DEV Community: Sub Engel

We put the Dataview starter queries out free

Sub Engel — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 21:48:36 +0000

When we shipped Dev Second Brain, the part that had to earn trust first was the Dataview layer, the queries that pull decisions, incidents, PR reviews, and open tasks into a dashboard. A pretty vault shell without working queries is just folders.

So we made a decision: put the Dataview starter queries out free.

It's a small pack of 10 queries for a developer vault. You drop them into Obsidian (with the free Dataview plugin), point them at your own notes, and see whether the pattern fits how you work. No vault purchase required. If a query doesn't match your folder names, you edit one line and try again.

Why it matters: you should feel the queries work in your files before you buy a full template. We'd rather someone walk away after five minutes with the free pack than buy something they can't use.

The free pack is on Gumroad: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/dzanl

If you want the whole vault (daily notes, ADRs, incidents, weekly reviews, dashboards), Dev Second Brain is $19: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/uoybkd

New templates and the occasional workflow note: https://forge.engelailabs.com

Did I forget something? A short about the to-dos that sink into old daily notes, and the Dataview query that finds them

Sub Engel — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 20:20:57 +0000

Rozz Queries is a new three-part set of Rozz shorts, each one built around a single query from our free Dataview pack. Episode 1 is about the to-do you wrote in a daily note last week that's now buried a few notes back.

Watch it on X, Instagram, or TikTok.

The query on Rozz's monitor is number 2 in the pack, "Unfinished tasks from the last 14 days of daily notes". This is the whole thing:

TASK
FROM "Daily"
WHERE !completed AND status != "-" AND text != "" AND file.day >= date(today) - dur(14 days)
GROUP BY file.link
SORT file.day DESC

It lists every to-do you wrote in a daily note in the last two weeks and never ticked off, grouped by day, newest day first.

Two small details do most of the work. Dataview counts only [x] as completed, so !completed on its own would also show tasks you cancelled with [-]. The status != "-" part leaves those out. And text != "" skips the empty checkboxes a daily template leaves behind when you don't fill them in.

The only thing it expects is daily notes named by date, like 2026-09-27.md, in a folder called Daily. Dataview reads the date from the file name. If your folder has another name, change the text after FROM.

The pack has ten queries like this in one note: open tasks across the vault, orphan notes, a decision log, stale projects, incident follow-ups, a tech debt register and a few more. Each one says what it shows and which fields it needs. You need Obsidian and the free Dataview plugin.

Episode 2 is about incident follow-ups that nobody did.

Dataview Starter Queries is free on Gumroad (pay what you want, $0 is fine): https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/dzanl

More of what we make: https://engelailabs.com

Home: the season finale of our Rozz shorts, and the one dashboard that ties the vault together

Sub Engel — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Episode 6 is the Season 5 finale. The first five episodes each took one note: a decision, an incident, a daily note, a PR review, a weekly review. This one is about where they all end up. Rozz opens one page and everything from the season is there.

Watch it on X, Instagram, or TikTok.

The page on Rozz's screen is the real Home dashboard from Dev Second Brain, the Obsidian vault template for developers. You don't fill it in. Each section is a Dataview query over the notes you already write:

Today shows today's daily note. If it isn't there yet, the dashboard tells you to press Alt+D to open it.
Open loops lists unchecked tasks from daily notes, projects, weekly reviews and the inbox, most recently edited first. Cancelled tasks are left out.
Open incidents is a table of incidents that aren't resolved yet, with severity, service, status and date.
Recent decisions shows your last five ADRs, with status, project and date.
Active projects lists each active project with its repo, due date and how many open tasks it has.
Recent PR learnings shows your last five PR review notes, with your role and the repo.
Inbox holds quick captures waiting to be sorted.
Orphans lists notes nothing links to, so you can link them somewhere or delete them.

At the bottom it links the Decisions, Incidents and Weekly Rollup dashboards. The vault ships with example notes so the dashboards aren't empty on day one, and Home lists them so you can delete them when you're ready.

If you missed the earlier episodes, here's the season:

Why did we do this?: decision notes (ADRs)
It broke again: incident notes
Standup amnesia: daily notes
The review that taught me something: PR review notes
Performance review season: weekly reviews
Home: this one

You need Obsidian (free) plus the free Templater and Dataview plugins. It's all plain Markdown files on your own disk.

Thanks for watching Season 5.

