Andy Balinsky spent his career in computer security, tracking intruders through military networks. Retired now, he's pointed that same attention at the things he loves: a podcast player that lets music keep playing underneath, a crib sheet for the hundreds of traditional Irish session tunes he's learned, and “Purple Skies”, a field app for the Purple Martin colonies he and his wife have tended for 25 years. We get into why the hard part of building software now isn't the code — it's the decisions that make it usable in the nebulous human realm.
Michael Porcelli builds software for himself — not for other people, just for his own life. A former techie who left the field two decades ago, he walks us through three projects born out of ordinary domestic problems: a receipt splitter for mile-long Costco bills, a ledger tracking his siblings' equity in an inherited house, and a database of his late father's 75,000-card baseball collection. We get into why he emphatically doesn't want to turn any of it into a product, and why an AI agent is like a handyman with a truck full of tools living in your back yard.
Jonathan Milton has worked in healthcare operations for most of his career, wrestling with gnarly problems like how to fill nursing shortages without relying too much on temp agencies. We talk about how he turned his hard-won expertise into useful tools — a calculator that exposes the fully loaded cost of staffing, and a game to coach future health care execs — and how removing the technical friction of building software lets a domain expert go from idea to working tool in an evening.
Jim Hanas spent his career in publishing — most recently as VP of Marketing at HarperCollins — but he hadn't been "under the hood" of technology in twenty years. Then a couple of friends got him "Claude-pilled", and within weeks he'd launched smallpressinsights.com, a dashboard that tracks the performance of small press books. We get into his three principles for building (slow, thoughtful, clear), his "ocean and lenses" metaphor for data, and how he runs Claude Cowork as a PM that writes tickets for Claude Code to implement.
In this episode, I speak with Mark Wochner — acoustic engineer, DIY aficionado, and maker of great cocktails — about building software in hotel rooms across three continents, his Historicast app for looking up the weather in the past, and why building for an audience of one might be the most freeing thing you can do.
In this episode, I speak with Sharon Klardie about her "AI minions" — and how she's using them to build Board Forge for nonprofit boards, publish puzzle books, and prototype a math game for her 10-year-old.
In this episode, I speak with the amazing Jacquelyn Halpern on how she got started with AI-assisted coding, and how she created a cooking app for herself and her family called Lil' Chef.
In this short introductory episode, I introduce what the Conjuring Code podcast is all about: helping regular people like you build software, using AI to help write the code. The pitch is simple: AI now handles all the tedious, mysterious "bad hard" parts of programming, leaving you free to focus on the "good hard" part of figuring out what's actually worth making.
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