ledger of one engineer · the substrate 15 notes · append-only
$ tail -f alexis.log
| date | did | what | ref |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-05-14 | shipped | Shipped a Hyrox app days before my own SOLO debut. Real users found what was fundamentally useless in an afternoon — things no amount of manual testing in my bubble had surfaced. | App Store |
| 2026-01-20 | shipped | Shipped my first solo iOS app — a workout timer. Thought the hard part was behind me. The hard part was getting anyone to find it. | App Store |
| 2024-02-27 | killed | Wrapped after four and a half years. Turns out the retrospective finally needed a retrospective. | rip |
| 2019-09-09 | built | Co-hosted “No es solo código,” a weekly podcast on life in web programming — a running retrospective with a colleague, 2019 to 2024. | 2019–2024 |
| at some point | wrote | Craft is the part nobody will ever scroll back to look at. | note |
| at some point | said | We estimate our own side projects as if a team had already decided they were worth building. Solo, that machinery doesn't exist. | thread |
| at some point | said | "Vibe coder" is a scapegoat. There have always been people who care about the work and people who ship whatever compiles — AI just stopped hiding which is which. | thread |
| at some point | said | "The AI got it wrong" is unacceptable. A model is a tool, and tools don't carry blame. You shipped it — you own it. | thread |
| at some point | said | AI coding isn't about generating code. It's that effort can compound — each pass should inherit the last one's context, not rebuild it from scratch. | thread |
| at some point | shipped | Until you ship it, an opinion is just a draft of a belief. | note |
| at some point | wrote | A feature that makes the easy path the wrong one. | note |
| at some point | said | Rausch — Nietzsche's word for the heightened state art comes out of. The philosophers were mapping peak performance a century before psychology arrived. | thread |
| at some point | said | "I don't have time" and "I wish I could" are how people justify mediocrity. The ceiling sits well above the social default — if you spend your hours on purpose. | thread |
| at some point | wrote | Paid to write software. Compelled to speak. | self |
| at some point | wrote | Libardo Alexis Duran Martinez. The first name only my parents use — and only when I'm in trouble. | self |
Nothing matches that grep.
the only first-person line on the site
“I write things down because I forget what I think otherwise. I ship things because writing them down isn't enough. I say things in public because I owe people the version I'd defend on a Tuesday.”
— a.d. · the substrate every other surface is built from