Brent Simmons’ recent post, How to Be Wrong on the Internet, got me thinking about why I don’t write or share as much as I should.

Over a decade ago, I was able to backpack around Eastern China primarily because of three friends I met through blogging. Monsoons, nightclubs, falling-outs and food poisoning - it was a pretty cool adventure for a 20 year old.

I wasn’t a particularly great writer or artist. Nothing I ever published went beyond a small circle of readers I considered confidantes. But I put myself out there and things seemed to work out.

I stopped for lots of reasons, probably. If I’m being honest, I can’t really recall.

But somewhere along the way I started being overly self-critical, believing that anything I put out had to be correct and perfect.

I prefer the way Brent thinks about it:

I’m constantly wrong on the internet. Here’s how I think about it:

Blogging is, for me, part of the process of getting to the truth.

Everything is provisional — it’s what I think now, and I might change my mind in a year. Or in a day. Or in a minute, when somebody posts (or tweets) more or better information or has a solid argument.

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If you haven’t used it before, Trello is a web-based tool to organize the things from life to project collaboration. We use it at work to track sprint backlogs, I use it at home as a project planner and todo list. It’s pretty sweet, except for one thing…

Say you’ve got a brilliant idea for where to go on your next vacation. You’ve been choosing between destinations and planning your itinerary with your friend on a shared Trello board. Normally, you’d have to go to trello.com, open your vacation board, find the right list, click to add an item, and then type it out.

I started working on Tello App so that all you’d need to do is hit a keyboard shortcut, type “Mykonos, Greece”, and get back to your life. Small victories my friend.

The design’s still pretty early (I’d love your feedback), but I’ve already started scaffolding out the app. Native development is new to me though and Tello has a little bit of everything – communicating with a server API, parsing JSON, token security, saving data to coredata, and drawing some views.

I’m enjoying Swift, but not so much Cocoa yet. So far, this stack of seemingly simple things is being made complex by edge cases and inexperience. But I guess that’s how it always is.

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Umm… It’s been an eventful couple of months. I broke up with my girlfriend of 5+ years, I went from being a designer to a developer, and I learned how to be a slightly better human in the process.

I just wanted to make something truly great, damn the consequences. But living, and being haunted by, that kind of singular determination makes one harsh. Defining your personal worth solely by the quality of your work means that you’ll never be good enough.

A funny thing happens when you come up for air – looking back, the failures don’t actually matter. Maybe, I’m also hoping the same applies to relationships.

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Fit Report is a simple fitness visualization I made for myself that tracks my daily workout and nutrition activity and correlates that to how I feel.

The visualization attempts to app correlate mood, with whether I worked out and ate well that day. worked out, ate well and good mood are deliberately qualitative metrics which get redefined as I get fitter. A 5k run might be the workout of a lifetime for one person and a warm up for someone more experienced.

Over time, I’ve had to increase the frequency, intensity and variety of my workouts and get ever stricter about nutrition. This approach sees fitness more like a marathon than a sprint.

How it works

There’s far more detail on the github page, but here’s the gist:

The data for the Fit Report is recorded nightly using Reporter for iPhone. I choose to use Reporter because it’s the nicest, quickest way to answer simple questions on my phone and get JSON exported. The questions are set up like so:

Then a local shell script cleans things up and uploads the result, which is then processed by the Fit Report webapp to render the visualization.

(Writing shell scripts is the worst).

Purposeful Tracking

I’ve been working out for years now. In that time, I’ve fallen into my share of ruts – times of sloth or plateaus in my progress. But even looking back, I still don’t really know why.

Fit Report is tied to the hypothesis that how consistently I work out and eat well is strongly correlated to my mood and mental wellness. By being able to quickly identify these patterns, I’ve already been able to better understand the complex relationship between these three factors.

Translating time-series activity into visual patterns should also give me an earlier indication of when I’ve hit a fitness plateau. If I’m reporting a good activity streak but my mood or notes imply meh-fulness, I’m probably in a slump and should up my game or try something new.

Ultimately, the hope is that, by shining a light on my activity patterns, I’ll be able to tackle the root causes of defeat, instead of just the symptoms.

One size fits you

I think there’s a place for something between the worlds of passive wearable tech and hyper-accurate detailed manual tracking. Just like the endless ways to workout, everybody is going to have something that works best for them.

Fit Report is a purposefully simple and unrefined tool, because I built it for myself. Also, over-thinking things puts me in a bad mood.

Fit Report on github

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