Wednesday, March 27

This is how I put my entire life in one database: from my fitness and nutrition to my social life


Keeping track of the number of steps we have walked or our progress in our professional career is newbie, or so he must have thought Felix KrausFastlane developer and former Google and Twitter employee according to his own biography.

He was encouraged to take personal monitoring one step further creating for three years a real-time dashboard with a multitude of data regarding your healthyour diet, your mood, where you are at all times or a history with several recent activities.

Without filters

A look at that board, on a website open to the public, we can find:

  • His weight
  • What you ate that day, including a breakdown of your macronutrients
  • The hours you slept the night before
  • ´The time since you last meditated
  • Your accumulated hours in front of the computer since 2013
  • The number of emails you have in your inbox
  • The number of tasks you have to complete
  • Your next trips
  • Your heart rate while you sleep
  • Etc.

Throughout the web, Felix not only breaks down all this information —on the other hand, with fantastically designed graphs and tables—, but also he also explains where he got his inspiration from (of course, everything was born from an old article by Tim Urban and from a subreddit) or what are the sources of all this data, both those that are obtained automatically through its HealthKit (Apple’s platform that centralizes all health data, including data from Apple Watch) or Swarm (Foursquare) and data you enter manually.

In turn, it shows in a single table a summary with the highlights or the country in which it was in each week of its life. About. It has graphs with your flow of spending and financial savings, the different ways in which the change in temperature affects your life (including the variation in his alcohol consumption, the time he spends sick or the recurrence of his visits to the gym). In summer he does more sports and gets less sick, in winter he buys more online and showers less with cold water. Cool news, but it’s impressive to see the entire panel. He even reels off, thanks to RescueTime, what he spends his time doing when he uses his computer.

It has posted on GitHub (explained many scroll down on the front page of the web) the necessary code so that anyone who wants to create their own vital dashboard can do so, although it advances that it requires not only time, but notions of programming, as well as customization work to discard what it is relevant to him, but not to another.

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Felix has starred in several viral events in recent years, especially the ones that get a lot of buzz on Reddit and HackerNews. For example, when he told how he started living as a digital nomad living in a different city every month, for two and a half years. Or when he revealed that he changed his profile picture every two years to an identical one, with the same lighting, clothes, hairstyle and background… Only two years older, waiting for someone to notice the subtle change. As an expert in digital security, he revealed how photo editors have easy access to our movement history or how easy it can be for a developer to get hold of our Apple ID password.

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At the time of writing this article, Felix is ​​in Vienna, is in good spirits, weighs 84.5 kilos and has eaten 200 grams of chicken after seven hours of sleep at 60.7 beats per minute. He has already trained, but he hasn’t meditated for more than a month. As the bullfighter El Gallo said when they explained to him that Ortega y Gasset was a philosopher, “there are people for everyone.”

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