The workshop metaphor fits because most of these projects are in motion.
Some are polished enough to share. Some are half-built. Some are sketches. Some are reminders to revisit an idea when the timing is better.
That is how real making works.
A website can make everything look more finished than it is. I would rather let this one show the process.
Some people enter software through school. Some through startups. Some through computer science programs. My path wandered through technical theatre, live entertainment, production systems, operational troubleshooting, and a long habit of asking why a workflow had to be so painful. That background changes how I think about software. I am less interested in elegance for…
Small utilities are underrated. Not every idea needs to become a platform. Some tools only need to do one job well enough that a recurring annoyance disappears. A tiny recorder. A simple cue sender. A configuration exporter. A status page. A converter. A monitor. These may not sound glamorous, but they are often the tools…
There is a moment in a project where it stops being a demo and starts being useful. It may still be ugly. It may still have rough edges. It may still need better packaging. But it does the thing. That moment matters because it changes the relationship with the project. Suddenly the question is not…
Codex is most useful when I treat it like a capable collaborator, not a vending machine. The better I describe the project constraints, the better the results become. The more I preserve context in READMEs, checklists, and changelogs, the less likely future work is to drift. The pattern is becoming clear: ChatGPT helps shape the…
One of the most frustrating parts of AI-assisted development is watching a working feature disappear. Not because anyone intended to remove it. Not because the idea was bad. It just gets lost in the churn. A layout changes and a compatibility fix vanishes. A build script improves and the package structure regresses. A new feature…
The operator test is simple: Would this help someone make a better decision under real conditions? A tool can be beautiful and still fail the test. A dashboard can have dozens of widgets and still not answer the one question an operator actually has. A monitoring screen can be technically impressive and still bury the…