Spring
February started with the operating system. Phase one had been the boot sequence, and phase two was everything that turns that into something you can actually use: a timer ticking a hundred times a second, a keyboard driver that turns key presses into characters, text output built up from nothing, and a small command line with help, clear, echo, time and reboot. All of it written from scratch, no libraries. It boots in a virtual machine and drops you at a prompt, backspace works, and reboot really does reboot.
The financial terminal drifted into being more of a situation monitor. I wrote a paper documenting every algorithm in the trading simulator, went from fifty-eight tradeable assets to a hundred, added the ability to send signals to real brokers, and moved to a map-first layout with new pins. Dose, a personal substance tracker and reference guide, got built from scratch in one sitting, then absorbed the health tracker and the AI doctor. Three fewer repos to think about. One Wednesday turned into an eighteen-hour session that finally cleared a week-long bug where a missing config value was blocking login before anything else could run.
The dream came back that month, the same one I have had once or twice a month since I was five. Always corridors, always chasing a faceless figure, and when I catch them they turn around and it is me, and then they chase me. No exit, just the reversal. The obvious reading is the shadow self, and the corridor is being between places and never arriving. What I cannot explain away is that it has been exactly the same for twenty years. Logging it. The fastest way to stop thinking about yourself is to build something complicated enough to take all your attention.
April was platform building. Epiphany, which had been Opticon and then briefly Monica, got a knowledge graph, live flights and wildfires on the map, and a chat panel. Spark and Tally each got a full Apple sweep, so Mac, watch and widgets on top of the phone and web apps that already existed. Arthur, a small language model built from scratch, got squeezed down small enough to run on a normal computer and went live in the browser. Then the codebase itself became the project, sliding from thirty-odd repos down to ten, back up as new things got built, into a monorepo, and out again.
I built a gamified task manager called Quest in one sitting and then merged it straight into the Times Square colony sim, so colonists now walk to a building and do my real-life tasks for experience points. Added a wallpaper mode so it can run as a living desktop background. Life, the therapy document I keep for Amanda, kept growing with new sections and six new views. BC Garage Doors got a real dashboard for my dad’s shop with a job pipeline, low-stock alerts and a PIN login. Cadence, a tool that tracks git history, went from scaffold to finished the same month, which felt appropriately recursive.
May belonged to Brief, the legal case tool. It went from a web layout experiment to a native Swift app in a week, then a full redesign, a third case opened and the second one carried end to end. Tally got a visual overhaul early on, new fonts and a parchment palette and a desktop layout that finally uses the screen, then an iOS redesign, read-state sync across platforms and a real translation pipeline. Charters got its own redesign and went live. Echo, which does speech transcription on the phone itself, and Beep, a transit companion, both shipped from scratch on one Saturday. Grapher, a calculator with no outside dependencies, landed the same way.
The biggest structural move was mid-month: school, cadence, epiphany and BCGD all folded into one repo, the journal moved off GitHub Pages, and a shared design system in cream, red, yellow and charcoal rolled out across every web app. Epiphany got migrated off a stock data service that was being retired, plus cached news, a dozen economic series, live flight tracking and buy, hold or sell calls on stock pages.
Away from the screen: gym three or four times a week since December, therapy still on, and Pre-Calc test prep as the constant background task. A two-hour call with Alex turned into the worst disagreement we have ever had, about whether hitting kids builds character, which was hard to sit with next to what I have watched across three generations of my own family. An evening with my brother left me thinking about where I rank in a room once someone’s girlfriend walks in, the quiet hierarchy nobody says out loud. School plans firmed up too: computer science, not paralegal. Steady, mostly solo, one call a week with a friend. Not complaining.