WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON
The pilot kept scaling while I wasn't looking, which is the point. It survived a stolen phone, a flu, and two weeks of me barely touching it — the systems held, which told me more than any demo could. I built an ops layer that watches everything overnight and briefs me in the morning, stood up an always-on server at home, and pulled two decades of photos and footage into an archive I actually own. The body project got renamed Hexis and keeps ticking.
Most side projects are deliberately parked — attention is the scarce thing, and I'm done pretending otherwise. Valencia happened: La Tomatina, and a first night that took my phone and left me analog for a week. Strangely, one of the better weeks of my year. Reading less than I'd like. Writing more soon.
BUILDING
Redacted
Primary focus. The pilot is live and several times the size it was in July — a demand planner in it daily, specifications numbered past four hundred, a seventy-three-tool copilot that cites its sources, over three thousand two hundred automated tests. Two production incidents in August, both root-caused in hours and hardened. New-product forecasting by analogue matching and the first material-planning slices are in.
Hexis
Hexis, formerly Soma — a disposition acquired by practice. What began as a body operating system (six and a half years of Fitbit history freed, the Apple Watch, a WHOOP cracked over Bluetooth) is now the phone-side of my whole personal OS: a digital twin of the body with conversational capture, a Learn library of a hundred topics and a thousand concept cards with a reading loop, Mind and Life surfaces, and a bridge that lets me talk to the brain from the app. Sixty specifications in. The most ambitious thing I’m building.
The Always-On Server
The substrate everything else runs on. Twenty-five years of photographs and video live there on my own disks; the public demos are served from it on named subdomains; the pipelines run there on schedule; and a nightly offsite replica of the big client system’s data sits on it. Reachable from anywhere over a private mesh, exposed to no one — and watched by its own monitors.
Watchtower
The ops layer. A board of mine froze for three weeks while the job feeding it reported success every half hour — so the rule is now watch the data, not the job. Three tiers: monitors every twenty minutes, nightly verifiers that read the logs and judge what a dumb check can’t, weekly audits. Everything lands on one phone, and it alerts on the change, never on every failing run. Newest piece: share a link from my phone and get a verdict back on whether it’s worth adopting.
FlatSignal
Running. Good London flats go before the viewing — thousands of listings watched, deduped, scored with an explainable model, live at flatsignal.app with accounts, plans and instant alerts. The board froze for three weeks in August because the pipeline kept reporting success while publishing stale data; fixed with incremental reads, a loud failure and a freshness assertion. That incident is what created Watchtower.
Cockpit
Demoed to the team and in use under per-person logins. Sales intelligence for the day job, built on my own stack. A deliberately narrow browser extension arms you from any open record, and the engine is exposed as a gated service. It never sends anything — zero-send by design.
Sky Above
Free and live. Swiss Ephemeris charts, AI readings, a grounded interpreter, compatibility. The paywall came down and stayed down.
APCP
The commercialisation platform — closing the repo-to-revenue gap. Point it at a working repo and it wires the business around it: domain, email, payments, legal, analytics, accounting, human approval on every consequential step. Run one took FlatSignal from side project to revenue-wired in three days. It feeds the other projects rather than demanding a slot of its own.
God's Favourite
As and when the competitions run. ML coordinate prediction in visual data — EfficientNet-b0 regression with human gaze overlay. Won first entry.
LandSignal
Started as a conversation at a family birthday with a relative’s business partner: this is the problem, could software see it coming? I built it — land and planning signals, national repossession and planning-application coverage — took it back to him, and acted on the feedback. The pilot demo is live at land-intel.parambahia.com. The conversation continues; the build waits for it.
Venture Lab
The venture-research thread — parked at its first gate while the commercial conversation it belongs to plays out. Research, not a product yet.
Crash Derby Arena
Parked on purpose. My first game — the PS2 couch demolition derby I half-remembered, rebuilt from scratch. Sixteen banger cars in a dirt bowl, custom crash physics, personality bots, comic-book hits. Playable in five days, then fourteen waves deep: a full county-fair economy, an aggression layer, split-screen. Online is spiked and waiting.
Certa
Parked. Crossed from polished demo to working software in one overnight run — real accounts, per-organisation isolation, document vault, AI-read certificate ingestion behind human review. Demo still live.
Kallos
Parked, and still live. What the Ancient Greeks would have said about your face. One tweet about physiognomy, one day of building — four classical temperaments, a statue twin, the Bald Verdict. Honest that it’s play, not science.
Surf Trip Finder
Parked, and the group chat still uses it. Weekend surf verdicts for North Devon, Sydney, and New York, recalibrated to the actual crew: wave size gates the whole score, so a glassy ankle-high day can never read as good.
Inner Axis
Parked, live at inneraxis.ai — the full-circle return of the worldview-oracle GPT that first showed me what AI could do. Answer hard questions, get a star chart of the philosophical traditions your views resemble. Resemblance, not diagnosis.
Flight Finder
Parked, still running. The deal-alert newsletter rebuilt as personal infrastructure — fares verified daily against live prices, scored against benchmarks learned from its own history, red-eye warnings included. Costs nothing to run.
Anamnesis
Parked. The unforgetting — years of handwritten journals made into a living, local-only record that reflects back through whichever lens I choose. Private by design; no findings published.
Mercurius
Wound down on evidence. Rebuilt around honest walk-forward backtests; five strategies tested, every one negative after real costs. The apparatus and the method carry forward. Full case file at /work/mercurius.
And endless more ideas in the queue. The discipline is not starting everything — it’s channelling energy into the things with the highest leverage. Do less, but do it completely.
READING
The Will to Change— bell hooks
The Secret Teachings of All Ages— Manly P. Hall
The Elegant Universe— Brian Greene
- My Secret Garden
- Greenlights — Matthew McConaughey
- Letters from Julius Caesar
- Letters from George Patton
- Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
THINKING
Congruence over comfort. The things that feel right are the things that compound. The things that feel easy are usually the things that decay.
Back from the road trip with a clearer head. Ten days in motion — different countries, different speeds, different mirrors. The kind of reset you can't manufacture at home.
Now it's heads down. The pilot is approaching and the work demands focus. Not scattered energy — directed energy. One thing at a time, done properly, stacked on the last one.
Still practising detachment from outcomes. The work is the work. Results are a trailing indicator of the habits you set months ago. Trust the process. Stay in the room.
Increasingly comfortable with ambiguity. Not everything needs to resolve. Not every question needs an answer today. Hold the tension, keep moving, let the clarity arrive on its own schedule.