Last updated August 21, 2026
At EverXYZ I kept the team small instead of growing it. I’d rather have a few people who understand the problem than a bigger team spending half its time in meetings.
That made the pace brutal. We rebuilt the whole system from scratch in about a month, and it came out noticeably better than what it replaced. We stuck to KISS, DRY, YAGNI, and split things up properly with DDD even while moving that fast, which is the part I’m actually proud of.
I did not set a pace for Alan this month. Between EverXYZ and everything else, it mostly ran on its own. Whenever I did touch it, it was refactoring: cleaning up the agent runtime, reworking how the macOS shell manages its own state. Nothing that changes what Alan can do today, but it keeps moving in the same direction it found in July.
Jimmy died on August 1st, at noon.
He had been fighting pancreatic cancer for months. I watched his weight drop from 5.2 kg to 2.3 kg, watched him keep eating anyway, and kept giving him medicine every day without knowing how much it was helping. In July I wrote that his appetite looked like ordinary life while his weight kept reminding me otherwise. Now that waiting is over, and I still don’t quite know what to do with the space it left.
A few weeks after, I started building an app and named it after him.
Right now it is a desktop pet: a pixel character modeled on real photos of Jimmy, walking around the screen, playable through natural language commands. It’s early, and I mostly built it because I wanted something of him that still moves.
I don’t want it to stop there, though. My wife and I have devices scattered across rooms and locations, and I want them to feel like one place, reachable the way rooms in the same house are reachable by walking between them. So the same app is growing a networking side too, mostly because I needed one anyway and it made sense to build it here instead of somewhere unrelated.
Put together, I want Jimmy to become the housekeeper of a small virtual world I actually live in: one character that knows the rooms, the devices, and the doors between them. What exists today is just the first piece of that, started as a way to keep something of him around.
The Aceoffix D10 got a new handlebar and saddle this month, on top of the tires, wheelset, and pedals from before. Shenzhen is still deep in summer heat, but I ride it to work every day anyway, heat included.
In May I stopped commuting by bike because the heat made it unsustainable, and I felt my body get worse for it. This month I decided the trade was not one I wanted to make again.
EverXYZ will keep moving fast with a small team, and I want to see how the rebuilt system holds up once it’s actually been running for a while, not just once it’s finished. Alan keeps converging without a promised schedule. The Jimmy app will keep growing on both fronts, the pet and the housekeeper idea, and I’m not in a hurry to pick one over the other.
And I’ll keep riding the D10 to work every day.