2026-10-15-2

The quantified self idea was introduced to me back in 2017 while I was working for Bruce Eckel and he brought me to Pycon Cleveland. I wandered off and found myself talking to a cool guy rocking an afro and glasses (sorry that's all I really remember about him) and he showed me his website. It contained an 8-bit graphic of himself, a music player, and a map.

It was the most creative website I had seen at that stage in my career. He used his Google Mapa data to track himself and sync to his site, drawing out his life, tracking his music usage, and probably other neat things that I no longer remember.

I wish I remembered his name or got a contact because I'd love to see how deep into the rabbit hole of quantified self he's gotten into. But this fun little conversation sucked me in.

I know there are many that track every detail of their lives. But I'm not quite there. An essential pillar of this idea is that the tracking needs to be autonomous otherwise I'll lose track, data, and the desire to continue tracking.

Health.md started from the basic desire to track and generate heat maps of my daily activities, visualizing questions like "how many days did I surf this month?" within my daily obsidian notes. But now with the advent of AI, my curiosity is taking these ideas a lot further.

I don't know if a visualization, notebook, etc. is even necessary. With an agent I can just discuss this data, finding patterns with ease. Instead of just seeing how often I surf, I can overlay the data and find patterns between my sleep quality and surf. Does surfing actually help me sleep? Or does it make it worse? What about running?

This is only the beginning. I think someday we'll all be tracking as much data about ourselves as possible and collaborating with AI to find patterns in our lives we didn't realized existed and I think this will lead to healthier and happier lives.