Dev Second Brain is $19 on Gumroad, one person per copy, personal and commercial use allowed, no resale or redistribution. Copyright (c) 2026 Engel Ziese (Engel AI Lab). All rights reserved: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/uoybkd?utm_source=rozz&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=s5e06

More of what we make: https://engelailabs.com

Templates: https://forge.engelailabs.com

Performance review season: a short about the self-review you can't remember writing material for, and the weekly note I use now

Sub Engel — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 22:29:02 +0000

Episode 5 of our Rozz shorts is about the self-review. Rozz's is due Friday, and the hard part is remembering what you actually did months ago. The fix isn't a better memory. It's a short note at the end of each week.

Watch it on X or Instagram.

The note on Rozz's screen is a real one from Dev Second Brain, the Obsidian vault template for developers. It's the example weekly review that comes with it, "Week 2026-W39".

The top half is the only part you write by hand. There are four sections: Wins, Open loops, What I'd do differently, and Next week's focus. In the example, a win is "Turned the duplicate-email incident into a real fix: ADR-0001 accepted and first PR up within a day." One open loop is still waiting on IT. What I'd do differently is "Should have asked 'is this handler idempotent?' when reviewing the PDF receipt PR." The focus is one line, so if everything else slips, you know what should still happen.

The bottom half fills itself in. When you make the note with Templater, it works out the week's dates, and Dataview lists what happened that week:

Decisions made this week, from your ADR notes.
Incidents this week, with severity, status and cause.
PR reviews this week, with your role and the repo.
Tasks completed in daily notes.

It also embeds the Shipped and Learned sections from each daily note that week, so you're picking wins from a list instead of a blank page.

A Weekly Rollup dashboard puts every week side by side: each week's focus and how many open loops are left, decisions, incidents and PR reviews per week, and daily notes and tasks done per week. When review season comes, that's most of the self-review already sorted by week.

You need Obsidian (free) plus the free Templater and Dataview plugins. It's all plain Markdown files on your own disk.

Episode 6, "Home", is the finale.

Dev Second Brain is $19 on Gumroad, one person per copy, personal and commercial use allowed: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/uoybkd

More of what we make: https://engelailabs.com

The review that taught me something: a short about the PR lesson you forget by next month, and the note I keep now

Sub Engel — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 18:43:00 +0000

Episode 4 of our Rozz shorts is about code review. Rozz is reading a PR and thinks "wait, I've seen this bug." Every review teaches you something, but unless you write it down, you learn it again next time.

The note on Rozz's screen is a real one from Dev Second Brain, the Obsidian vault template for developers. It's one of the example PR review notes that come with it: "payments-api 433 Replace hand-rolled retry loop". The PR Review template has five sections: What it changes, What I learned, Patterns to reuse, Patterns to avoid, Comments worth remembering. A role field says whether you were the reviewer or the author getting the feedback.

In the example, the PR swaps a custom for attempt in range(5) retry loop for the shared retry helper. What I learned has the bug: the old loop retried on 400s too, so one malformed request was sent 5 times and logged 5 errors. Patterns to reuse notes that the retry test uses a fake clock instead of sleep. Patterns to avoid is the old code returning None after the last retry instead of re-raising.

Reviews don't stay buried in a folder. Dataview pulls them back up in three places:

Recent PR learnings on the Home dashboard: your last five reviews, with role, repo and date.
PR reviews this week in the Weekly Review template, so they're part of your weekly look back.
PR reviews on each Project note, listing every review linked to that project.

You need Obsidian (free) plus the free Templater and Dataview plugins. It's all plain Markdown files on your own disk.

Episode 5, "Performance review season", is next.

Dev Second Brain is $19 on Gumroad, one person per copy, personal and commercial use allowed: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/uoybkd

More of what we make: https://engelailabs.com

Standup amnesia: a short about forgetting what you did yesterday, and the daily note I use now

Sub Engel — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 18:49:37 +0000

Episode 3 of our Rozz shorts is about standup. Someone asks "what did you do yesterday?" and your mind goes blank, even though you were busy all day.

The note on Rozz's screen is a real one from Dev Second Brain, the Obsidian vault template for developers. It's one of the example daily notes that come with it, and it has four sections: Plan, Shipped, Blocked, Learned. That's most of a standup answer already written.

In the example, Plan has the day's checkboxes (unblock CI, review a retry PR). Shipped links straight to the incident note and the PR review from that day. Blocked says what's needed and who was asked. Learned is one line: retrying on a 400 turns one bad request into five error logs.

Two parts of the Daily template do the remembering for you:

Created today: a Dataview list of every note in the vault dated that day, like incidents, reviews and decisions, so you don't have to list them yourself.
Still open from earlier days: unchecked tasks from older daily notes stay on this list until you finish them, so yesterday's leftovers don't vanish.

