Around October last year, I made the decision to resign from my Engineering Manager position at Mercari with the purpose of focusing on building something up on my own. I love Mercari and have only good things to say about this company, but the fire to go my own way was stronger.

It’s been about 3 months now and while I am slowly chipping away at my projects, I thought it would be a cool idea to reflect on 2025 and celebrate some of the achievements I’ve made so far, but also keep myself accountable by working more in the public.

I made the habit of keeping a log on my reMarkable to avoid running into the mindset of “oh no, I haven’t done anything and the month is almost over!!” (see the cover image above)

January

January was a good month. I re-focused and made the habit of going to WeWork offices more often to have that separation between work-mode and non-work-mode. When you don’t have anyone telling you what to do, it’s easy to get lost in the noise of the internet and lose focus.

There’s been a lot of smaller side quests, more than I wanted, but in the end, it was a fairly productive month.

Fix My Japanese

https://fixmyjapanese.com received a design overhaul, a new logo and lots of tweaking in the back, laying the groundwork for an app version. I hacked a lot on making this app a reality but while the code was finished, it wasn’t ready to be released yet.

FMJ also received a new Sensei and further refined the models in the back to be more accurate.

Fix My Japanese

Masked Email Manager

Masked Email Manager received a bigger update and now integrates with Siri Shortcuts, effectively allowing you to create Masked Emails from anywhere - be it macOS or iOS. I use this a lot myself to quickly create new Masked Emails at hotels or on websites.

Here’s the Shortcut I use currently: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/e0ee7234b3784d19bf81791c6fbfc98c

WeWork CLI and Desks App

My WeWork CLI https://github.com/dvcrn/wework-cli that I use to book and list my WeWork All Access bookings received a rewrite from Python to Golang to make maintenance a bit easier.

WeWork CLI

I then used it as base to create an entire app that embeds the Golang library and uses it as the core. This started mainly as a fun “I wish I had an app that just shows me my upcoming WeWork Desks without having to use the slow WeWork app all the time” and actually turned into a pretty nice app.

No booking support yet, but that’s already done locally, just not released yet.

The Desks app

(Technically approved in February, but submitted at the end of January)

Pocketsmith

This year I started going all in on Pocketsmith for managing my finances. The reason being that I started traveling more, and keeping track of Japanese, German, Thai, and US finances was starting to get a bit chaotic.

I am very happy with how smoothly this went. I now have almost everything in Pocketsmith and I love that I can quickly see how much I spend on what, no matter what I use for spending.

Small stuff

  • Migrated @[email protected] from mastodon to GoToSocial. Maintaining a single-user Mastodon server was getting too tedious and I wanted to reduce resources for upkeep. Saved me about $8/mo in resources.

  • chainenv, my CLI to manage shell secrets in Keychain (chainenv set foo bar) received a rewrite from Python in Golang as well, and with that support to use 1Password as backend (through my https://github.com/dvcrn/go-1password-cli that was already in Golang). I’m now using this for all my projects to simply have export FOO=(chainenv FOO) in .envrc and not have secrets laying around on my machine.

    chainenv
    • I’ve created a custom GPT to find cool upcoming music events in Tokyo called “Tokyo Club Event Buddy”. It’s powered by a custom aggregator that pulls from Zaiko, iFlyer, and RA, then exposes that to ChatGPT.
    Tokyo Club Event Buddy GPT
    • Started learning about Cloudflare Zero Trust and moved most of my homeserver + private services onto CF tunnels next to Tailscale. For example, I can now access my Homeassistant through https://hass.d.sh, which requires Okta authentication, or when I’m on WARP tunnel, just lets me through without auth. Saved me $10/mo in loadbalancer+external IP cost and another $10/mo on the homeassistant-cloud subscription
    • I’ve set up my own matrix server (https://conduwuit.d.sh, also exposed through CF tunnels), and added a bunch of bridges to it. So all my Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn/WhatsApp/Google Messages/iMessage/etc. are now on my self-hosted server, fully encrypted.

  • Created a fork of Cinny (matrix client) with changes to room sorting, https://github.com/dvcrn/davids-cinny

A lot of these side quests were Yak-shaving, but I had fun doing it nevertheless.

February

Looking at my February achievements, it was less small stuff and more focusing on a few bigger projects. However, I also travelled more. For example, this post has been written from a cafe in Phnom Penh.

Fix My Japanese

The month kicked off with my release of Fix My Japanese on iOS. Most of the work was done in January, but I submitted it in February and it got approved in February, so here we are!

This is very much a 1.0 but I am quite happy with how it turned out. I am not an iOS developer and it’s nice to slowly get the hang of things (after learning a lot from Desks and Masked Email Manager).

On the web, after getting some user feedback, I added a new slider for picking the politeness level, and added a new “Keigo” level for more formal Japanese.

Fix My Japanese Politeness Slider

Microfn

Most of my time got taken by https://microfn.dev, a new project I’m working on that I can’t talk about much yet. Hopefully the first public release will be up in March. Not much more to say at this point.

TripIt & n8n

My TripIt extension for n8n received a bigger rewrite to fix some auth issues and now properly implements oauth (after learning how to do it with the WeWork app). I also added “Transport” support.

While definitely in the Yak-shaving territory, this allowed me to build fully autonomous agents that manage my trips for me. For example, I have agents running that read my emails, extract flight/hotel/activity/events, find matching trips and file them accordingly.

This information is then made available in my calendar, given me an up-to-date overview of what is happening when.

Calendar managed by TripIt

The agents also attach PDF documents to the segments, so if I want to have my booking confirmation for a flight, I can just open TripIt, select the trip, and the flight information is there.

The cool thing is that I can hook this up to Matrix, so the agent will tell me whenever it did something, like having an AI-powered PA.

n8n agent in action

n8n agent in action

Smaller stuff

  • Siri Shortcuts MCP - A model context provider server that exposes all Siri Shortcuts to LLMs. So I can ask Claude to get information about anything that I have Shortcuts for, do things like “activate Cloudflare WARP tunnel”, “get my IP”, and so on.

    Claude with Shortcuts MCP

  • Created an app for more AI actions through Siri Shortcuts (using the learnings from Masked Email Manager). Nothing out yet, but it’s almost done.

  • Noodled more into music with Ableton. Nothing to show yet, but I’m learning.

  • Made a habit to take more photos with my camera and drag my ass outside.

February felt like it went by in a breeze. Reflecting on everything now, I’m surprised that I have done so little, and that microfn ended up consuming so much of my time.

Other thoughts

I do not regret going my own path, but I also need to re-focus on bigger projects and keep distractions to a minimum. The goal is to build something that makes money, and so far a lot of the things I did aren’t getting me closer to that goal.

AI is reaching critical saturation, I see people using ChatGPT/Microsoft Copilot everywhere, from trains to cafes, and autonomous coding agents like Cursor, Windsurf, Cline and Roo are getting incredibly good. Github Copilot even created their own coding agent that’s available in Visual Studio Code Insiders as preview.

I love that AI is making me 10x more productive, but I’d lie if I said I’m not worried about what it’ll do to my career. Junior engineers will probably have it the hardest, but we’re reaching a point where apps can get created in days without much coding experience, so I’m expecting less demand for engineers in general, but also a rapid flood of new apps and services hitting the market.

Only time will tell what’ll happen next and where the IT sector is going.