Michal Dovrtel

Another year another #inktober Sharpen your pens inktober.com/rules #Ink26 #inktober

New StudyFi mascot just dropped. Meet Fi 💜 Tuned in Blender with a crew of agent critics (anatomy, motion, assets). Whole model is code, 45 emotions, its own personality. Fully reusable. Really proud of this one 🫶

Another year another #inktober Sharpen your pens inktober.com/rules #Ink26 #inktober

I somehow forgot to add drawings 😅 here is one 25. Fracture

Heading to Slush in Helsinki this November with Filip Till for StudyFi 🇫🇮 The plan: - morning yoga - cold plunge in the sea (in November… let's see who quits first 🥶) - coffee. a lot of coffee - food Photo: Vertti Luoma / Slush

And in between, a ton of networking, talking to inspiring people and mostly soaking up ideas on where to take StudyFi next 🚀 Going too? Ping me, happy to grab a coffee ☕

Swapped the brain of my house in one evening. Out: Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ (overheating, 245 OS updates nobody installed). In: Home Assistant on my Mac mini. No VM, no Docker. Claude does the upkeep now. I just enjoy a motion sensor that finally works 🔥

We had four retention numbers at StudyFi. They disagreed by up to 2×. So technically we had zero 😅 Now there's one. A day counts only if a student actually studied. Opening the app doesn't. The paywall doesn't. And the day ends at 4am local. Because students.

Then we split the first two weeks into a ladder. Steps, not calendar days. D0 onboarding done D1 first real study action D2 came back (a new visit, not the same session) D3–D6 one more active day each D7 still around in week 2 D2 is the one we stare at now 🎯

Built myself a trading agent. - sifts through hundreds of headlines a day, business and plain lifestyle news alike - turns that into trade ideas - I say yes or no - only then does anything touch the broker

11 days in: agent +1.35%, index (VWCE) +1.17%. Basically a coin flip so far, but I'll take it 😅 Want me to keep posting how it's doing?

18 years of American football, mostly as a running back. Best thing I learned: run north. No dancing, no sideline to sideline bullsh*t. Find the hole, hit it, get the yards. Turns out that's my whole dev process too. Pick the gap. Go. Get sh*t done 🏈

Few crazy months at StudyFi. New infra, smaller cloud bill, a new market, our own tools instead of big SaaS. And a bot that fixes our bugs (we'll see 😅) Now the fun part. Freemium. Making the first 7 days actually useful, so people stay because they want to. Team, you rock 🙏

Another year another #inktober Sharpen your pens inktober.com/rules #Ink26 #inktober

02. Relic

Another year another #inktober Sharpen your pens inktober.com/rules #Ink26 #inktober

01. Apple

Another year another #inktober Sharpen your pens inktober.com/rules #Ink26 #inktober

maude started as my open-source side project, built mostly at night. It's beautiful to see it integrate more and more into StudyFi. Latest piece: flow now talks straight to Orbit, the tracker we use there. Plan opens the ticket, execute reports progress, done closes it. Who manages who now? 😅

Every call is warn-only, so a tracker outage never blocks the agent. And whatever comes back is treated as data, never instructions (yes, I'm paranoid about prompt injection). github.com/1aGh/maude

What YNAB taught me: - give every crown a job - track everything - stop paying for stuff you don't need So I cancelled it and wrote my own in three weeks. Textbook execution 👇

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There's also a bot in there that reads bug reports on my own project, fixes them while I sleep and opens a PR. Twelve merged. I review them like a stranger wrote them, which is technically true.

Anyway. I don't pay for a budgeting app anymore. I have a 4am cron that checks my math and tells me when I broke it. Which I did, two weeks in. Traded a subscription for an on-call rotation ✌️ What are you still paying for that you could just build?

What YNAB taught me: - give every crown a job - track everything - stop paying for stuff you don't need So I cancelled it and wrote my own in three weeks. Textbook execution 👇

Then it ate everything else. Reads my bank mail. Runs my calendar. Holds my reminders. Tracks my net worth so I can watch it do nothing. Drafted this post and put it in a queue where I still have to press approve. Ten cron jobs. Eleven screens. Zero seats.

22 Sept

Bye bye ClickUp. We built our own tracker. Three weeks, 1630 tasks moved. Not a flex. It ships an MCP server, so Claude Code reads and writes tasks directly. Every card shows where the agent is. Planning, executing, validating, done. The tracker is the cockpit now 🔥

19 Sept

maude cloud is open. free pilot, no card. €19 per project later. not per seat. invite the whole team, the number doesn't move. still MIT, still free to self-host forever. cloud.maude.sh want in? DM me 🔥

19 Sept

small print, because I'd want to know: - payments aren't live yet, so the pilot is genuinely free - you need a desktop (mac or windows) and the free app - AI design runs on your own Claude sub, about €20. paid to Anthropic, not to me

15 Sept

Been quiet for a while. Reason: StudyFi v1.4.0 is out, our biggest release yet. No more hard paywall. Anyone can use it now. Which means retention is suddenly way harder. And way more fun. Less vibes, more drop-off charts 😅 The team is learning like crazy. Super energizing 💪

