After a five-month pause in TrackLab development, I want to explain what happened — and what changed.
TrackLab version 0.4.2 was released on November 3rd; the next version, 0.5.0, only on April 5th.
“How can you explain this gap in your resume?” — as someone in HR might ask.
Reasons
I started this project out of enthusiasm and the desire to have something to show when that question came up. It would be embarrassing to say I had done nothing for several months.
The first reason evaporated after my negative user experience. As I mentioned in one of my posts, my first time using TrackLab wasn’t great — just tracking itself doesn’t solve problems. You track and… that’s it. You end up with a bunch of data you can see on graphs, but you still don’t know what to do with it. Unfortunately, updates didn’t fix this. I kept telling myself I’d address it later, but that was a mistake — by the time “later” came, enthusiasm had already faded.
Moreover, being unemployed, the second reason to keep developing evaporated too. This kind of project didn’t help me find a job. The IT market had shifted and demand for my profile had dried up. Employers want to see how you manage large, complex systems with many libraries, frameworks, and APIs. Nobody really cares about small, simple projects. Maybe I should have built several more complicated ones. But I came to realize I wasn’t really into that anymore — pure development isn’t my thing. I’m interested in creating something meaningful. The idea of building meaningless projects just to have the chance to build more meaningless projects pushed me away.
That’s why, even with plenty of free time, I didn’t improve my resume or build a portfolio. I genuinely didn’t care anymore.
Some would call it burnout. Maybe it was. The best cure for burnout is to change your environment. So when I had the opportunity to take a job outside of IT, I took it.
Shift of perspective
The new job has an IT department, and they mentioned they use Claude Code. As a result, that nudged me to try it on my project. I released version 0.5.0 only because of Claude Code.
And here’s the shift. In my post About ChatGPT, I wrote this about vibe coding:
It’s my idea of hell. I tried vibe coding and it didn’t have any “vibe” in it. Yes, code was written fast, but it’s so boring and doesn’t motivate me to continue at all. You get a result without the feeling of joy of creation.
In hindsight, I was completely wrong. I’ve gone through all the stages of acceptance. In the quote above, you can see the first one — denial.
What happens now
Right now I work as an order manager on a website and develop TrackLab (plus another small project) in the evenings with Claude Code. For the first time, finishing this app feels genuinely achievable.
AI will soon automate my current position — I already see so many patterns that automation could handle without effort, so it’s only a matter of time. That means I need to go deeper into the AI space.
As for the site — I haven’t forgotten about it. Additionally, I recently updated the design with Claude Code’s help. I’ll keep posting news about TrackLab and other things here.By the way, TrackLab v0.6.0 is already out.