projects

The work, as it happens

Each project is a series of check-ins written while building, grounded in the real git history, including the wrong turns. New entries land as the work progresses.

Projects10 Writing18

PersonalOSVault v2: Capture Works. Search Is the Hard Part.Notes now travel from Claude on my iPad into my real Vault. Search is proving harder. What shipped, what failed, and why the benchmarks stay unchanged.15 Oct PersonalOSBuilding Vault v2: Making My Second Brain DependableCapture works end to end in test. Retrieval still has to prove itself. A checkpoint on building one dependable second brain across devices and AI tools—and the failures that made this my longest PersonalOS build.14 Oct CompassBuild your own Compass: the system is now a public build kitI turned the useful parts of Compass into a public, privacy-first repository that another person can hand to an AI coding harness and use to build a job-search system around their own decisions.13 Oct PersonalOSPersonalOS v2: Giving AI more room to workV1 was starting to feel slow, and approving every change was slowing me down too. PersonalOS v2 gives AI more authority, makes shared context easier to reach, and builds toward a more useful daily operating system.12 Oct projectwong.comThe site caught up with the workThe site had fallen behind its own projects. I brought the story forward, closed Compass, removed the counters, and fixed a theme change that was interrupting the reading.12 Oct Spooky HollowSpooky Hollow: Still playing, taking a break from buildingHannah still plays Spooky Hollow, but development is paused while I start a new job and school, sports, and other activities fill the family calendar. We may return to it later.12 Oct Stadium EscapeStadium Escape: A break between inningsThe kids still play Stadium Escape. New iterations are on pause while I start a new job and the family makes room for school, sports, and other activities.12 Oct CompassCompass: The search is complete. The context carries forward.I’ve accepted a new role and am closing Compass as a standalone project. Its relationship-management concept is becoming part of PersonalOS, and the Compass name now belongs to the MCP and vault access layer.12 Oct Fuel the DreamFuel the Dream: getting Austin's team to CooperstownAustin's travel team is going to Cooperstown in June 2027, and getting twelve boys to upstate New York costs real money. So we set up a nonprofit, Nicolette wrote the words, and I built the website in a morning, including the moment the fundraising meter went from a made-up $8,750 to an honest $0.16 Sept Spooky HollowSpooky Hollow: the math game Hannah actually asked to playHannah needed more addition practice and already loved Roblox obbys, so I built the worksheet into a ghost hunt. One long day produced eight levels, 72 ghosts, 17,600 math checks, and a better lesson in what AI still cannot test by itself.1 Sept Stadium EscapeStadium Escape, three weeks laterThe catch-up post: one park became eight, the AI got eyes, a secret sandlot got a very large dog, and the game went live. Also what three weeks of building with AI taught me about taste, judgment, and why PMs and engineers still matter.19 Aug CompassA network engine that happens to be job huntingCompass is a system for the 2,164 people I have met over twenty years. It is pointed at a job search right now because that is where I am, and the search is the forcing function rather than the point.19 Aug CompassThe half of Compass I did not need to buildCompass runs my job search against a target list I built by hand. Two or three working hours went into building the other half, the part that would generate that list for me, and the useful result was killing it.19 Aug Stadium EscapeStadium Escape: building a ballpark with my sonMy son has been asking what I do at work since he could talk, and the answer I gave him was always true and useless. So we built a Roblox chase game set in an homage to a very recognizable Phoenix ballpark. The premise came from two kids in the back seat on the way to Ace Hardware.10 Aug PersonalOSI stopped re-explaining myselfEvery session starts from nothing. PersonalOS is a vault built so an agent reads my decisions before it acts, and I never explain them twice.31 Jul PersonalOSMy journal was empty for seven days straightI built a daily journal, then checked whether I used it. Seven days, seven empty entries, while the same week produced 120 commits. The tool was fine. It was pointed the wrong way.31 Jul Budget EngineThe Budget Engine: trust as an architecture decisionA household finance engine built in five days of commits: stdlib-only Python, every number traceable to a source row, and a decision log that records the wrong turns on purpose.27 Jul HandoffHandoff: a take-home, taken seriouslyHow a Principal PM take-home became a working operations prototype in seven days, and why the most important commits deleted code.27 Jul