50 Days, 80 Blog Posts, 0 Job Applications: The Complete Guided Tour of My SDR Era
Published: March 17, 2026 - 14 min read
If you're new here, welcome. You've probably noticed that this website has a lot going on. Over 150 blog posts, case studies, projects, an AI team of 16 agents, a French learning app, and a chatbot named Nancy sitting in the bottom right corner waiting to help you navigate all of it.
It can be overwhelming. I know because I built it, and even I sometimes look at it and think, "How did we get here?"
So let me walk you through it.
This post is your guided tour through the most important period of my professional life: the SDR Era. That stands for Skill Development and Refinement Era, and it's the 50-day stretch where I stopped applying for jobs, started building in silence, and accidentally discovered who I actually am.
I'm going to take you through the posts that document this journey, in order, with context for each one. Think of this as the highlight reel with commentary. If something catches your attention, click through. If you just want the overview, keep reading.
Let's start at the beginning.
Before the Clock Started
Stop #1: This Site Was Built in Less Than 10 Hours
Before the SDR Era, there was an identity crisis.
I built this entire portfolio website in under 10 hours using Claude as my AI coding partner. That speed should have made me proud. Instead, it terrified me. If AI could help me build a professional site this fast, what did that say about my value as a developer? This post is where I wrestled with that question, and the answer I found shaped everything that came after.
Stop #2: I Hate This Phase, But I Love the Person I'm Becoming
At this point, I was job hunting and it felt pointless. So I started building in silence. No one knew about this portfolio except my mom (who didn't really understand it despite my several explanations). No friends cheering me on. No dopamine hits. Just me, my laptop, and a promise I'd been making to myself for three years that I was finally keeping.
This post introduced a concept I still think about: mental masturbation. The habit of telling people your plans and getting praised for ideas you haven't executed yet. I was done with that.
Day 0: The Decision That Changed Everything
Stop #3: Another Audacious Decision: Why I'm Pausing My Job Search
This is where everything shifts.
On October 23rd, 2025, after 40 days of job applications with almost nothing to show for it, I woke up 30 minutes before my alarm and made a decision: I was going to stop applying for jobs. For 50 days.
I gave myself until December 13th. The plan was simple: instead of sending hundreds more applications into the void, I would spend those 50 days building real proof of work. Projects. Case studies. Skills that recruiters could see, not just read about on a resume.
"The audacity of this decision does not match the amount of money in my bank account." I wrote that line knowing it was true. I published it knowing there was no taking it back.
The First Burst (Days 1-16)
The moment I stopped applying for jobs, something unlocked. I started building at a pace that surprised even me.
Stop #4: The Art of Meta-Prompting and the Launch of Case Studies
Two days after pausing my job search, I tried Claude Code in the terminal for the first time. I had been ignoring it for months. That was a mistake. Claude Code was seriously a game changer, and this experiment launched an entire case studies section on my portfolio that hadn't existed before.
Stop #5: I Have No Excuses Left, I Have to Hit 'Record'
This is the post where I named the SDR Era. I had just spent 5 hours watching a DaVinci Resolve tutorial, partly because I genuinely needed to learn it, and partly because I was terrified of recording videos of myself in both English and French. The 5-hour tutorial was, admittedly, a very sophisticated way to procrastinate hitting record.
Stop #6: Introducing the French Writing Playground
I needed to practice writing French daily, but I couldn't find a tool that worked the way I wanted. So I built one. The French Writing Playground was my first real product launch during the SDR Era, and it taught me a lesson I wouldn't fully understand until later: every major breakthrough came from solving my own problems first.
You can still use it today at frenchwritingplayground.com.
Stop #7: How to Capture and Replicate Your AI's Personality
I had trained a Claude instance to perfectly refine my blog posts. It knew my voice, my formatting, everything. Then I hit the conversation limit and lost it all. In frustration, I figured out how to extract and clone that "personality" into a reusable prompt, and then I gave it a name: LLM Instance Cloning.
