Friday Shipped & Scarred · #19

My Writing Landed on Spotify. A Post I Spent an Hour On Reached 14 People

Both are true.

By Marcin Firmuga·2026-07-31·5 min read·Friday Shipped & Scarred #19

This week my writing landed on Spotify. Same week, a post I spent an hour on reached 14 people.

HackerNoon put my article about splitting a 6,533-line file into their newsletter and pushed it out as audio. Somebody is going to hear about my monolith while doing the dishes. A year ago I could not convince strangers to run my .exe.

Shipped

16 new guides. Not blog posts. Answers to what people actually type at 2am:

A search that never touches the internet. Type a symptom instead of a title. "loud fans." "high ram." It runs entirely in your browser. No backend, nothing leaves your machine. For a project whose whole promise is that nothing leaves your PC, a search box that phones home would have been a lie sitting in my own footer.

And hck_GPT got the biggest rebuild of its life. New engine, intents, memory and response packages. A question bank to test them against. Dead report window finally deleted. Tests went from 21 in June to 292 today. All green.

Scarred: I automated a cleanup across 15 files instead of doing it by hand. The script worked. It also stamped Polish data onto two English pages, and quietly ate the comma after 38 closing tags, turning "Driver conflicts, leftover GPU packages" into "Driver conflictsleftover GPU packages." Nothing crashed. Every page rendered perfectly. I only caught it because I checked the output instead of trusting my own code. Fifth time this series has taught me that.

Then Search Console taught me something worse. Three months. 20 clicks. Every search that found me was my own name. "pc workman", "marcin firmuga". Not one person arrived because they had a problem I had already solved. That is the entire reason for this week.

And the honest part: those guides sit on a domain six weeks old. Most will not be read for months. Pages do not rank because they are good. They rank because they survive long enough to be trusted. So I shipped 21,800 words knowing the payoff lands in autumn. Still the right bet.

Driving a taxi by day. Writing a manual nobody paid me for by night.

BuildInPublicPythonSEOOpenToWork
This is the project behind the post. PC Workman is a free, open-source Windows system monitor with an offline AI assistant - everything described here is real, shipped code. Download it or read the source.
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MF

Marcin Firmuga

Solo developer · HCK_Labs · building PC Workman in public

Every edition is written from that week's real commits. Newest posts premiere on LinkedIn - the archive lives here. More about me: my story.