I booked myself seventy hours of taxi shifts this week. Then I spent the entire weekend making sure that nothing I care about would need me while I was gone.
On Friday the confirmation came through: ten to twelve hours a day, Monday to Sunday. I booked it myself, so this is nobody's fault but mine.
What happened next was not dread. It was closer to a countdown starting.
This project is fourteen months old. It has survived a warehouse in Netherlands, a plastics repair shop, and every evening in between. It had never had to survive a week where I genuinely did not know how much of me would be left at the end of a shift.
So I sat down on Saturday morning and did not really get up.
By Sunday night
- A new release built, scrubbed and submitted to the Microsoft Store.
- Every version number aligned across the app, the site and the docs.
- Assistant rebuilt around guided conversations.
- My game submitted to IndieDB with a studio page, a logo, screenshots and recordings that did not exist on Friday.
- A driving CV written from scratch and an application sent.
- A long technical article finished. Fifteen posts wired into the site.
None of that was ambition. Every item on that list bought exactly one thing: ability to drive on Monday without a list running in the back of my head.
I do not think we talk about that honestly. Most stories about working hard are about wanting more.
This one was about wanting quiet. There is a specific weight in knowing that something you care about is going to sit untouched for a week, and the only way I know how to put it down is to leave it in a state where nothing is waiting on me.
Here is the part I did not expect. I am not tired the way I thought I would be. I am tired in the good way. The way you feel after finishing something, not after carrying it.
On Sunday I checked what was still outstanding and wrote myself one line:
Nothing requires you this week.
Fourteen months, and I had never once been able to say that.
The part I have been circling
Seventy hours behind a wheel funds the move out of a house I need to leave. It does not move me toward the work I actually want to do, and the maths on that is simple: every hour in the car is an hour not spent building.
So I am looking, properly. Developer, Python developer, IT support, and I am not closing the door on any adjacent path. I have no commercial title yet.
What I have is fourteen months of public proof: an application on the Microsoft Store, 331 automated tests, a Google AI certificate through SGH, INF.02, and a habit of writing down exactly what I broke every single week.
I will keep driving either way. I would just rather the two things stopped competing for the same evenings.
If you know a team that hires for what somebody can build rather than what a CV already says, I am right here.