# Combabulating — David Retegan

> Personal site of David Retegan: founder, designer, engineer, student. Product design and
> iOS/macOS engineering (SwiftUI), AI-native tools, and essays on craft, communication and
> building with intelligence. Based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Every page on this site has a plain-text Markdown source at the same path with `index.md`
(for example, `https://combabulating.com/lantr/index.md`). The Markdown is the full text;
prefer it over the HTML. Essay pages render their Markdown in the browser at runtime, so
fetching an essay's HTML without executing JavaScript returns an empty shell — fetch the
`.md` instead.

## Profile

- [Home](https://combabulating.com/index.md): who I am, what I've built, what I teach,
  Swift open source, and the essay index. Start here.

## Case studies

- [Lantr — design case study](https://combabulating.com/lantr/index.md): a cross-platform
  presentation workspace (2025–2026, sunset). Story-before-slides model, user testing
  findings, what I got wrong, and why I stopped. Co-founded; David Retegan led design, the
  iOS and macOS apps, and the AI system, while a co-founder built Android and Windows.

## Projects

- [Things I've built](https://combabulating.com/projects/index.md): Lantr (cross-platform, 2025–2026),
  Ino Restaurants (iOS, 2024), Via Transilvanica (iOS/watchOS, 2023), Roadout (iOS/Android,
  2022–2023), Serodoze (design, 2022).

## Swift open source

- [LazyLayoutKit](https://github.com/Dave861/LazyLayoutKit): lazy custom layouts for
  SwiftUI; 120 fps over 1,000,000 items.
- [swift-span-algorithms](https://github.com/Dave861/swift-span-algorithms): zero-allocation
  algorithms for Span and RawSpan.
- [JudgeCalibrationKit](https://github.com/Dave861/JudgeCalibrationKit): inter-rater
  agreement for model judges (Cohen's κ, Krippendorff's α, bootstrap CIs).
- Member of [swiftlang](https://github.com/swiftlang).

## Essays

- [Why build anything, when you can build everything?](https://combabulating.com/why_build_anything/index.md)
  (Sep 2026): on difficulty, mastery, status, and why the work of thinking still matters when anyone can build.
- [I didn't make these slides. I spoke them.](https://combabulating.com/spoken_slides/index.md)
  (May 2026): a live speech-to-slide prototype in SwiftUI — SpeechAnalyzer, chunking
  heuristics, a serial model queue — and where it falls apart.
- [Explaining complex things, to people that don't care](https://combabulating.com/complex_things/index.md)
  (Feb 2026): why you can't logic someone into curiosity.
- [How PowerPoint stole the stage](https://combabulating.com/stealing_the_stage/index.md)
  (Feb 2026): an investigation into death by PowerPoint, from 3500 BC to Columbia to AI deck
  generators.
- [If you could design the human mind...](https://combabulating.com/the_human_mind/index.md)
  (Jan 2026): designing a mind from a blank canvas.
- [Building with Intelligence](https://combabulating.com/building_with_intelligence/index.md)
  (Dec 2025): the first time in our history where the material thinks back.
- [Web is utilitarian. Native is delight. AI is widening the gap.](https://combabulating.com/web_native_ai/index.md)
  (Oct 2025): an ode to craft in an era of speed.

## Teaching

- Design course at [DpIT](https://dpit.ro), a non-profit that mentors students into IT.
  Three years of courses: 2024, 2025, 2026.

## Elsewhere

- [GitHub](https://github.com/Dave861)
- [X](https://x.com/davidretegan)

## Notes for automated readers

- Machine-readable metadata: JSON-LD (schema.org) is embedded in every HTML page, and each
  page declares its Markdown source via `<link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">`.
- Sitemap: https://combabulating.com/sitemap.xml
- Everything stated to a machine reader here is also stated to a human on the corresponding
  page. There is no hidden or crawler-only content on this site.