Monday Grind Blueprint · #17

Opening One Menu Took 2 Seconds. It Now Takes 17 Milliseconds

Getting there meant admitting my own code had been lying to me for months.

By Marcin Firmuga·2026-07-20·5 min read·Monday Grind Blueprint #17

Opening one menu in my app took 2 seconds. It now takes 17 milliseconds.

For ten days I added almost nothing new. All of it went into speed, optimization, and paying off the technical debt that quietly stacks up over 12 months of shipping every single week. Digging through your own year-old code is humbling. Here is what the dig found.

Lie 1. The fan curve "Apply" button. It flashed "Applied successfully" and saved nothing. Every restart threw your settings away in silence.
Lie 2. The version itself. The window called itself v1.8.1 while the single-instance check hunted for v1.8.2. So launching the app a second time stopped bringing the running one to the front, for two whole releases, and no test ever saw it.
Lie 3. The CPU numbers. Per-process load was measured per core. One busy thread on a 12-thread machine proudly displayed "100%" while the whole PC sat at 8%. The top-process list ranked garbage and alerts fired at nothing.
Lie 4. A TURBO switch drawn right there on screen, wired to nothing at all. Click it, feel productive, change zero bytes.

All four passed every test I owned, because you do not write a test for a feature you already believe works. Each one now has a ratchet test that fails the build if it ever comes back.

The receipts after ten days

One feature slipped in anyway, because some ideas refuse to wait for a calm week. Upgrade Readiness. Ask hck_GPT "will an i5 11400F fit my board?" and it answers from a 320-entry offline library: fits, needs a BIOS update, or wrong socket with the full price of the swap laid out. It knows the traps a spec sheet hides, like a B460 board flatly refusing an 11th-gen chip that shares its exact socket. No internet, nothing leaves your machine.

Wednesday, v1.8.5 lands. It has never run this well and it has never been this optimized.

Welding plastics by day. Hunting my own lies by night.

BuildInPublicPythonPerformanceTesting
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.