This concept, born from a personal workflow problem, ended up becoming one of the most referenced ideas across my entire portfolio. It later connected to tokens, context windows, and the way I build every AI agent on my team today.
The Acceleration (Days 17-31)
By this point, I was building something new almost every day. The ideas wouldn't stop. Neither would I.
Stop #8: Dear Prisca from June 2025: You Did It
This might be my most emotional post.
Back in June, I committed to learning French despite barely being at A1 level. I booked the TCF exam for September as a deadline. And then I worked. Hard. But through all of it, I never really believed I'd get to the level where I could record an educational video in French.
Then I did. I published that video and wrote a letter to my past self who never thought it was possible. Reading it back still gets me.
Stop #9: I'm Officially on a Mission to Become a 'Claude God'
With 26 days left in the SDR Era, I launched the Claude God series. The goal was to document every tip and trick I was learning about working with Claude at maximum speed and efficiency. What started as a few tips turned into 19 posts (and counting). This series became one of the most popular parts of my entire website.
Stop #10: I'm Petrified of Having Chauffeur Knowledge
In the middle of all this building, a fear crept in. I heard the story of Max Planck's chauffeur, who memorized the Nobel laureate's lectures perfectly but understood nothing. Was I doing the same thing with AI? Building applications I couldn't actually explain?
This fear haunted me. It also made me better. It led to an entire series where I publicly proved I understood every concept in my own work, and it's the reason I still dig deeper than I need to on everything I build.
Stop #11: All My Ideas Are Worthless, So Say Hi to Nancy
I was peeling yellow potatoes when it hit me: who is going to navigate 30+ blog posts when the SDR Era is over? I left the potatoes boiling, sat down, and built Nancy, my portfolio chatbot, in 2 hours. This post is about why ideas without execution are worthless, and how AI has shortened the gap between concept and working product to hours.
(Nancy is still here, by the way. Bottom right corner. Say hi.)
The Hard Middle (Days 32-46)
This is the part of the story people don't usually tell. The momentum was still there, but so was the doubt, the pain, and the financial anxiety.
Stop #12: At 8:01 PM Last Night, A War Was Waged on the Current Version of Prisca
My Dell XPS 13, which had been failing me for months, finally died. Right after I had signed a lease for Montreal that would drastically increase my cost of living. I ordered a new laptop at 8:01 PM despite my bank account literally wailing at me, and something shifted. If I was investing this much in my tools, I had to match it with intensified effort. A war was declared on the current version of me.
Stop #13: I Deleted My Reddit Post Because the Comments Hurt
I shared the French Writing Playground on Reddit for the first time. The very first comment dismissed my entire app by pointing to tools that already existed. I deleted the posts because it hurt. Then I sat with the pain and decided I would never do that again. This post is raw. It's me admitting that criticism stings while choosing to keep sharing anyway.
(Later, I researched those "competitors" and realized they weren't even competitors at all.)
Stop #14: This Portfolio is a Reflection of the Chaos of My Mind
By December, I had multiple projects at 70% completion, a case studies section, blog posts flying out daily, and a growing AI team. I stopped and looked at what I'd created. It was a reflection of the chaos in my head, and I genuinely couldn't tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing. This post is me being honest about the mess of building too many things at once while acknowledging that each unfinished project taught something that fed into the next.
The Final Stretch (Days 47-50)
The clock was running out. But instead of slowing down, everything accelerated.
Stop #15: Doubtful Prisca Has Concerns. I'm Doing It Anyway.
Before launching the 777-1 Experiment (seven projects, seven AI subagents, seven case studies), I wrote down every single doubt in my head. Every fear. Every reason not to start. I gave Doubtful Prisca the mic. She spoke. I listened. Then I started anyway.
The 777-1 Experiment has been paused temporarily as I manage client work and other competing priorities
Stop #16: I Build Well. I Sell Terribly. So I Hired a Man to Do It.
