Every morning started the same way. I’d wake up, grab my phone, and open a handful of health apps. One showed how long I slept. Another showed my heart rate variability. Another tracked yesterday’s workout. Another estimated my recovery. Each one had beautiful graphs. Each one had colorful scores. Each one had another subscription. And somehow, after looking at all of them, I still didn’t know the answer to the only question that mattered.
How am I doing today? Not how many hours I slept. Not what my resting heart rate was. Not whether my HRV was up three points. Just how is my body today? That question became the foundation for Motion. I wasn’t trying to build another fitness tracker. Apple Watch already does an incredible job collecting health data. The challenge isn’t collecting more information. It’s making sense of what we already have.
The fitness industry has spent years building incredible sensors. Watches measure heart rate hundreds of times a day. Sleep stages are estimated overnight. HRV, respiratory rate, temperature, activity, workouts, and recovery scores are all available with a few taps. Yet most of these numbers live in isolation. They’re accurate enough to be interesting. But they rarely work together to tell you what your body is actually trying to say.
Motion treats health differently. Sleep isn’t just another chart. It’s one of the signals that influences recovery. Recovery affects readiness. Stress changes how your body responds to effort. Activity creates demand that recovery has to repay. None of these metrics exist on their own. They tell one story together.
Motion isn’t trying to convince you to work out every day. Some days the best decision is a hard ride. Other days it’s a walk around the block. Sometimes the smartest workout is taking the day off. My goal isn’t to tell people what they want to hear. It’s to build something they can trust.
Motion is still evolving. Every algorithm changes. Every release gets a little smarter. But the goal hasn’t changed since the first line of code. I don’t want to build another app that gives people more health data. I want to build one that helps them understand it. Because the most important question isn’t how many charts you can fit onto a screen. It’s whether you can answer the question every person asks when they wake up: How am I doing today?
Motion is currently in active development. The ideas in this article are already shaping the app, and I’ll be sharing the journey, design decisions, and lessons learned as it evolves.
I’ve written about the layoff already, and this is the last post about it. What I want to write about is what I’ve been doing since. And if you’re in the middle of it right now, maybe some of this helps.
There were four stages for me. They came in that order, more or less, and a few of them overlapped. I’m still in the last one.
The quiet. After eight years at Disney, my role was gone. I told people I’d be fine and I meant it. What I remember most is people telling me I deserved a break, that I should take some time for myself. Then the quiet set in. It wasn’t just that first week. It was the rest of April and into May, and that’s when it became real. I had been looking forward to being back in the office with my colleagues, and that went away with the role.
The search. Looking at other people’s resumes online got me thinking about where the last eight years actually went. They went into Disney+, and I wanted that to show, along with how much that time meant to me. I also knew I could build something myself, so my resume became a streaming site. Then I applied to a lot of roles and took a lot of calls. Friends and former colleagues checked in on me through all of it, some weekly and some daily, over LinkedIn, over text, and in person. Those messages meant a lot. Thank you.
The low. This part was harder than I expected. Roles I applied for got filled, and recruiters stopped answering. A lot of what did come in was people posing as recruiters who only wanted my personal information, and sorting the real messages out from those took real time. The rest of it is harder to explain. Some of it was psychological, and some of it I still can’t name. There was something special about working for a place that everyone loves, and then one day it was gone. That sat uneasy in my stomach.
Building. I never took that break. Ten days after the layoff I was building again, and I haven’t stopped since. This is where I picked myself back up. Some of it started before I left. In my last stretch at Disney I was one of a small group of TPMs leading AI adoption across our program management organization, and I helped my own team pick up these tools. I’m thankful my manager and my team gave me that opportunity. After the layoff I started going to AI developer events around San Francisco, Cursor and Claude among them. After all those quiet weeks, those rooms were the opposite, full of people making things. I’m lucky to live near where so much of this is being built, and I’ve been part of that community ever since. Sitting with the people building it, watching the landscape change month to month, has been incredible. The part I missed most after the layoff was working on something with other people, and building in the open gave me that back. It has given me a new life.
I work as a program manager, a designer, and someone who builds the thing himself. What follows is what that has looked like since April.
DPM is short for Design Program Management. It comes out of the work I’ve done for years, and I built all of it myself, the process model and the code. I wanted to make the tool for the discipline I practice.
CyberRuler is a native macOS app I wrote in Swift. It’s the on screen rulers, guides, and loupe I wanted on my own desk, so I built them instead of paying for them.
I also stood up my own practice. Studio Practice is the name on all of it now, and it’s how I take on client work, web audits, and sites.
And there’s this paper. The Dispatch runs on software I wrote, on a domain I own, and no platform decides who gets to see it.
I didn’t plan any of this. One project led to the next one, and some weeks all of them need me at once.
The difference lately is that the work brings people in. It has started conversations I never would have had, and some of those turned into real connections. A few came from readers who found the paper and wrote to me. There are a few doors I’m not going to talk about here.
None of that came from an application. I built in the open where people could find it, and every opportunity that has mattered since April started with something I made.
None of this means I’ve stopped looking. I want my next role, and I’m having those conversations now. What I build on my own is what I would bring to it.
I’m not going to call the layoff a gift, because it wasn’t. But I’m in a better place now than I was in April.
If you’re going through this right now, keep going. Stay curious, keep learning, and build something where people can see it. Find the rooms where others are doing the same. That’s what moved me out of the low.
If you’ve taken the time to stop by my dispatches, and maybe even thought about leaving me a letter, thank you. I appreciate it. For years I’ve wanted a place like this. Not a profile, not a feed, but something I actually own. A place where I tell my own story and share things from my past and whatever I’m building right now.
So I built my own instead of posting on someone else’s platform. Those platforms are good at pushing you to pick a lane. On LinkedIn I’m the professional. Somewhere else I’m the design guy, the car guy, or the dad. Here, it all fits. Nothing is off topic.
Expect range. Technology, design, product, and AI, but also cars, family, and the occasional story from the past that still has something to teach me.
I built it to feel like a newspaper on purpose. It’s inspired by the paper, from an era that forced us to slow down. A feed is built to keep you moving. A paper you sat with. I wanted that back. And unlike a feed, a paper is something you can write back to. That is what the letters are for.
Welcome to The Dispatch. I’m glad you’re here.
—Wilfredo
Founder of Studio Practice
