Tag: #journey

The week's main result: the Ukrainian association's site is public. SEO, sharing, sending mail and documents straight from the site — all working. The contract said end of June; we opened in mid-July.

The Ukrainian Verein's site reached its last phase: I added a simple CMS, so they now manage almost all the content themselves. What's left is waiting on their texts and photos.

The second saltwater fishing trip: fewer fish, more sun, two sleepless nights on the road — and the same effect that made it worth going.

An ordinary solo-dev weekend with the family: pet shops and ice cream with the kids, an airport run at five in the morning — and agents writing code while I push the swings.

Back in September someone passed my name to a Ukrainian association in Germany. Today was the first real meeting: requirements, fonts, a domain — and I prepared for it with Claude.

A Friday in the middle of a launch: short on sleep, simple tasks stretched across the whole day, everything slightly off. What I do when I feel I'm getting close to the edge.

I bought Mikhail Tabunov's course on launching pet projects. The main idea of the first modules is surprisingly simple: don't build anything big — take an unfinished project you already have and get it to revenue.

The course is generating more ideas than I can work through — and it's déjà vu: this is exactly what I built Referity for. The product didn't take off, but the habit of talking into the journal stayed.

The Referity race is logged in the voice journal day by day, but the final isn't: fifth place, a jury question we couldn't answer, and a debrief with the organizer. Wrapping it up — and why the next run will be different.

Hung the pull-up bar, finally sorted the car for €916, cleaned out the closets, said goodbye to the €500-a-month coach — and for the first time in a long while I feel energy coming back.

Seventeen minutes into the voice journal about being torn between projects, doomscrolling Instagram, and hunting for a magic solution that was with me the whole time.

The last accelerator session before the final landed on a day when the whole team was away. We canceled even the online option — and then five days of fishing in the fjords did what no weekend ever had.

The structure frontend built in a day, a plan for a rough MVP by the end of the week — and a paid Max subscription to Claude as an investment in development pace.

The deploy is on fire two hours before the presentation, the voice agent lands fifteen minutes before it — and in the evening, out of nineteen teams they name ten, and one of them is ours. All of it on my birthday.

A Saturday with an early start, an optimist friend, and a pond where nothing bites. A day without a single line of code — one that stays in memory better than many working days.

Ran local models on my Mac: embeddings as good as the cloud ones, Mistral extracts tasks from notes. Privacy is turning from a pretty word in the pitch into a feature we can actually build.

In the morning — a new name and the Referity.ai domain with a redirect from the old Speech Journal; in the evening — the first offline presentation at the accelerator. A B grade: one thought slipped my mind and the ending got crumpled.

An email from Startbahn27: we're in the accelerator. Ahead — a kick-off and the first presentation, and that same evening a friend asked to join the team — and I wasn't sure at first whether to be happy about it.

After submitting the application I couldn't stop: three more hours — and the app became an installable PWA, in the afternoon my wife saw it, in the evening — friends. Plus the first survival tests for the recording.

A two-day sprint: the bot turned into a standalone web app with a demo mode — while submitting the accelerator application itself took fifteen minutes and ended with a beer.

Invited a friend into the project — and he caught fire even more than me. We sat down to prepare the accelerator application and recorded the whole brainstorm straight into the journal: target audience, integrations, and the biggest problem — the input interface.

Came to a coworking space to get some work done — walked into a student project pitch session, met a professor, pitched my voice journal in German for the first time, and left with the contacts of a local accelerator.