Living Inside a Database: One Developer's Commitment to Quantified Self
Source: hackernews
The quantified self movement has been around long enough that it’s no longer surprising when someone tracks their sleep, mood, or exercise. What is still striking is when someone commits fully, builds their own infrastructure around it, and then opens it to the public.
That’s what Felix did at howisfelix.today. The premise is straightforward: one database, everything in it, a live dashboard showing the current state of his life. Steps, sleep, location, time spent on work, how he’s feeling, what he ate. The kind of data that most people let scatter across a half-dozen apps with incompatible formats and no export story.
As someone who builds bots and automation systems, the appeal is legible to me. There’s a particular satisfaction in having all your data in one place under your own control, queryable however you want, not subject to some startup’s pivot or API deprecation. SQLite for a personal project like this is an obvious choice, though I’d be curious whether Felix hits any friction when the dataset grows over years.
The Interesting Part Is the Schema
What draws me to projects like this isn’t the tracking itself, it’s the modeling decisions. How do you represent a mood in a row? Do you log discrete events or continuous states? How do you handle the days you forget to log something, and does that absence mean anything?
These are hard problems that any event-driven system faces. A Discord bot logging user behavior has the same shape: sparse data, irregular intervals, the question of what a missing record implies. Felix’s project is essentially a personal analytics pipeline, and the choices he made to make it coherent enough to visualize publicly are worth thinking about.
The Hacker News discussion predictably splits between people inspired to build something similar and people skeptical of the privacy implications. Both reactions are reasonable. Publishing your own data is a deliberate choice, and Felix made it deliberately.
What This Kind of Project Teaches You
Building a system that ingests your own life as structured data forces you to confront a few things:
- Consistency is harder than instrumentation. Getting a sensor or a script to log something once is easy. Having it be reliable for two years is not.
- Normalization fights expressiveness. The cleaner your schema, the harder it is to capture the weird edge cases of being a person.
- Querying your own history is genuinely useful. Once the data is there, questions you couldn’t have anticipated become answerable in seconds.
I’ve done smaller versions of this, logging certain habits through scripts that write to a local file or a SQLite database I query occasionally. The discipline required to maintain it is real, and most people drop it. Felix has apparently kept going, which is more impressive than the technical side.
Projects like this sit at the intersection of systems thinking and self-awareness in a way that’s hard to replicate with off-the-shelf tools. The dashboard is almost beside the point; the value is in having built something you understand completely and that reflects your actual life, not the sanitized version a wellness app wants to show you.