What I Built This Week

Big week — 35 projects touched, 79 commits across 26 sessions, and a clear gravitational centre: getting a sports history YouTube channel to the edge of launch. Everything else orbited that, or ran in parallel while the render queue was grinding.

sleep-sports: 21 commits and a deliberate one-week hold

The core idea here is a YouTube channel that publishes decade-by-decade sports history videos on a Friday drip — automated, narrated, composited. This week was about getting the first three videos from "technically working" to "actually good enough to ship." That meant four days of focused sessions (Monday through Thursday), three passes through an editorial gate on the two-thousands video before it got a PASS verdict, and a discovered bug where decade videos were only reading partial era data rather than the whole window. That last fix earned a cheeky commit message: "decade videos read the WHOLE decade (rickleberry ruling)."

The most interesting moment was the decision to hold the launch by a week. After all the gate passes, I ran the slot math on Friday drip scheduling and found enough uncertainty in the timing logic that I wanted a testable buffer. A findings doc captures the reasoning. The channel art got generated, the auth and upload tooling is wired, the queue runner and scheduler are in place — everything is loaded and pointed at the runway. It's just not off the ground yet. Deliberately.

gif-forge: a GIF maker that got a phone site

This started as a template-driven GIF tool for inside jokes — the kind of thing where you have a running bit with people you talk to and you want a one-click way to produce it. Nine commits, no active sessions logged, which means this one ran largely on momentum from prior work plus some autonomous tooling. The notable additions this week: a classics library (100 well-known image meme templates), a mobile-friendly site interface, pinned groups, and a "variants" feature where multiple backdrops can share one caption string. The site is live behind auth.

The design constraint that shaped the phone site was treating it as a tool you'd actually open mid-conversation — so the flow is template picker, live preview, one-click send. There's also something the commit message calls "the embarrassing bit" for the animated template work on mobile, which I'll leave as an exercise for whoever ends up using it.

ai-resume: a resume that talks back

The setup: I'm building a version of a resume that isn't a PDF. It's a served page with a live MCP playground where a recruiter or hiring manager can literally ask questions and get answers from a running server. The commit history for this one is dense — eleven commits on July 28th alone — and the scope kept expanding: a visual landing page, a 155-day activity timeline rendered as a 7-track SVG, a dolphin-pod footage loop rendered inline via MCP image block, and a system map.

The honest-repo-count fix mid-session is worth noting: early in the build the resume was inflating project numbers, and I caught it and corrected it explicitly. That kind of thing matters when the whole point is that the resume is the demo. The site is live at the apex domain, serving the AI-native resume as the default experience.

agentic-ai: one afternoon, a full consultancy blueprint

This one came from a different angle than usual. Instead of building something to ship, I wanted to understand whether running an AI consultancy solo was actually viable, and what the architecture would look like at different scales. The session on July 31st went from research into solo AI consulting (rates, delivery models, legal basics) all the way through to org structure benchmarks at 100, 1,000, and 10,000 people, with a four-layer tech stack and an agent staffing model layered in between. The in-house password manager scaffold was a tangent that came from the "what can agents handle for your EA" thread — it's more of a proof-of-concept than something running.

Six commits from a single session, all docs, all merged same day. The interesting design choice was structuring this as a living research repo with a bibliography and changelog rather than a one-off document. If I come back to it, the decisions and alternatives file is where I'd start.

The big spike is Tuesday July 27th, which is when the sleep-sports launch kit came together — channel setup, queue runner, scheduler, three video scripts drafted and gated, all in one long session. Wednesday carried the momentum with gif-forge's classics library and the ai-resume build. Things leveled off Thursday and Friday but never went quiet. The pattern this week was one intense midweek surge followed by steady cleanup and parallel builds on either side.

sleep-sports dominated the commit share as expected, but the spread across 35 projects is what's actually interesting — a lot of small things got a nudge this week alongside the main push. The food tracker got its presets and a homescreen icon. The dive channel's Shorts got a loop-length floor and a fail-closed render gate after the last batch underperformed. Brothers-photos shipped two gated year-by-year face sites. None of those were headline projects, but they all got done.

The launch hold on sleep-sports is the honest confession: everything was ready and I still waited. Next week is the actual first Friday drip. — rickleberry