My Week #229 - I am a painter this week
I was a painter this week. As a side quest to my daily duties, the 80% of my focus (except of World Cup and booking holidays) was related to renovation of one room in our apartment...
🗓 Jul 12, 2026⏳ 1 minutes
I was a painter this week. As a side quest to my daily duties, the 80% of my focus (except of World Cup and booking holidays) was related to renovation of one room in our apartment...
It’s summertime. School is over, which means we can spend more time in the countryside and plan some renovations here and there. This is why my family has already planned a bunch of work for me. It means that in the mornings I have my daily job duties, while in the afternoons and on weekends I have my renovation duties.
I completed the gameplay for my new game at the MVP stage and tested it with my family. They’re usually very skeptical of my overengineered projects, but this time they genuinely liked it. That means the MVP is a success, and it’s time to turn it into a production-ready product.
This week was all about vibe-coding the 1:1 online experience for my game. For the first time ever, I was building an online game based on WebSockets and a Swift backend. Thanks to modern tools, I was able to migrate the existing solution and set up the first test server within minutes. This is absolutely amazing. And scary. But still, definitely more amazing than scary.
Vibe coding is a vital part of my daily development process. However, at this stage, I see it primarily as a way to accelerate experimentation and testing of new gameplay ideas. When something doesn’t feel right, I either think about a small improvement or a complete redesign, and a few hours later I can already test the new experience. This is a game-changing experience for a developer.
Yet another week of my life has passed by. I had a productive week at work. I added plenty of features and redesigned parts of the gameplay in my new game. I also made the first significant repayment on our mortgage, reducing the outstanding balance by nearly 20%. I had a few get-togethers with family and friends and found some time to relax.
Our car is broken, which means we're left with walking, public transportation, and taxis. It really shows how conveniently we live nowadays and where our boundaries actually lie.
Malaga trip was exactly what we needed. We started it with low expectations, but it turned out to be amazing. I think the biggest shocker for us — the thing that changes everything — is the weather. When you board the plane wearing a jacket in cold or rainy weather and then leave it a few hours later in a T-shirt, enjoying the sun and the heat, it completely resets your mind. Literally, completely.
Let's try to be short as this update is definitely delayed. I have an idea for the next project - it's a mix of football & chess. I have first mockups and this looks interesting. My goal is to build playable MVP and check if this is something interesting...
The first part of this week could be described as a failure related to our search for a piece of land to purchase for our new home...
I set up my personal assistant with OpenClaw a week ago. After the first week, I can already see that, on the one hand, this is not a revolution—but on the other, it clearly points toward the future. It finally enables building human-like automations without strict rules or the need for sophisticated software to gather structured inputs. Now, with LLMs, we can provide inputs in a very flexible form, and the system can generate outputs based on that input and its context.
Something clicked this week, and I started swimming. For now, it’s just the beginning, but I’m finally able to swim several lengths (with some pauses) without choking on water. It’s a great feeling. It proves that if you train long enough, things eventually start to click.
You can move forward slowly, step by step. You can follow a clear plan. You can do a lot, but everything can still go wrong in a single moment. The blink of an eye can cause a serious distraction. At the end of a fairly calm and positive week, I had a major disruption yesterday. Nothing physically harmful happened; rather, it was a family argument that raised many difficult questions.
I came back after a few days of being sick with some energy, but this time I decided not to put it into another project. Instead, I’m slowly starting to clear my life backlog. There are two types of backlogs—the ones that bother you and the ones you forget about. My personal backlog is not something I can ignore. It meant I had to do something about it, and I did.
The spring breeze caught me off guard, and now I’ve come down with a mild cold...
I finally feel tired. Weeks of pushing myself, overloading my context, and juggling multiple things in parallel have taken their toll. Now I have to pay the price. It gets even worse when it conflicts with family expectations. Suddenly, you find yourself in the middle of a weekend trip, frustrated because you feel like you’ve made no progress on the projects you believe are important to solving your life problems.
After every push, we deserve some cooldown time. We all deserve it. For me, taking time off to relax with Football Manager is my guilty pleasure. I’ve loved this game for over 20 years. There have been long periods when I didn’t play it at all, but from time to time I rediscover that excitement and start a new journey.
Let me confirm that my first larger software project has finally been released! The remaster of my game, which took up half of last year, is now completed and available on the App Store.
It was a good week. A week of wrapping up the last features from the to-do list. A week of reviewing and updating the App Store configuration. A week of mental recharge before the final push.
For the last 3–4 months, I’ve been extremely productive. I was so productive that I probably reached my peak. Sure, I wouldn’t have achieved that without the extensive use of modern AI tools, but still, the amount of work I completed in the same period of time was amazing.
