HELLO WORLD

For the past few years, I've been playing with the idea of learning how to program.

I did some Codecademy, went through a couple of Udemy courses on Unity and C#, and eventually built a few silly, very small games with Unity, plus a couple of simple websites (on localhost:3000). But I never had the time or opportunity to truly see it through.

Due to some life circumstances, and for the first time in many, many years, I now find myself in the rare position of having a couple of hours each day for learning. It's not much, but I can dedicate at least two to three hours daily to doing whatever I want for the next few months.

Feeling motivated, I dusted off my Codecademy account and… had no idea where to start.

The problem with having been a Product Owner for over 15 years is the burden (or blessing) of having seen many of my peers complain about the limitations of languages, frameworks, platforms, etc. I've worked on console games, PC games, browser games, mobile games and I've seen that the grass is always greener on the other side. I didn’t want to get stuck with the “wrong” language or waste my time on the wrong tool.

Knowing all the ways I could mess up, I spent weeks unable to decide which language to use.

Do I like frontend?
Do I like backend?
Am I too stupid to do backend? (Certainly.)

Again and again, I turned to YouTube, Google, and GPT in search of answers and everyone had different opinions and advice.

I was starting to feel quite stupid until a good old friend, with over 20 years of experience as a developer, told me to just start shipping products.

"That's what you know," he said. "You're a builder. Just get shit done. With time, you'll get a feel for what you like best and more importantly, what you don't like."

I’d built a couple of Unity games in the past and remembered the thrill of seeing something I’d made actually being used by other people. So I followed his advice and got started.

"Ah, by the way, you should take a look at RAILS. I hear it’s gotten much better these days," he said as he left.

Rails? I remember one of our backend engineers using Rails back in 2011 to ship one of our games onto Facebook. People spoke highly of it back then. It must be good...

Without putting much thought into it, and armed with a few LLMs, I started building a small application for my fitness coach. He had been sending me his training and diet plans through WhatsApp in PDFs and I remember thinking:

"It’s 2025 and he’s still sending these via WhatsApp? This just feels... outdated."

So I figured it would be easy to build a solution. From a product perspective, it’s a no-brainer. There are a million fitness apps out there. So, quoting the Fireship guy on YouTube: I started building it, not because it was easy, but because I thought it would be.

Needless to say, it ended up becoming a full product, not just a small tool to help him manage his clients, but a real application.

Not long after starting, I ran into the hard walls and swampy terrain that come with blindly trusting LLMs. Don’t get me wrong, what I’m doing would be impossible at this speed (and at this stage probably at any speed) without them. But if you just follow their suggestions without understanding what’s happening, you’ll land in some very real, very deep pits of despair. You’ll drown in your own tears unless you take the wheel yourself.

What was supposed to be a simple body fat calculator and PDF manager turned into an app with Coaches, Customers, image storage and comparisons, mesocycle rules and entries, and don’t even get me started on how I learned why CAPTCHA is a thing... the hard way. (The internet is a cruel, dark wasteland where some people just want to see the world burn. If you’re coming from mobile app environments, it gets scary, fast.)

I’ll use this space to jot down small notes about the most likely very stupid and obvious things I’m learning as I wrap up these products.

As of today, the fitness app is about 60% complete in terms of functionality. I’ve decided to start this blog to document my learnings. I’ll be using Codecademy to continue learning the fundamentals, running experiments based on those lessons here on the site, and continuing to develop both the fitness app and other projects along the way.