I asked an AI to read my notes again: every retrospective from 2019 to September 2026, my personal permanent notes, a sample of my fleeting notes, and my Garmin data. This time I asked it to go beyond what it found in what-120-notes-say-about-me.
Personality
- Earnest to the bone. “Thank you, thank you, thank you” in a retro. “My sacred two hours” for evening coding. I’m still crediting swyx for making me a maintainer back in 2020. I don’t really do irony.
- Playful. Shiba Every Hour, shibe.store, shibe.lol, planning poker on a chonk scale, falling cats on a login screen, a boiled banana bedtime drink, grainy gradients. “Fun” appears 196 times in my fleeting notes. “Money”, “SaaS” and “MRR” appear 4 times combined.
- I learn by building. Skill-stacking is how I learn: save up concepts, then learn them in one go through a project. I don’t learn things for their own sake. I learn them so I can make something.
- Very hard on myself, and getting softer. From 2019 to 2022 every “What could I do better?” section was full. In 2025 I left it blank on purpose to practise love and kindness to myself. By 2026 it’s often just empty. That’s a real change I hadn’t noticed.
Aura
Warm, hard-working and a little bit dorky. The person who builds a planning poker app because the team kept forgetting what the chonk sizes meant, then writes 1,500 words about the architecture. Easy to be around and quietly reliable. I probably seem more relaxed from the outside than I feel inside.
Things I might not know about myself
1. I don’t abandon projects. I put them down and come back years later.
In July 2021 I wrote that I wanted to work on the poolside.fm clone. That became hacker.fm in October 2021, which I dropped. Five years later, in August 2026, I built CoasTTY, “the poolsuite.fm clone I’ve always wanted to make.” Big Two has been rebuilt at least three times (fly.io, then Durable Objects, then the v2 app store release). The shibas went from Twitter bot to store to photo community.
I keep beating myself up about unfinished side projects, but the things I love do get finished, just slowly. What never comes back is the business-ideas list. I’ve revisited none of those ideas.
2. The “build a business” goal may be about security more than ambition.
It shows up in every year-end review from 2021 to 2026, and it’s the one goal I never meet. Look at when it gets loudest:
- 2020: stuck and bored at TfL
- end of 2023: burnt out at NB
- 2024: after the layoff
- 2026: AI anxiety, and “I must do everything in my power to make sure we make it through this crazy world”
It reads less like a dream and more like an insurance policy. It’s a way out of depending on an employer for my family’s safety. That would explain why it never gets the same energy as CoasTTY or Big Two. I’m not lazy about it. I’m trying to get excited about a fire exit.
Worth asking: do I want a business, or just the feeling of being safe whatever happens?
3. I calm my anxiety by measuring myself, and I keep looking for someone else to read the results.
Jottivity (my own mood tracker) in 2019, learning journals, diet and psoriasis logs, 1,200 Garmin entries, seven years of monthly retros, and now an AI reading my notes for the second time. In 2019 and 2020 I wrote that I needed someone to give me a chance. In 2026 a medium told me about Osaka.
My no-regrets note says my anxiety comes from questioning every choice. Records and outside opinions calm that down for a while. The note’s own advice, to make a choice and stand by it, is the part that no dataset or AI can do for me.
4. My body worries about Monday before I do.
From my 2023–24 Garmin data (my 2025–26 logs don’t include sleep, so this only covers those two years):
- Sunday is my worst night’s sleep, scoring 68.9 against about 73 on weeknights. My body starts dreading the work week early.
- March and April are my worst months for sleep (about 66), stress and HRV. July is my best (76.7). My retros line up with this: “missing the sun”, “sad that summer is starting to end”, “get out in the sun”, the Ibiza vitamin D. I do best in summer, and spring is when I’m lowest.
- December has my highest daily stress (28 against about 23 the rest of the year). That fits my retros, which keep praising “no last minute work stress” as if it were rare.
5. Maps might be the real thread, more than code.
“Map”, “GIS” or “geo” appears 186 times in my fleeting notes. That covers TfL GIS, becoming the map expert at M4M, Supa Meet on Mapbox, 3D work at Vu.City, the Helsinki trams visualisation that left me in total awe, AR location experiments, and in 2026 calling GeoLibre the “WebGIS I’ve been dreaming of”. Even the Strava-swag business idea is about places I’ve been.
When I’m unsure what to build, maps are the thing I keep coming back to.