Each daily note also links back to the day before and forward to the next, so "what did I do yesterday?" is one click.

You need Obsidian (free) plus the free Templater and Dataview plugins. It's all plain Markdown files on your own disk.

Episode 4, "The review that taught me something", is next.

Dev Second Brain is $19 on Gumroad, one person per copy, personal and commercial use allowed: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/uoybkd

More of what we make: https://engelailabs.com

It broke again: a short about the same bug coming back, and the incident note I write now

Sub Engel — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 17:42:28 +0000

Episode 2 of our Rozz shorts is about a bug that comes back. Customers got three payment emails for one invoice. Rozz opens the Incidents dashboard, then the incident note, and works through it: symptom, root cause, fix, prevention.

The note on Rozz's screen is a real one from Dev Second Brain, the Obsidian vault template for developers. It's one of the example incident notes that comes with it: "Duplicate payment emails after deploy". A new step made a webhook handler slower than the provider's timeout. The provider retried, the handler wasn't idempotent, and each retry sent another email.

The Incident template has the same four parts the episode walks through:

Symptom: what users, alerts or logs actually showed, with room to paste the log lines
Root cause: the real cause, not just what set it off. Keep asking "why did that happen?"
Fix: what changed, and the PR or commit
Prevention: checkboxes for the test or alert that would have caught it

It asks you for a severity when you create it, files the note under 40 Incidents/ with the date in the name, and tracks status as open, mitigated, then resolved.

The Incidents dashboard (Dataview) is where "it broke again" gets easier. It lists incidents that aren't resolved yet, every unchecked Prevention item, and a log grouped by cause and by service. If the same service keeps coming up, you'll see it there. Prevention work you never got to also stays on the list until you check it off.

You need Obsidian (free) plus the free Templater and Dataview plugins. It's all plain Markdown files on your own disk.

Episode 3, "Standup amnesia", goes up tomorrow.

Dev Second Brain is $19 on Gumroad, one person per copy, personal and commercial use allowed: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/uoybkd

More of what we make: https://engelailabs.com

Why did we do this? A short about losing context, and the vault I use for it

Sub Engel — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 17:40:36 +0000

We made a short with Rozz about a feeling every developer knows: you open old code, or an old decision, and nobody remembers why it's like that. Including you.

That's the problem Dev Second Brain is for. It's an Obsidian vault template for developers: one place for what you shipped, why you decided it, what broke and how you fixed it.

What's in it:

Six Templater templates: Daily note, Project, Decision record (ADR, auto-numbered), Incident, PR review, Weekly review
Four Dataview dashboards: Home, Decisions, Incidents, Weekly Rollup
A few clearly marked example notes so the dashboards aren't empty on first open. Delete them whenever you want.

You need Obsidian (free) and two free community plugins, Templater and Dataview. The README walks you through a five-minute setup. Everything is plain Markdown files on your own disk.

The "why did we do this?" moment is what the decision records are for. Write down the options and the reason when you choose, and the Decisions dashboard brings it back when someone asks months later.

Episode 2, "It broke again", goes up tomorrow.

Dev Second Brain is $19 on Gumroad, one person per copy, personal and commercial use allowed: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/uoybkd

More of what we make: https://engelailabs.com

ghostwalk: an ofrenda for the forgotten files in your git repo

Sub Engel — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 16:23:47 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine

What I Built

Every old repo has ghosts. Files nobody has opened in years. Branches someone started and walked away from. TODO and FIXME notes from people who left the team long ago.

ghostwalk is a small Python CLI that finds them. It walks a git repo and lists:

files nobody has touched in N days
abandoned branches
TODO/FIXME notes, with who left them (via git blame)

Then a small open-weight model running on your own CPU writes a one-line, Día de los Muertos style epitaph for each ghost. You can save the whole thing as ofrenda.md, a little altar for the code your team left behind.

I took the theme literally: honor the past of a codebase, and the people whose names are still in its history.

Demo

A real terminal recording (about 23 s): python ghostwalk.py records --days 365 --max 6 --out ofrenda.md finds 6 file ghosts, the local Qwen model writes their epitaphs in 2.9 s on CPU, and it saves ofrenda.md. Like the run below, the demo only shows file ghosts; the branch and TODO detectors are covered by tests.

