The Night I Stopped Building For Myself.

The Night I Stopped Building For Myself
"If I were a real user, I'd quit this in five seconds."
That hit harder than listening to my 2014 laptop scream at 94°C.
Because I was that user.
**And I was ready to give up.

**

The Reality Check

December 22, 2025. Three days until Christmas.
I'm in a temporary apartment in the Netherlands. My job disappeared that morning. The housing situation collapsed hours later. My dogs are still back in Poland. My laptop won't stop overheating. The app I've invested 680 hours into building? Still stuck at 60% complete.
The smart move: quit. Get warehouse work again. Stop pretending to be a developer.
But something made me launch the app one more time.
And I absolutely hated it.

Why I Almost Walked Away

Not because it was broken. The code worked fine. The logic was solid. The architecture held.
But imagine you're a real user—someone who just bought a gaming PC, maxed out the graphics, and now it's throttling like crazy. You want ONE answer: why is this happening?
You open PC_Workman. You see mountains of information. Endless tabs. Numbers fighting for your attention.
You close it.
Five seconds, gone.
That's when it hit me: I'd been building for myself, not for actual people. I'd been chasing the idea of being a developer instead of solving real problems.

The Turning Point

It wasn't like my previous three restarts. Those were just trial-and-error. Different architecture approaches.

This one was survival mode.

Around 2 AM, my girlfriend showed up with energy drinks—those neon cans that taste like regret mixed with electricity. I was on my seventh piece of toast. We both laughed at the insanity of it. "Just finish," she said. Not just the app. She meant finish this madness.
3 AM. I'm staring at my codebase.
16,000 lines.
Not optimized. Not refactored. Deleted.

Entire systems went away. The fan control module? Gone.

The overcomplicated process management? Completely removed. All those "clever" dashboard tricks? History.
Each deletion felt like murder. But the app kept sending the same message: I'm not ready for actual users.
I made my choice.
I destroyed it.

What The First Three Rebuilds Taught Me

Rebuild One: The "It Works" Trap
My first version looked like Windows 95 in the middle of a panic attack. Emojis everywhere. Infinite scrolling. Zero visual structure.
It functioned though. CPU readings were accurate. GPU data was collected. Logic worked.
I felt proud for about two weeks.
Then I used it as a normal person would. That's when the truth hit: functional and good aren't the same thing.
Rebuild Two: Building For Your Ego
I thought I needed to be "professional." Event-driven architecture. Modular plugins. Clean separation. All the patterns from fancy engineering blogs.
Result? A confusing mess that looked great on a resume but felt awful in actual use.
I spent two weeks building an advanced fan curve editor. Drag and drop. Real-time graphs. Beautiful code. Then I realized: one wrong setting kills a GPU. I deleted the entire feature.

Rebuild Three: Asking Better Questions

This is where my thinking shifted. Instead of "what features can I add," I asked: "what does a real person actually need to see?"
The answer shocked me with its simplicity.

One Screen. One Purpose.

Everything visible at 1080p. No scrolling needed.
CPU usage. GPU usage. RAM. Top processes draining resources. Trend lines.
Click a process, see details. Done.
That's when I understood: PC_Workman wasn't supposed to be comprehensive.
It was supposed to be clear.

The 5 AM Moment

By sunrise, the core structure was rebuilt.
By morning, the new architecture was actually working.
For the first time since starting this project, I opened PC_Workman and didn't immediately see a dozen things to fix.
I didn't think "this is amazing" or "this is feature-complete."
I thought: I would actually use this.
That became my bar.
Not perfection. Not finished.
Just: Would I close this in five seconds?

What's Actually Being Built

The rebuild continues. We're on stage one of three.
Next: MY PC dashboard launches fully.
Not another tab. This is where the application actually understands what's happening with your hardware.

Stage 1: FAN Dashboard (Complete)

Polished to shine. Every metric serves a purpose. Every visual communicates something real about your system.
What changed from the original:

Removed clutter (no useless statistics)
Highlighted signal (only what matters right now)
Visual language (colors have meaning)

Simple looks simple. Building simple is exhausting.

Stage 2: MY PC (In Progress)

Health Report

Not a list of temperatures. A narrative about your hardware's actual condition. GPU performance over 30 days. CPU behavior under different loads. Everything connected so you understand the full picture instead of hunting through three different applications.

Statistics & Time Travel

Go backward. See voltage spikes. Watch temperature curves evolve.
The app learns your baseline and alerts you when anomalies appear.
Not: "Your GPU is 75°C."
But: "Your GPU hit 75°C under this specific load—it's never done that before. Your thermal paste might be degrading."
That's monitoring vs. understanding.

Optimization Suite

For older hardware. For laptops that throttle. Tools you set once and forget, not just toggles—actual solutions.

System Cleanup

Every tool has cleanup features scattered everywhere. Here they're unified. Cortana removed. OneDrive? Your choice. Xbox Game Bar disabled smartly.
Fresh Install Setup
New hardware is chaos. All drivers from one location. Only essential services. Bloatware identified on day one.