When we think about toxic things, we usually imagine deadly poisons. While that is still true, I believe those substances are not as dangerous as the hidden ones.
The best day to start ai-empowered engineering was yesterday. The second-best day to start ai-empowered engineering is today.
Probably for the first time, I got scared of AI...
I am changing my daily cooperation once again. This month, I am starting a brand-new journey, hoping it will last longer than the previous two. That is my primary goal - to have the opportunity to actively participate in the future of a single project for more than two years.
Despite many obstacles, it was a productive week for my side project. After completing the core gameplay, I focused on the less exciting parts, such as additional screens (instructions, credits), integrating crash reporting and analytics tools, and addressing many other small details. I shared the app with a few friends and gathered feedback that made me rethink the app’s retro feel. As a result, I decided to experiment with a subtle, glassy design for the buttons and navigation components. I like the outcome—it feels noticeably more modern.
The gameplay is complete. At least for now. I added all the fixes and changes we identified after the initial testing release. This is such an amazing feeling!
This week was a major push toward the MVP release of my game remaster. My first side project to be completed in years is finally at a stage where the first testers can try it out...
Let's try to plan this year...
Let's try to predict what the future brings...
Let's try to plan this year...
Let's try to predict what the future brings...
FOS vs FOMO — the battle that should never take place
Let's try to predict what the future brings...
It's Christmas time so I had to use the opportunity to look back a year ago. Usually what I am used to is reading or listening to people proud of what they have achieved in the past year - the idea for that is to feel proud but also to prove and motivate others that lots can be done within a year.
The worst thing about living an organized life is that you have too much time to think which generates conclusions and actions that may lead to both simplification and complication, depending on luck, quality of decisions, ability to foresee the future, or random number generator, whatever fits best.
This was a crazy week mostly focused on the real estate market and decisions to be made. I've already summarized my thoughts on buying a flat for the office in the summary of...
Yet another Sunday, yet another summary time, and, to my surprise, I'm a bit stressed/frustrated since the early morning. My initial thought is the fact that once I checked my plan for the current week I realized that due to very active holiday time, I did not complete anything.
It's natural for most of us to hope to live forever, or at least as long as possible. We dream of reaching the magical age of 100 years, and we celebrate amazing records of people living even longer, looking for the secrets of a long life that only few possess, but everyone else would love to have.
In an ideal world, you sleep for 8 hours, you work for 8 hours and you live for 8 hours. That seems to be pretty fair, right? You give yourself enough time to recharge the batteries, to use those batteries to live an interesting life, and to earn some bucks to spend on that.
For a couple of days, we had a visitor in our flat - a 10-year-old cousin of my children. One thing that stroke me when we ate together was the fact of how slow she eats. It was absurdly slow compared to my family. Sure, she is known as the one that eats very little, but I realized that the speed of eating may have a significant impact on how much we eat and how it impacts our health & physical appearance.
Will I enter the biggest project of my life? Will I define my future place to stay for a longer period? It looks like after years of thinking, discussing & wondering we are about to become the owners of the house in the countryside.
I've finished the investment course. Based on this I updated my financial plan and already started executing the first steps...
Lazy Sunday, lazy, Sunday, lazy Sunday!
We've already had several iterations of HMI (Human Machine Interface). Just to mention a few most important ones - physical buttons on machines, keyboard & mouse for PCs, and touch & multi-touch gestures for smartphones. For a couple of years, it sounded like the next iteration will be the voice control, but it looks like the challenges with natural language and privacy impacted heavily on the low adoption of audio assistants.
After super stressful and exhausting weeks of work, I finally started the 7-day holiday on Tuesday. In the past, I already introduced the concept of the I-need-holidays factor to measure the level of tiredness. It is represented by the number describing the number of days needed to fully relax and enjoy the holidays.
At some point this week I felt like a well-programmed robot of a well-functioning machine. I'd say that I am in a pretty good physical form (one of the best, tbh). Although working hard during weekdays and the weekend, I still find time daily to learn and practice some chess and some other activities. That makes me feel both great and scared.
This life week was rather focused on weekly goals, which is good, right?
The first year of this project has passed by. The first anniversary makes me wonder if this was a good year. If the project I started a year ago actually changed my life? I defining goals for year, month, and week makes it easier to achieve them?
Somewhere deep in my heart, I want to be a writer. This is my kinda dream since I was 19 and I was preparing myself for final exams. The thing is that I always felt too incompetent to start writing. Although, according to my family & friends, my vocabulary and language and the way I write prove that I am a good writer I've always felt the barrier. 21 years later I still feel barrier. It's stupid, but for me writing something is like setting in stone the opinion and my desire to write perfect things makes it sooo difficult to define a perfect and fulfilling final opinion I would be proud of.
