Adventures In App Building: Carnadh, The Bookshelf App
Book piles, a Japanese word, and an app named in Irish. How I built Carnadh, a household library you catalog by taking photos of your shelves.
Posts
All posts, newest first.
Aug
28
Blog
Aug
21
Blog
Code Is Weird
If you feel like you should be able to read code but can't, there's nothing wrong with you. Code is cryptic, terse, and arbitrary for reasons that have nothing to do with you—and these days you can just ask the agent to translate it.
Aug
17
Podcast
Episode 07 - Software Is For The Birds with Andy Balinsky
Andy Balinsky spent his career in computer security. 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 hundreds of traditional Irish session tunes, and a field app for the Purple Martin colonies he and his wife have tended for 25 years.
Aug
07
Blog
A Contractor In Your Back Yard
Software engineers have spent 50 years building millions of tiny specialized tools. An AI coding agent is the handyman who knows which one your job needs—and he's parked in your back yard.
Aug
05
Podcast
Episode 06 - Building the Toolbox with Michael Porcelli
Michael Porcelli builds software for himself, not for other people: 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.
Jul
16
Blog
Hail Mary, Full Of Grease
The hero of Project Hail Mary does things no lone scientist ever could—unless he brought along something like an AI coding agent. That's the hopeful vision of AI: not a replacement, but a quiet tool for doing much bigger things.
Jun
19
Blog
Gears And Ghosts
There are now two kinds of software: gears and ghosts. The best systems will combine them both.
Jun
17
Podcast
Episode 05 - Closing the Gap with Jonathan Milton
Jonathan Milton on turning his healthcare-operations expertise into useful tools — a calculator that exposes the fully loaded cost of staffing, and a game to coach future health care execs on solving the human problems well.
May
19
Podcast
Episode 04 - Indexing the Indies with Jim Hanas
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.
May
16
Blog
Apps That Work The Way You Think
Personal software lets you build for the way your brain actually works—not the way someone else thinks it should.
May
15
Blog
Beta Part Deux
Beta round 2 of the Conjuring Code book launches Friday, May 15th. If you'd like to be a beta reader, sign up here.
May
08
Podcast
Episode 03 - Cutting Through the Noise with Mark Wochner
Mark Wochner on 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.
May
01
Podcast
Episode 02 - Making an Impact with Sharon Klardie
Sharon Klardie on 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.
Apr
30
Blog
The Guessing Machine
LLMs are guessing machines—deeply capable and fundamentally untrustworthy at the same time. Knowing when to trust their guesses is the key to using them well.
Apr
24
Blog
Do-Over
When AI coding goes sideways, you have an option programmers never really had before: just take a do-over.
Apr
17
Podcast
Episode 01 - Cooking Up Apps with Jacquelyn Halpern
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.
Apr
17
Podcast
Episode 00 - Introducing The Conjuring Code Podcast
AI now handles 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.
Apr
15
Blog
Post-Its
When software becomes as cheap and disposable as a Post-It note, we'll use it for things we haven't even imagined yet.
Apr
10
Blog
First Draft: Check ✅
The first draft of Conjuring Code (the book) is done! It's now in the hands of early beta readers.
Mar
29
Blog
Programming Is Going To Be For Everybody
Programming legend Steve Yegge is right: programming is going to be for everybody. And it's going to be the most amazing thing.
Feb
27
Blog
When Do You Need A Professional Engineer?
Is it OK to let AI write code for you? It depends on three things: longevity, reach, and consequences.
Feb
20
Blog
The Great Deflation Is Great
In most fields, software is so crappy, it's practically a bad word. The great deflation in software costs is very good news.
Feb
9
Blog
Super Idea
The Super Bowl ad that captures the joy of discovering you really can build software now, even if you couldn't before.
Feb
4
Blog
The Decision Pyramid
Programming is a series of decisions. AI moves you up the decision pyramid by making all the choices you don't want or need to make.
Jan
29
Blog
Growth Mindset for AI
AI is uneven and changing rapidly. Are you guilty of having an AI fixed mindset?
Jan
27
Blog
Software Is The Best Thing You Can Do With AI
There are lots of things you can do with AI, and in my opinion, most of them are bad. The only slam dunk for AI is using it to make software.
Jan
25
Blog
Flying
This feels like the zeitgeist right about now ...
Jan
22
Blog
Work On A Copy
Building software is among the best things you can do with AI, because you can always work on a copy.
Jan
20
Blog
Anti-Slop
I am anti-slop, and I think using AI to make software you actually care about is anti-slop, too.