Here's a real run on the public repo kennethreitz/records, on an 8-core CPU:

🕯  ghostwalk: 6 ghosts found in /tmp/records

👻 [file] .gitignore (untouched 4214 days, last by Kenneth Reitz)
   🌼 .gitignore, untouched 4214 days, last by Kenneth Reitz.
👻 [file] MANIFEST.in (untouched 3918 days, last by Kenneth Reitz)
   🌼 The file remains untouched 3918 days, a testament to its preservation.
👻 [file] tests/__init__.py (untouched 3914 days, last by Harold Cooper)
   🌼 `Unwritten Code: The Untouched File of Harold Cooper, 3914 days old.`
👻 [file] LICENSE (untouched 3348 days, last by Waldir Pimenta)
   🌼 `LICENSE` remains unchanged since Waldir Pimenta's last use, a reminder of forgotten knowledge.
👻 [file] tests/test_records.py (untouched 3179 days, last by Joakim Uddholm)
   🌼 This file is no longer needed, but Joakim Uddholm's touch made it worth remembering.
👻 [file] .travis.yml (untouched 3121 days, last by Jan Vlcinsky)
   🌼 Untouched, untouched, it remains.

Epitaphs written in 2.8s on CPU. No cloud, no API key, $0.
Ofrenda saved to /tmp/ofrenda.md

That run only turned up file ghosts. The branch and TODO detectors didn't find anything there, but each one has its own unit test (test_abandoned_branch and test_orphan_todo_blamed, which also checks the TODO gets blamed on the right author).

I'm leaving that output as-is, including the weak epitaphs. More on that below.

Code

https://gitlab.com/engelstands-hue/ghostwalk

MIT licensed. 5 tests pass in CI: latest test job.

To try it:

pip install -r requirements.txt --extra-index-url https://abetlen.github.io/llama-cpp-python/whl/cpu
curl -L -o models/qwen2.5-0.5b-instruct-q4_k_m.gguf https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct-GGUF/resolve/main/qwen2.5-0.5b-instruct-q4_k_m.gguf
python ghostwalk.py path/to/repo --days 365 --out ofrenda.md

--days defaults to 180; I used 365 above. Other flags:

--no-ai lists the ghosts without running the model
--max caps how many ghosts you get (default 12)
--out ofrenda.md saves the ofrenda
--model <path to .gguf> swaps the model (default is the Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct Q4 GGUF above)

How I Built It

Model: Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct (Apache-2.0), as a Q4_K_M GGUF file, about 490 MB.
Inference: llama.cpp through llama-cpp-python 0.3.36, on CPU. No GPU needed.
Everything else: plain git. Last-touched dates come from git history, abandoned branches from the branch list, and TODO/FIXME authors from git blame.

The git part finds the facts. The model only gets one job: turn each fact into a short epitaph. After the one-time model download, it needs no API key and no network.

Honest limits: the 0.5B model is fast, but it sometimes just restates the facts instead of writing something nice. "Untouched, untouched, it remains." is a real example. A bigger GGUF writes better epitaphs, just more slowly. Since it's an open model, swapping one in is one flag:

python ghostwalk.py path/to/repo --model models/your-bigger-model.gguf

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

A repo's history is a team's private memory: who left, and what they never finished. That's not something I'd want to ship off to a cloud API just to get a joke epitaph.

Because ghostwalk runs an open-weight model locally:

the history never leaves your machine
it works offline
each run costs nothing
you're not stuck with my model choice. Since the model is open, you can point --model at a bigger or fine-tuned one

A closed API would have meant sending names and commit history to someone else's server, needing a key, and paying per run, for a tool whose whole point is a little Halloween fun with your own repo.

The Spirit of It

What got me wasn't the epitaphs, it was the names. Real people wrote those files years ago, and the repo still remembers them. ghostwalk just lights a candle for them.

License: MIT. Built by Engel AI Labs.

I made a free Windows board for all my AI account limits

Sub Engel — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 16:20:00 +0000

I pay for more AI tools than I'd like to admit, and a few of them have more than one account. Every week the same thing happened: one account would reset with half its usage never touched, while I was burning through another one that still had days left.

So I made a small free Windows app for it, Engel Usage Meters.

What it does

You add every account you have. Several accounts for the same tool is fine, each one gets its own row.

For each account you can type in two things: how much is still left (as a percent) and how many days until it resets. Hit save and it goes on the board.

The board sorts itself:

Accounts that reset within 3 days and still have at least 20% left go on top, under "Finish these first".
Everything else comes after, soonest reset first.

The header gives you the totals: how many accounts, how many have usage set, and how many to use before they reset.

