overviewdevelopmentmilestone
Building Fret-o-Matic: The First Sixteen Days
16 May 2026·10 min read·Sessions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38
Fret-O-Matic Dev Blog
Building a Precision Tab Generator engine — from zero to launch
PythonNode.jsReactNext.jsSQLiteTypeScriptJavaScriptalphaTab
143
SESSIONS
~579.6h
DEV TIME
2 / 3
PHASE
Last updated: 12 July 2026 at 14:12 CEST
Latest Posts
devlogday-7infrastructure
Day 7 — Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
Day seven was the day the project stopped being a folder on a hard drive and started being something you could find on the internet. Domain, infrastructure, logo, two full deployment specs, and a Railway workspace — all in one sitting.
7 May 2026·7 min read·Sessions 15, 16, 17
devlogday-6engine
Day 6 — Learning to Hear
Day five had left the engine standing in the right shape and stone deaf. Day six is the day it opened its ears — real key and tempo detection, the pitch-preserving slowdown made good on at last — and the day the project was given a memory it could search.
6 May 2026·9 min read·Sessions 11, 12, 13, 14
devlogday-5engine
Day 5 — The First Code
After four days of decisions, plans and laws, Fret-o-Matic still didn't have a single line of working code to its name. Day five fixed that — the engine got its skeleton, and the project finally became something you could run.
5 May 2026·5 min read·Sessions 7, 8, 9, 10
devlogday-4governance
Day 4 — The Constitution
With the project newly underway, the obvious move was to start building. Instead I spent the whole day writing the rules the building would have to obey — a constitution, a single source of truth, and the bones of the documentation system that runs the whole operation.
4 May 2026·5 min read·Sessions 4, 5, 6
devlogday-2naming
Day 2 — The Day It Got a Name
Day two gave the project the two things a Thursday of pure architecture had left it without: a name, and a price. By the end of it, an idea had quietly become a project.
2 May 2026·5 min read·Sessions 2, 3
devlogday-1architecture
Day 1 — Four Decisions and a PDF Nobody Asked For
Day one of Fret-o-Matic produced no code at all — and that was the point. It produced a full architectural proposal and the four decisions that everything since has been built upon, all of it written in the span of a single Thursday.
1 May 2026·6 min read·Session 1