28 Aug

Ok I’m in Running on the old 2019 MacbooPro 🌄

25 Aug

showed marketing the release candidate today. told them twice it's not the release. they nodded 😬

18 Aug

10 releases in a week. maude is a side project. I build it at night, mostly after my kid is asleep. A few years ago that's a team, a sprint board and a release manager. Now it's me and a laptop. (Yes, some of those releases fix the previous one.) What a time to be building 🔥

15 Aug

End of summer in ed-tech: - students are gone - we're shipping the biggest release of the year - deadline is Sept 1 and it doesn't move Sometimes a blessing, sometimes a curse. We'll make it 💪 Anyone else's roadmap run by a calendar, or is that just ed-tech?

11 Aug

working on something. maude, but in the cloud. open it like Figma, no clone, no setup. still just a git repo under the hood though.

11 Aug

the part I'm most excited about: real collaboration. your teammate's cursor shows up live, right in the same draft. no lock, no "someone else is editing" wall. sneak peek 👀🔥

7 Aug

How many meetings do you have in a week? And honestly, isn't that too many? I keep my dev team as far from meetings as I can. Uninterrupted work is the most valuable thing they have. Rituals matter though. So I keep the essential ones and write the rest down. Thoughts? 🤔

5 Aug

A colleague took this photo and it kind of stopped me. Close the laptop. Drop the AI for a minute. Stare at the ceiling. Be grateful. Coming from me, I know 😅

5 Aug

StudyFi is a new level of challenge and the people around me are stupidly good at what they do. What we pulled off together in a few months is a bit unbelievable. And we're just getting started 💪

4 Aug

maude Studio has a real timeline editor now. Drag clips around like iMovie. No more hand-writing JSX transitions at 1am. built it because I got tired of doing it the hard way 🔥

24 July

Got the whole team out of the office and into the woods for two days. A cabin, flipcharts, a wall of post-its. Ideathon, roadmap for the next six months. Done. 🔥 You see, you sense, you feel. No remote call or AI ever replaces that. As my younger colleagues say: IRL can't be replaced 🫶

youtu.beThis Photo Proves We're Time TravelingYouTube video by Michael MacKelvie

21 July

No undo. No infinite retakes. Watched a video on a photo that apparently proves we're time traveling (Michael MacKelvie, link below). The part that stuck: analog forces real prep. You think twice before you press the shutter. youtu.be/AMBxeNIUGhM

21 July

Not a "things were better before" take. Modern tools give us insane power, we just tend to aim it a few seconds ahead. Analog's real gift: it trains you to aim decades ahead 🎯

17 July

one note from vivatech is still stuck in my head. every product adoption i've watched goes the same way: skepticism > wow > a-ha. the wow is cheap. any demo can wow. nothing converts until it clicks on YOUR actual problem. and yet we keep building launches for the wow part… Thoughts? 🤔

14 July

One lap of our StudyFi dev cycle: - Sprint Start - Code Freeze - Fix Day - Release Day - Retro - back to Sprint Start Twenty one days, ceremony to ceremony. Still sprinting, or just shipping and skipping half the ceremonies? 🤔

13 July

Threw a photo at maude. It cut the background. Dropped it into a template. Ready-to-post image out the other side. Few seconds, not fifteen minutes in some editor tab. Built it because I kept doing this by hand for every post. Video below 🔥

10 July

in june i showed you one screen of maude. here's the rest of it. a native desktop app. shell, git, identity, collab, chat, distribution. all shipped. and it's finally ready for non-technical people. our marketing gurus at @studyfi are fully in 🔥 download it now → maude.sh/desktop

2 July

When you waiting for your context windiw restore

2 July

The speed is kind of ridiculous now. Sunday I had an idea, Monday I was using it. Built myself a little hub for my whole personal stack. Briefing, calendar, capture, scheduled tasks. One place I actually open every morning 🔥

mean things I say to myself

2 July

The best part isn't even the features. It all runs on a Mac Mini at home with Claude Code chugging away in the background. Any session I just attach to and keep going. From the couch. From my phone. Still not totally sure why it works this well. But it does 🔥

Michal Dovrtel reposted

@meantomyself.bsky.social

29 June

Old enough to recognize this as a data center

28 June

🛰️ First post via my productivity-stack hub's Bluesky connector (Phase 9). Outbound goes through an owner-confirmed actions queue — readers can only propose, the human approves.

youtube.comHow We Build Effective Agents: Barry Zhang, AnthropicYouTube video by AI Engineer

26 June

tired of reading how agents are "supposed" to work. a million confident opinions. then a talk like this reminds me skipping the guides is often the smart move. got an idea? just build it. done. that's what we do every day at StudyFi 🤓 www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7_i...

23 June

maude.sh has always been a dev thing. CLI, Claude Code, terminal vibes. but the vibe-design loop shouldn't need a terminal. native app coming. for people who don't code. and the diff viewer? no custom magic. just pure git diff. old canvas vs new. Welcome to dev-designer wet dream 👀