Stage 3: Advanced AI Diagnostics (Future)

Pattern recognition that matters.
The system builds a baseline of what's normal for your specific hardware. When something new appears, it tells you why and what to do about it.
GPU thermal spike? "This matches gaming at these settings. Thermal paste degradation likely. Options: replace paste or adjust power limits."
Random power spike? "New service running—Windows Update indexing. Configure or disable."

Most tools show what happened.
PC_Workman explains why and suggests solutions.

The Competition Never Saw It Coming

I reviewed the market while rebuilding:
MSI Afterburner — Best in class for GPU control. Amazing overlay. Legendary fan curves. But only handles GPUs.
HWMonitor — Shows every sensor on the system. Overwhelming. Accurate. Underwhelming UX.
ASUS GPU Tweak — Works great if you have ASUS hardware. Ecosystem locked.
Each solves part of the problem beautifully.
None work together.
Users open three apps. Manage three mental frameworks. Navigate three different UIs.
What if one place made everything make sense?

Three Things That Night Taught Me

#1: Deletion Moves Faster Than Addition

Not optimization. Not adding features. Removal.
Every line I deleted meant progress toward something that mattered. Those 16,000 lines weren't failures. They were experiments that freed my mind.

#2: Your First User's Opinion Is Sacred

If you wouldn't use it, nobody else will.
That moment when you think "I'd close this immediately"—that's not criticism. That's your most important user giving honest feedback.
Most
builders ignore it. They shouldn't.

#3: Limits Create Honesty

Dying 2014 laptop at 94°C. Zero budget. No team. 16,000 lines to delete. These aren't limitations.
They're truth machines.
Before adding anything, I had to justify it: Will this burn too much RAM? Generate too much heat? Add unnecessary complexity? The features that survived this filter were the real ones.

Why Now Matters

PC_Workman v1.6.2 shipped five days ago.
Not a revolution. Stage one of weeks of work. But something shifted.
When I test it, I don't immediately hate it.
That's the baseline.
Everything else builds from there.

What's Coming

In four weeks, stages two and three release.
MY PC gets finished. Statistics & Monitoring launches. Cleanup integration goes live. Analytics arrives.
The application becomes what I imagined at 3 AM:
One place that gets your hardware. Speaks your language. No app juggling. No partial answers.
Worth using. Worth following someone for.
Not because they're brilliant. Because they finally built something they'd actually open and use every day.
Because they deleted 16,000 lines at 3 AM instead of compromising.

For Developers Building Solo

You're deep in a project that still feels off. You catch yourself thinking: "if I were using this, I'd quit immediately."
Don't dismiss that thought.
That's not criticism.
That's clarity.
That's the moment you stop coding for yourself and start building for the humans who actually need it.
What was the turning point for your project? When did you realize what had to die so something real could live?

No AI Here

Just coffee at 2 AM. Frustration at 3. Toast. Energy drinks that taste like electricity. Someone who believed even when I didn't. And understanding that if you wouldn't use your own creation, you're wasting everyone's time.
v1.6.2 is live.
Stages 2 and 3 drop next month.
You'll see what I mean.

Let's Connect
GitHub: https://github.com/HuckleR2003/PC_Workman_HCK
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/marcinfirmuga
X/Twitter: @hck_lab
Current Version: v1.6.2 - Next update coming soon

About The Builder

I'm Marcin Firmuga. Solo developer. Founder of HCK_Labs.
PC_Workman is an open-source, AI-powered PC resource monitor.
Built from scratch on dying hardware during warehouse shifts in the Netherlands.
This is the first time I've given a project a real home.
Before this: game translations. PC tech internships.
Warehouse work across multiple countries. Dozens of abandoned projects.
This one stuck.
700+ hours of code. 4 complete UI rebuilds. 16,000 lines deleted. 3 AM sessions. Energy drinks and toast.
Finally: an app I wouldn't close in five seconds.
That's the difference between building and shipping.

BuildInPublic #IndieDev #OpenSource #Python #DeveloperJourney #SoloBuilder #CodingLife

I created PC Workman , an open-source, AI-powered
PC resource monitor
built entirely from scratch on dying hardware during warehouse
shifts in the Netherlands.

This is the first time I’ve given one of my projects a real, dedicated home.

Before this: game translations, PC technician internships, warehouse operations in multiple countries, and countless failed projects I never finished.

But this one? This one stuck.
700+ hours of code. 4 complete UI rebuilds. 16,000 lines deleted.
3 AM all-nighters. Energy drinks and toast.

And finally, an app I wouldn’t close in 5 seconds.
That’s the difference between building and shipping.

PC_Workman is the result.

BuildInPublic #IndieDev #OpenSource #Python #World

What’s the hardest moment you’ve faced in your project? Drop it in the comments. I’m curious.*