Subscriptions in WordPress are my last SaaS dependencies and I am getting rid of them for good.
Even though I host WordPress on my own infrastructure, I don't particularly like it. Not just from a cost perspective but also the management overhead, with almost daily plugin updates.
I had my data. Now I needed somewhere to put it.
Obsidian stores everything as plain markdown files with no database and no cloud lock-in. Just text files I own and can read with any editor.
I discovered my website was down by chance today.
The connection looked healthy from the outside, but the real issue was buried deep in the database logs: a configuration problem that my existing monitoring didn't detect. The fix was a one-line change once I could actually see what was happening.
Running keeps me alive. Staying alive to care for my wife and children.
I'm sharing this while sitting on a park bench overlooking the lake immediately after finishing, before my stretching, as i need to get it out, raw and unfiltered.
I felt naked at a client site last week.
Not as naked as when I went to The Rocky Horror Picture Show as Frank-N-Furter. Trust me, you don't want to see the photo, it would scar you for life. If you do then you are very naughty.
Sometimes I think my mind lives in the gutter, anyway ...
My wife Charlotte is going to find out now.
When she was sleeping after a night shift I would entertain my son by holding him upside down and walking him across the ceiling singing:
Spider-Pig, Spider-Pig, Does whatever a Spider-Pig does. Can he swing from a web? No, he can't, he's a pig. Look out, he is a Spider-Pig!
We both thought it was hilarious.
It shouldn't be this hard to get my own f*cking data.
When I started looking I found that my data was scattered everywhere.
This is my sequence of actions that helped me escape burnout, from deep despair to hopefulness.
At the start of this I did not know I was burnt out or what the word really meant. In reflection I have been through many cycles of burnout, with the last (and hopefully final) one being the worst.
I have never built an MCP server or published an npm package, and definitely not one with multi-agent coordination. Until 2 days ago.
In December 2023 I was burnt out. I did not have a name for it then. Just symptoms: exhausted, unable to think straight, nearly 100kg, in what I can only describe as a pit of despair.
By June 2024 I had lost 20kg, reversed Type 2 Diabetes, and understood for the first time why I kept burning out. The catalyst was not a book, a coach, or a productivity system. It was writing a song.