What broke, what I built, and what I’m still learning.
Newest first. The useful failures tend to age well.
Bubbles sends ten songs on Friday morning. The useful part is not the number. It is that the first pick should feel brave, yesterday's misses change next week's angle, and familiar songs do not waste the list.
I kept writing temporary thoughts in the terminal and repairing the pasted text afterward. jot. gives those thoughts one clean place to exist for exactly as long as they are useful.
My son and his grandfather build their league's spreadsheet together every July. I added four research agents and an offline draft board. The research confirmed both of their selections.
list. is also list.mckinnon.ai: a Tailscale-only address that Caddy routes to the right private app. The product name, browser address, access boundary, icon, and switcher label all come from the same word.
A task list, groceries, trips, workouts, and a few other household annoyances became small tools on the server. Their value is not that I built them. It is that the family kept opening them.
The new house-control app was fast, polished, and expensive to keep correct. An outside review asked whether it should exist at all. The honest answer sent me back to the dashboard already in the house.
A traveler used Southbound in two time zones and came home to an app that would not open. One calendar day had become two records, and the launch screen could not survive the disagreement.
A task list that only I can reach kept demanding my password. The token was fine. The larger mistake was copying a public-app login screen into software that already lived behind a private door.
A new preference about movies or songs kept becoming a software release. Moving those opinions into ordinary notes made changing my mind editorial work again.
The good trip idea appears months before dates or confirmation numbers exist. I wanted somewhere that could keep the sentence alive without pretending the family had already made a decision.
Weather, the calendar, the house, and the few things that need attention arrive in one email before the day starts. The facts come from code; Bubbles is allowed to add the voice.
Four streaming apps and several watchlists still left us reading the same synopses at nine o'clock. One useful recommendation required remembering what we owned, watched, and already rejected.
The official handicap, scorecards in a drawer, and my own memory told different stories about where strokes disappeared. Before building anything new, I found pieces of the answer scattered across three machines.
Gift ideas, books, and packing lists kept leaking into the task manager. Treating every maybe as an obligation made the real work harder to trust.
fit. made each session easy to follow and log. Then our actual routine changed while the app kept producing a beautiful plan for workouts nobody did.
Typing 'call the roofer' takes seconds. Deciding where it belongs, when it matters, and whether anybody will see it is the part that made capture feel expensive.
Groceries enter the list while someone stands at the fridge and leave it from a phone in the store. The useful system had to respect both moments, even though the bridge between them could disappear.
Plain text made it easy to keep years of notes and surprisingly unpleasant to return to them. A private reading surface made the same files feel worth opening without changing how I write.