Who Am I

Purpose

I do not remember what this app was supposed to do. But the name — Who Am I — maps to something I have always done instinctively: perform regular audits of myself. What do I know? What do I desire? What are my goals? Am I still who I remember being? The project may be forgotten. The practice is not.

Stack

What I Learned

• After high school, whenever I hit my head, I would try to do calculus in my head to check if I was still who I remembered myself to be — specifically, the power rule. d/dx of x^n = nx^(n-1). If I could still do that, I was still me. The power rule is hilariously easy — it is the first thing you learn in differential calculus — but it was my cognitive fingerprint, my "am I still here?" check. In hindsight, I should have ramped it up over time. But maybe the point was never about the math. It was about having a test at all.
• Self-auditing is a practice most people do informally (shower thoughts, new year reflections) but rarely do systematically. The questions are simple: What do I know that I did not know a year ago? What do I want that I did not want a year ago? What have I stopped wanting? What skills have atrophied? What skills have grown? The answers change faster than most people realize.
• For developers, the self-audit has a technical dimension: What can I build today that I could not build six months ago? What frameworks have I forgotten? What fundamentals have I solidified? This blog — walking through every project chronologically — is itself a massive self-audit. Each entry surfaces what I knew, what I did not know, and what I was reaching for.
• The forgotten project is its own lesson. Not every project survives in memory. Not every repo has a story. Some were experiments that taught something subtle and subconscious — a pattern, a failure mode, a taste preference — without producing a memorable outcome. The learning happened. The artifact did not stick. That is fine.

Key Insights

• The power rule as a cognitive integrity test is funny but the instinct behind it is sound. Fighter pilots use "chair flying" — mentally rehearsing procedures — to verify their training is intact. Musicians run scales. Athletes run drills. Having a quick self-test that confirms "I still know what I know" is a form of cognitive maintenance. The specific test does not matter. The habit of testing yourself does.
• Regular self-audits prevent drift — the slow, invisible process of becoming someone you did not intend to be. Without checking in, your goals silently shift toward whatever is easiest, your skills silently decay in areas you stopped practicing, and your identity silently conforms to whatever environment you spend the most time in. The audit is a course correction. It costs nothing but honesty.
• The "Who Am I" question is not a crisis — it is a practice. Identity is not fixed. The person who started this blog (bootcamp student, Chrome extension builder, aspiring rapper) is not the same person writing this entry (multi-platform developer, brand founder, published author). The continuity is not in the skills or the projects. It is in the practice of asking the question and being willing to hear a different answer than last time.
• Every project in this blog is an answer to "Who Am I" at a specific moment in time. Chrome Save Tabs: someone learning to build browser tools. Mancala: someone chasing the old internet. Crew Queue: someone trying to merge music and tech. Potatuhs: someone who found the thing. The arc is only visible in retrospect. In the moment, each project felt like a guess. The self-audit is what turns guesses into direction.