I ran a script on my own github and met a stranger

I ran one command against my own GitHub account this week to see what was there. Seventy-eight repositories. I could have named maybe twenty-five without looking.

The account goes back to 2021. The oldest is my portfolio site. A few repos later, still 2021, there’s a thing called notionesque-obsidian whose entire README is “look at me editing a file to see if it will get updated. wow me.” Me learning git, four years ago. I remember the week, even if I’d forgotten the repo.

A couple quiet years, then 2025 hits and I built around twenty apps over a few months and archived most of them the same season. A lot of them wear names GitHub generated, plush-galaxy and dreamy-ping and clumsy-robot, so the only way back into one is to open it. Those are the actual strangers. Not the work, the labels.

Here’s the honest part, because the count wasn’t really the surprise. I knew I kept rebuilding the same app. What I’d never done is see it stacked, fifteen near-identical things in a row, in date order, the archive date sitting right next to the start date on each one. Knowing you do a thing and watching a script lay out the evidence are different experiences. One you can talk yourself out of. The other has timestamps.

I find bugs for a living. I knew exactly what these were. I just hadn’t looked at all of them at once, and looking turned the number from a feeling into a count.