I have fourteen side projects sitting in a folder. Affiliate sites, scrapers, dashboards, automation experiments. Most never made it past the idea stage.

I collect ideas the way other people collect books they never read.

By day, I architect data platforms for iGaming companies in Malta. Useful work, but not the whole story. Outside of work, I end up studying things most people would consider unrelated — how MrBeast built a content machine, how TheSoul Publishing industrialised video production, why crypto casinos structure treasury systems the way they do.

I understand data infrastructure, iGaming, affiliate marketing, content creation, and prediction markets — not because my job requires all of it, but because I can't help myself.

The problem is that none of it turns into anything real.

It lives in markdown files, unfinished repositories, and Amplenote pages I never revisit. I have the research without the output. The ideas without the execution.

This log is my attempt to change that.

The goal is simple, even if the path isn't: more control over my time, fewer obligations I didn't choose, and a future that isn't tied entirely to a salary or a single company.

That doesn't happen by accident. It happens by building deliberately, tracking honestly, and not lying to yourself about what's working.

So this is the log. What I'm building, what I tested, what failed, what the numbers actually say. I'm not going to promise a schedule — I'd rather post when there's something real to report than pad it to hit a date. No hype, no “building in public” performance art, just the real attempt, documented publicly so I can't hide from it.

— Julian