It can read some of them for you

On Windows, after you sign in or hit Refresh, it reads your usage on its own for Codex / ChatGPT CLI, Cursor and Grok Bot, so you don't have to type anything for those. Everything else you fill in by hand for now.

Here's a short clip of it reading usage on a real Windows run:

Get it

It's a free download here: Engel Usage Meters

It's part of what we're building at Engel AI Labs. If you juggle a pile of AI seats too, I'd like to hear how you keep track of them.

slothnotes: let a tiny local model read your notes so you don't have to

Sub Engel — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 14:43:12 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 3: Slow and Steady.

What I Built

I have a folder full of notes I never reread. Standups. A grocery list. An email to my landlord. Book club plans.

slothnotes is a small Python CLI that reads that folder for me. You point it at a folder of .md or .txt files. It prints one summary line per note. If you want, it also writes a digest.md you can skim in about ten seconds.

It runs a small open-weight model (Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct, Q4_K_M GGUF, about 490 MB) on the CPU through llama.cpp. After the model download, it needs no API key and no network.

The effort it saves is the boring part: opening every file to remember what was in it. One command does that.

Demo

This is a real run on four sample notes: standup, groceries, landlord, book club. On an 8-core CPU with no GPU, it summarized all four in about 3 seconds.

One honest limit: the tiny model got a grocery detail wrong. It listed "half a loaf of bread" when the note actually says to skip bread. A bigger GGUF should be more accurate, but it will be slower. For a quick skim it's fine. For anything that matters, read the note.

Code

https://gitlab.com/engelstands-hue/slothnotes

MIT licensed. It has a README, three pytest tests that run without the model, and a GitLab CI job.

How I Built It

Python and llama-cpp-python, running on the CPU.
Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct (Apache-2.0) as a quantized GGUF.
One prompt per note, one line back, then an optional markdown digest.
--model takes any GGUF, so you can swap models without touching code.

To try it:

pip install llama-cpp-python --extra-index-url https://abetlen.github.io/llama-cpp-python/whl/cpu
curl -L -o models/qwen2.5-0.5b-instruct-q4_k_m.gguf https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct-GGUF/resolve/main/qwen2.5-0.5b-instruct-q4_k_m.gguf
python slothnotes.py demo_notes --out digest.md

Why Open Innovation Matters Here

Notes are personal. Standups, landlord emails, grocery lists. Because slothnotes runs an open-weight model locally, none of that leaves the machine. It works offline, and each run costs nothing. Since the model is open, you can swap in a bigger or fine-tuned one with a single flag.

A closed API would mean an account, a key, a bill, and sending my notes to someone else's server. For a tool whose whole point is being lazy, that's too much setup.

Prize Categories

None. This entry doesn't use partner technology.

More of what I build: https://engelailabs.com

Dev Second Brain: the Obsidian vault I use for daily notes, ADRs, incidents and PR reviews

Sub Engel — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:04:06 +0000

Most of what I learn at work ends up scattered: a decision explained in a Slack thread, an incident fix in a terminal history, a good PR review comment that disappears once the branch merges. A few months later I need it and can't find it.

So I put together a plain Obsidian vault that gives each of those a place, and lets Dataview pull them back together. I'm selling it as Dev Second Brain, and this post is a walk through what's in it.

What's inside

Six templates (Templater):

Daily note: a quick log of what you worked on and what's still open
Project
Decision record (ADR): auto-numbered, so you don't have to track the next ID
Incident: what broke and how you fixed it
PR review
Weekly review

Four dashboards (Dataview):

Home: today, open loops, open incidents, recent decisions, active projects
Decisions
Incidents
Weekly rollup

The dashboards are only useful once there's something in them, so the vault ships with a few clearly marked example notes. It isn't empty on day one, and you can delete the examples whenever you like.

What you need

Obsidian (free)
Two free community plugins: Templater and Dataview

The README has a five-minute setup guide, including installing those plugins and switching on the one Templater setting you need per device. I tested it in Obsidian 1.13.7 with Templater 2.25.1 and Dataview 0.5.68.

How I use it

The habit is small: write the daily note, and when something worth keeping happens (a decision, an incident, a review you'd want to find again), make a note from the matching template. The dashboards do the gathering. At the end of the week the weekly review and rollup show what actually happened, without me reconstructing it from memory.

If you'd rather build your own, the earlier posts in this series cover the Dataview queries and linking decision records to git commits that this vault is built around.

Get it

Dev Second Brain is $19 on Gumroad, personal-use license: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/uoybkd

My other templates are at https://forge.engelailabs.com.