February 2025

Looking back at February, I’m struck by how much I’ve settled into a sustainable rhythm between my work at Readwise, my side projects, and family life is what I wish I could say.

It’s been hard. I’ll share more below, but for Readwise work it felt a lot of the time that I just have a shitty streak where I can’t get many things done. A lot of new things are flying at me and spending considerable amount of time on each, without succeeding in the end is bringing me down a bit.

Personal work is also lacking a bit. Though there are things to celebrate, in general direction it feel like I am a little lost and am not sure how to proceed.

Family wise, it often feel like I could be dedicating more time to my wife and my son.

So each part feels like it is not getting enough attention and success from me.

But then, at the same time, all of these are more or less good, nothing crazy bad is going on. Weird thoughts, weird state.

This month was about finding balance while still making progress on multiple fronts.

Major Themes

Balancing Pragmatism with Exploration

This month, I juggled practical work tasks with creative exploration. At Readwise, I found myself diving deep into debugging issues while simultaneously exploring new AI tools in my side projects. I’m learning that both sides of this coin are important - the meticulous problem-solving builds career skills, while the creative exploration feeds my passion.

Documentation and Reflection

I’ve developed a strong habit of daily logs. Thanks to AI I have a strong feeling that those logs would never be lost. I can just feed them all into an LLM model and it will help me solve a problem I’m having with the context of my own thoughts. Need to find a specific event/thought? Boom, done. Need help summarizing your week/month? Boom, done. Just this simple thought of it being useful and not lost has been a game changer to keeping this habit stick. I wonder if there is a way to integrate this into other parts of life…

Embracing AI as a Multiplier

This month reinforced my belief in AI as a force multiplier. From updating Built with Django to enhancing SEO Blog Bot with PydanticAI, I’m seeing firsthand how these tools can accelerate development. As I reflected on February 3rd: “I will be so stupid if I don’t take action and leverage the usefulness of AI now. It’s not about the hype. What matters is the speed revolution.”

Family Milestones

Amidst all the work, there were beautiful family moments. Theo’s potty training success was a highlight, and I cherished our morning routines together. These moments remind me why finding work-life balance matters so much. A huge personal win on this front is the discovery of “Hunt, Gather, Parent” book. Game. Changer. Thanks to Johannes for recommending it. It further improved the relationship I have with my son. I’m now recommending it to aaaaaal parents.

Readwise Work Highlights

Debugging and System Improvements

A significant portion of my work involved investigating and fixing user-reported issues. While not always glamorous, I recognized the importance of this skill: “Having the ability to quickly debug and figure out what’s going on and fix it is very important, because most of the work of a programmer is actually maintaining code.” Yet at the same time it is a hard thing to do, not only from a skill point of view, but from a psychologial (especially if you were not the one to write the code in the first place). The feeling of spinning your own wheel and going into a never ending rabbit whole of code is hard. If you succeed the light at the end of the tunnel feels great. If you don’t, it just brings moral down. I was a little in the latter camp this month.

Key accomplishments included:

Have been setting up and fixing all Wiseup issues.
Improved Twitter integration logs and diagnostics. Didn’t really ship any fixes, but just got a much better inderstaing of all the moving parts.
Fixed some smaller bugs, like Enhanced Send to Kindle functionality and Export Integration bugs.
Created better NewRelic dashboards for monitoring, as well as improving our logging in general.

Personal Life Highlights

Side Projects

Built with Django

Added pagination and search functionality
Integrated PydanticAI and Gemini to analyze web pages
Fixed migration issues and storage problems
Added more featured projects to the directory

SEO Blog Bot

This became my most active side project, with numerous improvements:

Added a cheaper pricing tier to attract more customers
Implemented PydanticAI for better content generation
Added like/dislike functionality for feedback
Refactored code to make future updates easier
Improved error handling for scanned projects

Content Creation

Published blog posts including “Throw Away Dead Code” and “Getting Real”
Created my first video demo for SEO Blog Bot and shared it on social media
Started using AI to summarize books like “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis