Tinkering with tech

-VERIFIED

My son could build the next NVIDIA. He just needs talent and intelligence.— My Mother, probably[next]

I love technology. My formal coding days are long gone, but I’ve never stopped tinkering. I don’t intend to compete with professional engineers, but hands-on experience bridges the gap between business, product, and tech. It helps me understand engineering perspectives and make better decisions.

Building for fun differs vastly from building for work. At work, you have scale, resources, and a team. You are also constrained by deadlines, stakeholders, and processes. When building for fun, you are the team. You are limited only by your time, budget, and skills. But you are free to build what you please and enjoy the ride.

Here are some hobby projects I’ve built over the years. They took shape in airport terminals, cramped airline seats, and during lazy weekends.

Charting library for mobile software: [C] A library for engineers to build business charts on Palm pilots! It had tens of users. Tens! But it was validating to see people actually want it.

A numerical testing site: [JavaScript, C#/ASP.NET, SQL/MySQL] Built in the pre-cloud era. I designed and coded a site for math aptitude tests, handling everything from content to authentication and payments. Zero advertising; SEO did the heavy lifting. It had over a thousand paid users before life got in the way.

Markdown to Word processor: [NodeJS, OpenAI API] A script that processes Markdown manuscripts with YAML headers. It grammar-checks chapters via an OpenRouter API and uses Pandoc to generate styled Word docs. Pretty handy for my writing hobby.

A pervious version of this site: [Astro, Vanilla JS, Pure CSS, AWS Backend]. Over-engineered to hell? You bet. But I had fun learning new things.

I’ve built many other things, but I’ll stop here.

(Years ago, during my strategy consulting days, I tried teaching SQL to some bright analysts. I expected thunderous applause. They almost fell asleep. Not everyone loves tech.)

The laundry list

Here’s a list of languages/frameworks I’ve used over the years. Though in these vibe-coding times hand-coding is not much of a thing, at least for what I do anyway.

C
C# / ASP.NET
Java
JavaScript
SQL/Postgres
AWS (SES, Lambda, DynamoDB, EventBridge, S3, SNS, CloudFront, Bedrock, Route 53)
Figma for design
Vue, Astro, Htmx.