Sometimes, once you look back to the week that has just passed by you realize that the week was much better than you would expect it to be. Great, unexpected progress is always welcome, especially after a series of tough weeks. I am happy that this is related to a New Year - this is always a nice boost to New Year's resolutions.
Let's try to predict what the future brings...
It's Christmas time so I had to use the opportunity to look back a year ago. Usually what I am used to is reading or listening to people proud of what they have achieved in the past year - the idea for that is to feel proud but also to prove and motivate others that lots can be done within a year.
Winter has arrived in Poland. The first days of winter are extremely difficult due to both drivers and roads being unprepared for the winter to come. Freezing rain, roads not covered with salt or sand, summer tires on some cars - that's the reality we all have to face in the first days of real snowy winter.
Winter has arrived in Poland. The first days of winter are extremely difficult due to both drivers and roads being unprepared for the winter to come. Freezing rain, roads not covered with salt or sand, summer tires on some cars - that's the reality we all have to face in the first days of real snowy winter.
Recently I heard some advice that although making a list of goals is the first step towards reaching them...
Short days and long evenings encourage you to spend more time at home rather than outside, eg. reading books.
The current time is crazy. November also does not help to recharge, this is why it's tough sometimes to keep the energy at the appropriate level. Of course, the one way is to fall asleep and wake up around March, but that's the easy way.
The reason for `4hour.me` project is to make a progress in my life. One of my observations during weeks of this project is the need to focus and constant struggling with distractions that slow me down.
It's been four years actually since my butt hurt me last time from working too much in sitting position. Four long years of work, mostly from home, still in changing positions - sitting, standing, moving around, with back hurting after standing too much but never with butt pain.
Procrastination is very popular explanation for lack of progress. It's sooo easy to get disturbed when the big chunk of work is looking at you waiting to see how you try to tackle it. Oh, it's a pure fun for the chunk to see you fail even to start a task.
Being alive can have so many meanings. For me, actually it means that after positive heart tests I returned to running. It also means that after couple of difficult work days I joined a project that seems to be super tailored to my best & current knowledge and it lets me instantly develop with the speed like I was in a project for at least some weeks.
For years I am used to think about myself as the healthy one. I try to live active live, I am on a pretty good diet, I limit sugar & alcohol, I've never smoked, I sleep like 8h a day. And then, suddenly, organism says that something is wrong...
Consistency, persistence and patience - the big three needed to reach goals. But, here comes the counter three - creativity, responsibility and helpfulness - and they don't like the big three. They want to be the three to rule me all.
Have you ever tried to measure how good your work-life balance is?
The whole blog is all about `reaching goals`...
I'm currently on holidays so this ain't gonna be typical post describing the progress towards building great dev company of one. Holidays gave me no space for working progress, but also gave some space for thinking and doing some cleanups. One of the things that needed cleaning up was ~50 cards in my mobile Safari browser kept `for later`. This list of course grew for months.
So, I was born and lived for first 23 years of my life in Cracov, Poland. They say that we are very traditional people. We are so traditional, that if something happens twice in a row we call it a tradition. For second week in a row we have very small celebration - this time related with finishing first milestone of `Consider it done` app. How could I did not admit that it slowly becomes a tradition to celebrate something? 😜
You could call this week a total failure.
You are at the edge of your forties and you still feel that you mostly live not you life but adopt your life to someone else's life. Do you think this is your problem, problem of the other person or simply toxic relationship? To be honest, as it stands for today I believe that any kind of toxic relationship is mostly cause by ourselves cause we allow for this situation to happen and to last.
Actually the best moment to go on holidays is the one when you say that you don't have time for holidays. Lack of time sits inside your brain, keeps you stressed and tired. There might be couple of medicines for that but probably the best one is taking a break and having holidays, even if short ones.
Ain't it that simple? When you have plenty of time you have wider perspective, sometimes focus on things you just like or wanna do, not the things that are the key ones. But, in the other scenario when you are actively seeking for a bit of time to make any progress you start focusing on essentials - cause they actually matter most.
Each decision has the feature, which might not be visible at first, but usually becomes visible once we feel remorseful some time later.
Actually, I like learning. It may sound weird but I like to know a lot, even if just on the basic level. Still I feel that every topic has multiple layers, like an onion. You start with scratching the surface, but under it the complexity rises up to the very detail level. Some people spend whole live diving deeply into one topic, some people prefer just scratching the surface of many of them.