March 10, 2026
Open-sourcing your soul
I put my whole life into a single database
He tracked his entire life — and the comments went feral
TLDR: One developer logged nearly everything in his life into a giant, open-source database—then admitted building it himself wasn’t worth the time. The comments split between calling it an outdated time sink, arguing objective metrics help while mood logs don’t, and dreaming of a version that tracks you automatically.
A developer poured three years and 380,000 data points into a single, self-hosted life database — fitness, mood, sleep, weather, the works — even piping entries through a Telegram bot and posting 48 graphs on howisFelix.today. The code’s open source (FxLifeSheet), the setup is elaborate, and the twist? His own conclusion (flagged by one commenter): it’s probably not worth building your own mega-tracker from scratch.
Cue the crowd chaos. The top roast: “latest data is from 4 years ago,” which skeptics are using as a mic drop — if the life-logging stopped, did the project flop? Another thread demands to know how much time this took each day, imagining a man held hostage by his own spreadsheet. The big debate: objective vs. subjective tracking. One camp swears steps, calories, and sleep hours are gold; the other shrugs that mood and stress logs are a rollercoaster you don’t need to graph to notice. Meanwhile, a softer chorus loves the ambition but begs for automation: “Know thyself… but please let the phone do it.” Humor flew too: “Human Fitbit,” “life-as-a-CSV,” and “open-sourcing your soul.” It’s part inspiration, part cautionary tale, and 100% comment-section sport.
Key Points
- •Project began in 2019 tracking 100+ daily metrics across health, lifestyle, and environment.
- •~380,000 data points collected from manual logs, date ranges, weather records, and Apple Health steps.
- •Data stored in a self-hosted Postgres timestamp-based key–value schema with helper fields for querying.
- •Manual inputs via a Telegram bot; visualizations primarily created with plotly.js.
- •Public site (howisFelix.today) shares 48 snapshot graphs; code is MIT-licensed and open source (FxLifeSheet).