Notes from working this way.
Roughly every other week. Mostly what went wrong, measured, and what I changed because of it. No listicles.
If you keep giving them the fish, you get anger, not gratitude
A note I wrote in March 2024 about charity turned out to be the rule I now use for software. The systems that made me proudest are the ones the client no longer needs me for.
I kept everything I learned to myself. It paid nothing.
In February 2024 I wrote a note telling myself to start publishing. I then did not publish anything for two and a half years. Here is what the delay cost, and why the notebook it was written in is now the thing I publish from.
What you learn goes up in a straight line. What you earn does not.
I drew two lines in a notebook this month, trying to explain to myself why two years of work had not turned into money yet. The gap between those two lines is where most people quit — and it is the only part of the picture nobody shows you.
Nobody pays a personal trainer for their knowledge
I wrote this line in a notebook in February 2026, about the gym. It turned out to be the clearest description I have of what clients actually buy from me — and why the first two weeks of any project are the ones that decide it.
The most stable job is the unstable one
A note from March 2024, back when I was a student worrying about employment. Two years of unstable work later, I think the reasoning holds — and I can now say exactly which part of it is wrong.
I read 123 of my own work sessions. 42% contained a correction.
I thought I was working well. Then I measured it — 6.99 billion tokens, 1,333 messages typed by hand, and a correction rate that would get anyone fired. Here is what I changed.
My software cancelled 41 real orders. Nobody had cancelled anything.
A shop assistant typed a delivery status without Vietnamese accents. Three letters in the middle of that word matched my rule for "cancelled". Forty-one live orders vanished from the shop's screen — and the same week, merged spreadsheet cells broke the money column too.
New posts land here. Or email me and skip the queue.