Tinkering with tech

I love technology. While my coding days ended long ago, I’ve never stayed away from learning and tinkering. While I have no intention of competing with the smart engineers at Amazon or elsewhere, I believe that hands-on experience can help bridge the gap between business, product, and tech. It helps me understand engineering points of view and make better decisions.

There’s a big difference between building something for fun and building something at work. At work, you have the benefits of scale, resources, and a team. When you’re building something for fun, you’re the team, the scale, and the resource. In the former, you are constrained by deadlines, budgets, stakeholders, processes, regulations, and a million other things. In the latter, however, you’re constrained by your own time, your own budget, and your own skills. But you are free to do whatever you please and enjoy the process.

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Here’s some stuff I’ve built as a hobby over the years. They took shape while waiting in airports, sitting in cramped airline seats, during lazy weekends and occasional holidays.

Charting library for mobile software: [C] It was a library for engineers to build business charts in their applications. It had tens of users, I tell you, tens! But it was great to see people wanted it.

A numerical testing site: [JavaScript, C#/ASP.NET, SQL/MySQL] This was pre-Digital Ocean and early AWS days so I didn’t use either. I built a site for people who wanted to take math aptitude tests. I designed the tests, the site, authentication, and used FastSpring for payment. I didn’t advertise at all and SEO did the work. It had a thousand+ paid users and then life got in the way.

a Markdown to Word manuscript processor: [NodeJS/JavaScript, OpenAI API's] The script takes a Markdown file with YAML directives in the Headers, then grammar checks each chapter through Open AI’s API, and finally uses Pandoc to generate a Word doc using a specificed style sheet. It works great and I use it for my Book writing hobby.

This site: [Astro front end with JS/Tailwind/DaisyUI, Htmx/AlpineJS, AWS Bedrock, API Gateway, SES, and DynamoDB at the backend]. You bet it’s over-engineered to hell but I was having fun learning a couple of things.

I’ve also built a few other things, but I’ll stop here.

I can also cite numerous examples of how I’ve used technology at work to solve problems.

(Many years ago, when I was in strategy consulting, I tried teaching SQL to a bunch of super smart analysts. I was excited. I expected thunderous applause, but all I got was yawns and folks falling asleep. I learned that day that not everyone loves tech.)

The laundry list

Here’s a list of languages/frameworks I’ve used over the years.

• C
• C# / ASP.NET
• Java
• JavaScript
• PHP
• SQL/MySQL
• SQL/Postgres
• AWS (SES, Lambda, DynamoDB, EventBridge, S3, SNS, CloudFront, Bedrock, Route 53)
• Figma for design
• OpenAI API’s
• Vue, Astro, Tailwind, Htmx.

Head over to my tools page for a list of tools I love.