritual in LOOP, they are reminded by the Ouroboros after every entry, that every end is just a new beginning.
The Magic of Sine Waves
I always thought "Art" and "Engineering" were different rooms, and now I see that they are just different doors to the same room.
Technically, LOOP is built on React Native and Expo. But the soul of the app lives in a library called Skia. It allowed me to bypass standard UI components and draw directly to the GPU with math. The build of the Ouroboros was not just telling a <div> to move right. This snake only started to breathe through the calculation of sine waves and the GLSL shaders (a tiny program that runs on the graphics card).
The Alchemy Engine
The most exciting part of this journey was building "The Brain." I didn't want the art to be random. I wanted it to be yours.
This deterministic analysis engine is called "The Alchemist". When you finish an entry, the app doesn't just save the text, it tastes it. It tastes through the Energy (typing speed, volume, punctuation), the Chaos (vocabulary diversity), and the Mood. These invisible metrics renders a unique, one-of-a-kind abstract artwork. You don't just read your history, you see the visual fingerprint of your mind.
Closing the LOOP
LOOP is the Geoguessr for the soul, a journaling instrument and a technical experiment driven by my creative impulses. After years of rigorous academic training, the part of me that allows indulgence in pure, unoptimized creation had almost gone dormant. However, my urge to create and build remains restless inside. LOOP is another attempt to capture the fuzzy, warm chaotic reality of human being using the cold precision of binary code. It's my rebellion against the efficiency algorithms that run our lives.
If you are reading this, take a moment today to stop scrolling. Find a ritual. Check your own internal weather. And if you need a mirror to see it clearly, the Ouroboros is waiting.