ledger of one engineer · the substrate 17 notes · append-only
$ tail -f alexis.log
| date | did | what | ref |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-05-27 | wrote | "Friendship" is the soft word for it. What you build is a load-bearing rope — twine as a kid, spun-steel cable once you've earned the material. You can hand someone the material, not the readiness to build with it. The last wisdom is accepting whose rope never gets past twine. | |
| 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 | 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 | wrote | Craft is the part nobody will ever scroll back to look at. | note |
| at some point | wrote | Paid to write software. Compelled to speak. | self |
| 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 | wrote | A feature that makes the easy path the wrong one. | note |
| at some point | wrote | Kaizen — the things that once felt impossibly hard quietly become ordinary, then become me. | book |
| at some point | wrote | Libardo Alexis Duran Martinez. The first name only my parents use — and only when I'm in trouble. | self |
| 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 | 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 | shipped | Until you ship it, an opinion is just a draft of a belief. | note |
| 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 | 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 |
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