Berrycakeness

Another project that started well…

My last post was on 21st May, and since then I have been extremely busy doing all of the things I apparently considered more important than writing another one. In my defence, there was a heatwave, and I also adopted the cutest cat in the world.

Those two things alone feel like perfectly acceptable reasons to achieve absolutely nothing, except I have also somehow started building apps. Yup, apps.

I’ve always been a bit of a technology geek. I work in tech, I’ve owned a Raspberry Pi, I love an Excel spreadsheet more than anyone reasonably should, and I’ve spent a significant proportion of my life sitting in front of computers wanting them to do something they weren’t necessarily designed to do.

Although I now write requirements for technology, I’ve never really considered myself someone who makes technology – AI has changed that ever so slightly.

I’ve obviously been using AI for a while, but this year it has gone from being something I occasionally ask questions to something I regularly use to help turn the nonsense inside my head into reality. And if you know me well enough, you know that there is a lot of nonsense inside my head.

The interesting thing is that I’m not particularly interested in asking AI to build something and then wandering off with the finished product pretending I’m some sort of coding genius; I genuinely want to learn.

This has resulted in me learning about Kotlin, Android Studio, GitHub, APIs and adding even more acronyms to my vocabulary.

So far I’ve:

• Built a little Android app
• Planned at least 2 more apps
• Had apps on the brain
• Apps, apps, apps

Because once you realise you can potentially make your own tools, the ideas start multiplying.

I don’t need to wait around for someone else to build the technology I want. I can attempt to make software, spend several hours working out why my button doesn’t work, accidentally break seventeen other things, ask AI what I’ve done wrong, fix it, and experience approximately eight seconds of superiority.

Then something else breaks…

I don’t see myself as a creator, but truly I’ve always created things. Food. Writing. Poetry. Spreadsheets that absolutely did not need to be spreadsheets. Halloween decorations. Playlists. Elaborate plans for projects I may begin sometime around 2030. Software, however, always felt different. There was a technical wall between having an idea and actually being able to make it.

AI has punched a Gemma-sized hole through that wall.

I still need to understand how everything works, and I absolutely don’t know what I’m doing half the time, but that’s become part of the fun. I can have an idea in the morning and have a pretty decent prototype of it by the evening.

Of course, this has done absolutely nothing for my existing problem of having too many projects.

• The maths books still haven’t been purchased.
• The spice rack remains imperfect.
• The garden remains a work in progress.

And I now have a cat supervising proceedings, which mainly involves sitting somewhere inconvenient and contributing nothing technically.

So that’s where I’ve been, temporarily distracted by the discovery that I can make things I previously thought were beyond me.

My list of projects will never end.

Peace out xoxo