{"slug": "one-year-ago-today", "title": "One year ago today", "summary": "One year after being laid off from Indeed while on paternity leave, a developer published four books, built a SaaS product, and created 123 project folders, using AI to accelerate learning and productivity. The developer, who remained unnamed, launched CarerNotes for domiciliary carers and a knowledge base called cce, among other projects, and now advocates for building with AI despite maintenance costs.", "body_md": "One year ago today, 18 August 2025, I was let go from Indeed while on paternity leave.\n\nIt is a cliché to say it was the worst and the best thing that happened to me. Best only in hindsight. Worst at that moment, with a three-month-old baby. The market was a terrible time to find a job, and I was exhausted, mentally and physically.\n\nI did not land a job until February 2026. I did not let that stop me.\n\nA lot has changed since August 2025, especially with AI. I was fortunate, in one sense, to be on the outside when it happened. I got to sit with it before most people had even noticed.\n\nI published four books.\n\n* Building Your Own Roguelike: A Practical Guide*. A roguelike built from scratch in Ruby.\n\n* Modular Rails: Architecture for the Long Game*. Rails architecture and Rails engines.\n\n* Filed Under No One: A Registry File*. The novel.\n\n* The AI-First Landlord: An Operating Manual for UK Landlords in the Renters’ Rights Era*. For UK landlords, written for the law as it is now.\n\nI built my own pipeline to make them. Quire takes Markdown and turns it into a print PDF, an EPUB, a DOCX, and a web edition. It is becoming a SaaS.\n\nI started a business while unemployed. [CarerNotes](https://carernotes.uk) is for domiciliary carers: they record a visit by voice, and AI turns it into CQC-compliant notes. I built the product, the billing, the infrastructure, and the marketing site.\n\nI started my own knowledge base for AI business context, cce. I wrote it in Rust, for portability and speed. Do I know Rust? Barely. Enough to know what was built, and why.\n\nI built [Filed Under No One](https://filedundernoone.uk) as a game as well. I did my own research, and built it in TypeScript with real game editors. It runs in the browser. You can plug in a gamepad, not just a keyboard.\n\nI improved the SEO on this site so the work can actually be found: titles, descriptions, sitemaps, share cards.\n\nI used a local LLM to process thousands of Portuguese recipes into a kitchen I can actually search.\n\nI wrote my own compound engineering system, [firm](/presentations/firm/). Think of it as the superpower skills everyone has heard about in software engineering, except I actually built the thing.\n\nI even used AI to write replacement firmware for the iPod Classic, in Zig. ZigPod. Do I know Zig? About as well as I know Rust.\n\nI reverse-engineered games. I built my own. I wrote books. I wrote posts like this one. I educated myself further in one year with AI than I could ever have imagined. I also help online, on questions I know the answer to, or ones I am curious enough to sit with. Either way, it is a chance to learn something.\n\nI counted this morning. Every project directory on this machine, including the archive. One hundred and twenty-three folders. Seventy-seven of them already put away.\n\nThat number is not a score. Not all of them are products. Some are interviews. Some are dead ends. Some I put away on purpose. Most of them taught me something and then stopped. Starting is cheap now. Finishing, and then living with what you finished, is the work.\n\nI have always wanted to create my own things, my own solutions. You still have to weigh building against buying. Building has become cheaper. Maintaining what you build is a different story.\n\nSo yes, when people say you can be productive with AI, I have been. Sometimes too much. I am still eager to learn, and I will take the extra time where most people will not.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/one-year-ago-today", "canonical_source": "https://davidslv.uk/2026/08/18/one-year-ago-today.html", "published_at": "2026-08-18 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-18 09:41:52.646824+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Indeed", "CarerNotes", "Filed Under No One", "Quire", "cce", "ZigPod"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/one-year-ago-today", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/one-year-ago-today.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/one-year-ago-today.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/one-year-ago-today.jsonld"}}