One commit this week. It was an autopost — the Sunday morning script that drops the previous week’s update into the content folder and pushes it to the site. That is it. If you track my GitHub, you saw a single green square on the contribution graph and probably wondered if I was on holiday.
I was not on holiday. But I was not shipping either.
A Quiet Week Has Its Own Kind of Work
There is a version of build-in-public where every post is a sprint recap — features shipped, bugs squashed, version numbers climbing. I like those weeks. The AutoBrew run in early June, three releases in 48 hours, felt genuinely good to write about. But I would be lying if I said every week looked like that, and I think lying about the rhythm is one of the things that makes build-in-public feel hollow to the people reading it.
This week was a thinking week. I spent time inside the software architecture of two things I want to build next — not writing code, but drawing boxes and questioning assumptions. One of those is a feature direction for Sommelio that I kept putting off because I was not sure the data model I had sketched actually held up under real usage patterns. I pulled out a notebook, not an IDE, and worked through it properly. The answer was: the model needs one more layer of indirection, which means a migration I did not want to write but now know I have to. Better to find that now than two weeks after the TestFlight release.
The other thing I spent time on was the architecture of a new project I am not ready to talk about publicly yet. Early-stage thinking. A lot of it went nowhere. That is fine — that is what early-stage thinking is supposed to do.
The One Thing I Actually Shipped
The single commit that landed was the autopost for last week’s update. That post covered Sommelio reaching 95% and DokuAI appearing on the site for the first time. If you missed it, it is here.
The autopost mechanism itself is a small Astro script I wrote a while back. It takes the MDX file, drops it into the content collection, commits, and pushes. Nothing clever. It runs Sunday morning and means the site stays current even when I am heads-down elsewhere. Small pieces of automation like this matter when you work alone — there is no one to remind you to publish.
Honest Reflection
I am a little restless about the quiet week, to be direct. Not because I think the thinking was wasted — it was not — but because I know the contribution graph does not distinguish between “Marcel was being strategic” and “Marcel was watching television”. You have to take my word for it, and I am aware that is exactly the kind of thing every developer says.
What I can tell you is that next week I expect to be back in the code. The Sommelio data model question is answered. The migration is scoped. I know what I need to write. That is the real output of a week like this: the decision is made before the keyboard gets involved, which means when I do sit down, I am not making expensive architecture choices at the speed of typing.
If you are thinking about having a custom app built and you are wondering what you are actually paying for when a developer seems to be “just thinking” — that is a fair question, and it is one I try to answer honestly on the /services page.
The Sommelio TestFlight build is still open if you want to follow along: the /app/sommelio page has the current status.