On December 12th, one day before the SDR Era officially ended, I acknowledged a truth: I'm good at building. I'm terrible at selling. So I hired Alex Bennett, an AI subagent, as my Chief Marketing Officer. This post marks the moment I stopped building in silence and started preparing to share my work with the world.
Stop #17: SDR Era Reflections
On the last day, I wrote two reflection posts that captured everything the era taught me.
Reflection #1 revealed the pattern: every major breakthrough came from solving my own problems first. The French Writing Playground, LLM Instance Cloning, Nancy, the Claude God series, the Hall of Shame. None of them were built for imaginary users. They were built for me.
Reflection #2 was about the greatest gift of the era: writing. By my 80th blog post, I realized that writing was my way of teaching, and teaching was what I'd loved since I was a 16-year-old building pillow forts to record math videos for YouTube.
I later distilled the biggest lessons from the entire era into The SDR Playbook, a 9-day email series. If you want the concentrated version with actionable takeaways, grab it here.
Stop #18: 354 Days Ago, My Stomach Betrayed Me. Yet, Thank You, IBS
This post dropped on December 13th, the official last day of the SDR Era. It's the most personal thing I've ever written. For nearly a year, I had been living with IBS-C, an invisible pain that shaped every single day of this journey without me ever mentioning it. This was me finally telling that story. The forced silence. The walks without dopamine where my best ideas were born. The pleasure shifting from food to creation. This post is the foundation underneath everything else.
What Came After
The SDR Era officially ended on December 13th. But the person who came out the other side couldn't just... stop.
Stop #19: Miracles Don't Happen. I Have 12 Days to Create My Own.
Five days after the SDR Era ended, financial reality hit hard. My bank account was racing toward zero. A miracle wasn't coming. So I gave myself 12 days to build and sell one product to one customer. The SDR Era had proved I could build. Now it was time to learn the second most important skill: selling.
Stop #20: The Great GitHub Push: From Job Seeker to Consultant
On December 22nd, 2025, at exactly 11:48 AM, I ran a Git command that transformed this website from a job seeker's portfolio into a consultant's platform. I committed to 4 months of trying to build an AI consulting business. It was terrifying. But when I really thought about the worst-case scenario, the only thing that could come from this decision was growth.
That moment, The Great GitHub Push, is where the SDR Era truly ends. Not with a deadline, but with a transformation.
By the Numbers
Here's what 50 days of building in silence actually produced:
- ~80 blog posts written and published
- 50 days of commitment (October 23 to December 13)
- 15 Claude God Tips published during the period
- 7 context engineers hired for the 777-1 Experiment
- 3 products launched (French Writing Playground, ViteHero, and Alex Bennett MCP)
- 2 French videos recorded despite being terrified
- 1 case study section built from scratch
- 1 concept invented (LLM Instance Cloning)
- 1 AI team that grew from 0 employees to 10+
- 0 job applications submitted
What This Era Really Taught Me
If you've read this far, here's what I want you to take away.
The SDR Era wasn't about the blog posts or the products or even the AI team. It was about discovering that problem solving is exactly the type of work that feels like play to me. It was about learning that writing is my way of teaching, and teaching is the thing I've loved since I was 16 years old and didn't have a word for it yet. It was about proving to myself that I could do hard things, even when no one was watching, even when the money was running out, even when my own body was fighting against me.
If you're in a similar phase right now, where you're building something and nobody sees it yet, where the silence feels unbearable and the doubt is loud, I want you to know: that discomfort is the point. The silence is teaching you to build for the right reasons. And the version of you on the other side of this is someone you haven't met yet.
I hadn't met her either.
But I'm glad I kept going.
Want the Concentrated Version?
If you're in the middle of your own SDR Era right now, building in silence, figuring things out, wondering if any of this will pay off, I distilled the 9 most important principles from these 50 days into a series called The SDR Playbook. One principle per day, delivered to your inbox, each one with the real story behind it and what you can actually do with it.
As always, thanks for reading!