Engineer Applies Production System Metrics to His Own Career for 12 Weeks

A software engineer with 25 years of experience decided to apply the same observability principles he used on technical systems to his own career, tracking time, output, and project completion across a 12-week experiment starting in late June. Using three markdown files in Obsidian, he set rules around publishing cadence, open-source contributions, and a definition of a 'real' project requiring code, documentation, and a published article. Over the period, he produced over 40 articles and a dozen open-source tools, but discovered his initial metrics dashboard measured only raw output, making it a vanity tracker that could not distinguish meaningful work from throwaway notes. He also caught himself violating his own publishing cadence rule — posting eight articles in four days — realising he had prioritised personal momentum over reader value. The experiment surfaced blind spots he had previously identified quickly in others' work, reinforcing that self-measurement can reveal biases even experienced practitioners miss.