For a year I wrote code every single night — not because I loved it, but because I was scared. Scared that if I stopped moving, I'd quietly vanish, like the twelve projects and the version of me that came before this one.
This morning, that fear got the strangest possible answer. PC Workman — a Windows system monitor with a fully offline AI, built by one broke kid on a dying laptop — is live on the Microsoft Store. Not a random ZIP. Not "clone the repo." A real listing, in the same store as the software I grew up thinking only companies could make. Just click Install.
Let me tell you how a barcode scanner got here. All of it — the good, the desperate, and the math underneath.
The number you never see cross a line
My father died when I was seventeen. I didn't break that week. I broke slowly, over the next two or three years — and that's the part nobody warns you about: there's no moment. No threshold you catch yourself crossing.
It's a power rail sagging. 12 volts becomes 11.9, becomes 11.8, and every reading is still "within spec," so nothing alarms — and then one day you look at the number and it's just wrong, and you have no idea when that happened. Somewhere around 22, I quietly gave up on myself. The way almost everyone does it. You cannot fix a number you never learned to measure.
The warehouse
Nine months in a warehouse in the Netherlands. 15 km a day on foot, scanning barcodes, for 19 zł an hour that became about 15 after deductions — roughly €3.50. Nine-hour shifts, then six-hour coding sessions at night on a 2014 laptop that climbs to 94°C if I ask it to think too hard.
Then, three days before Christmas, they smiled the same smile they'd smiled for weeks and said: "You didn't pass the trial. Tomorrow, goodbye — and out of the apartment." The 22nd of December. Suitcases by the door before I'd finished understanding the sentence. Two dogs waiting for me in another country. Maybe a month of money left.
That night I started rebuild #4. Three weeks later I shipped the first .exe. Twelve dead projects came before it. I didn't know it yet, but this was the one that wouldn't die.
What I actually built
PC Workman tells you why your PC is slow, not just that it is. It talks to you through hck_GPT — an assistant I wrote that runs 100% on your machine. 84 intents through a 9-layer routing engine, no cloud, no API key, nothing ever leaving your computer.
But the part I actually lose sleep over is memory. Every monitor on earth forgets you the second you close it — HWiNFO, Afterburner, they draw your 78°C against the same line they draw for every machine that ever existed. I couldn't live with that. The most useful number a monitor can give you isn't the temperature. It's whether this temperature is normal for you.
So every reading falls into one of five workload buckets, and each keeps its own learned normal — folded forward with a Welford accumulator, three numbers per bucket, never recomputed:
def _welford_add(acc, x):
"""Fold one sample into a running accumulator (Welford, 1962)."""
n = acc["n"] + 1
delta = x - acc["mean"]
mean = acc["mean"] + delta / n
acc["n"] = n
acc["mean"] = mean
acc["M2"] = acc["M2"] + delta * (x - mean)82°C while you game: normal. 82°C sitting idle: something's wrong. Same number, opposite verdict — judged against your own past instead of a spec line. Voltages get the oldest math in the project: median and MAD, Nelson rules from 1984, hunting the slow sag a threshold will never catch.
You already know why I had to build that. I am the rail that sagged for three years inside spec while everyone — me included — swore nothing was wrong. I built the alarm I never had. Statistics from the '60s babysitting a power supply. Boring, predictable — and that's exactly why I trust them. Statistics don't hallucinate. People do.
A year, measured in releases
You don't see the grind. You see the version number. So here's the receipt: 11 releases, 800 commits, roughly 48,000 lines, 4 complete UI rebuilds.
From a v1.0.6 prototype that could barely draw a graph → the first stable .exe at 1.6.3 → the SQLite stats engine at 1.6.8 → the hybrid AI + Startup/Services managers at 1.7.2 → the biggest quality jump at 1.7.6 → the Smart Learning core at 1.8.0, where the monitor finally got a memory. Every one of those written after a shift, on the same warm laptop.
Microsoft said no. Then Microsoft said yes.
Two weeks ago I wrote a post titled "Microsoft said no." My first .msix was rejected — not for the code. For a blurry tile icon and a privacy-policy link that pointed at the wrong file. A year of voltage-anomaly math and offline AI, gatekept by one fuzzy PNG. The reviewer was right, and it stung anyway.
So I fixed it. A crisp new icon, drawn clean. A real, readable privacy policy, living where it belongs. A patched build with 13 more fixes I'd collected from my testers in the meantime. Resubmit. Wait. And this morning — approved. A rejection that says "fix these two things and resubmit" was never a no. It was the Store telling me I was this close.
The kid who was afraid of disappearing
A while back, an article of mine hit 44,000 people, and I wrote the most honest thing I've ever published: that I keep building because I'm terrified of disappearing. That I code to prove I still exist.
I don't have a tidy ending for that fear. But I have this: a permanent listing in the Microsoft Store is about the most concrete "I exist" a solo dev can get. The kid who quietly quit at 22 didn't stay quit. The rail that sagged inside spec got its alarm. Twelve projects died so this one could stand in a store next to software made by companies with a thousand engineers.
I built a program that learns for the entire life of the install. I learn for the life of mine. This grind is a year old, it hasn't ended, and it isn't going to — and I've finally understood that's not the tragedy of the story. It's the proof of it.
PC Workman is free and open source (MIT). No accounts, no cloud AI, nothing leaves your machine. Physical work by day, code by night — the same rhythm that built every line of this. Next chapter's already loading.
Still here. Still shipping.