About Me and This Site: 165 Commits in 10 Days📋

What does your git history say about you? Mine says I don't sleep much.

The Numbers📋

This entire website — the one you're reading right now — was built from scratch in 10 consecutive days, from March 18 to March 27, 2026.

Not a single day off. The quietest day was March 24 with exactly one commit — and even that was a late-evening push.

Daily Breakdown📋

The intensity wasn't uniform. Two days stand out as absolute marathons:

The weekend of March 22-23 was the turning point: 65 commits in 48 hours. That's when the site transformed from a collection of markdown files into a polished, animated, static-generated product.

I Code at Night📋

The git timestamps tell a clear story about when I do my best work:

00h   17  #############################
01h    7  ############
02h    9  ###############
03h   17  #############################
04h   13  ######################
05h    5  ########
06h    8  #############
07h    4  #######
08h    6  ##########
09h    8  #############
10h    3  #####
11h    2  ###
12h    7  ############
13h    3  #####
14h   13  ######################
15h    7  ############
16h    1  ##
17h    4  #######
18h    7  ############
19h   11  ##################
20h    5  ########
21h    9  ###############
22h    3  #####
23h    6  ##########

Peak hour: 3 AM — tied at 17 commits with midnight. More than a third of this site was written between midnight and 6 AM.

This isn't insomnia. This is when the world is quiet, notifications stop, and I can hold an entire architecture in my head without interruption. Twenty years of development have taught me that the quality of focused time matters more than the quantity of calendar hours.

The Iteration Pattern — Extreme Programming by the Book📋

Looking at commit messages, a pattern emerges:

• ~60% of commits are labeled "fixes" or "fix"
• ~15% are feature additions ("animated toc", "new blog posts", "analytics")
• ~15% are structural changes ("new static website", "workflow", "ts requirements, tests")
• ~10% are infrastructure ("vercel cache", "robots style", "serard.dev")

This is textbook Extreme Programming. Not the caricature — the real thing, as Kent Beck described it: small releases, continuous integration, simple design, refactoring, and fast feedback.

The XP practices are all here in the git log:

• Small releases: every commit is a deployable increment. No feature branches, no release trains — main is always production.
• Continuous integration: push to main, Vercel builds, the site is live. The feedback loop is measured in seconds, not days.
• Simple design: vanilla JS, no framework, no abstraction layers. The simplest thing that could possibly work — then iterate.
• Refactoring: the 60% "fixes" ratio is refactoring. Small, constant improvements to code that already works. Never rewrite, always reshape.
• Courage: shipping to production 16 times a day means accepting that some pushes will break something — and trusting that the next push will fix it within minutes.

The high ratio of "fixes" isn't a sign of poor quality — it's a sign of continuous refinement. Each fix is small (often a CSS tweak, a padding adjustment, a link correction) and each one makes the result incrementally better. This is XP's "embrace change" principle applied at the individual level: don't try to get it perfect on the first pass. Get it working, ship it, observe, adjust.

The only XP practice missing is pair programming — unless you count coding with Claude at 3 AM, which is arguably the modern equivalent.

Work Sessions📋

If we define a "session" as a period of continuous work with no gaps longer than 2 hours, the pattern becomes even clearer. Long, deep sessions — often spanning 3 to 6 hours — followed by breaks, then another deep dive.

The longest sessions tend to start around 10 PM and end around 4 AM. The most productive sessions aren't the longest — they're the ones where a single coherent feature gets built end-to-end in one sitting (the static website conversion, the animation system, the typed spec testing).

What This Says📋

This git history is a snapshot of how I work:

1. I start fast. The initial commit wasn't a boilerplate — it was a functional prototype. Get something working, then iterate.
2. I don't plan in documents — I plan in code. The architecture emerged through commits, not through design docs written before the first line of code.
3. I ship constantly. 165 commits in 10 days means I push to production roughly every 90 minutes during active work. The site was live and improving from day one.
4. I care about details. The volume of "fixes" commits shows someone who notices a 2px misalignment and can't move on until it's right.
5. I work in bursts. Intense 4-6 hour sessions with total focus, not 8-hour days of moderate attention.

This is the pattern of a self-taught developer with 20+ years of experience: no ceremony, maximum iteration speed, and a bias for shipping over planning.

The Tools📋

This site was built in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic). Not as a code generator that I copied from — as a development partner in a conversation that spanned dozens of sessions. I prompted, reviewed, adjusted, rejected, redirected, and refined. The git history shows my decisions; the AI accelerated my execution.

The stack itself reflects the same philosophy:

• Vanilla JavaScript — no framework, no bundler
• Markdown + YAML frontmatter — content as data
• Static generation — Node.js build script, no server
• Vercel — push to main, site updates in seconds
• PowerShell — local tooling and reporting (including the script that generated this analysis)

No cloud CI/CD. No Docker in production. No Kubernetes. Just git push and the site is live.

This blog post was generated from an analysis of the git history of this repository, using a PowerShell reporting script that extracts commits, timestamps, sessions, and patterns from git log.