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Tinkering with tech

“I am confident my son would’ve built NVidia and Google. The only things he was missing were talent and intelligence.”

— my mother, probably

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. 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 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 files with YAML headers. It grammar-checks chapters via OpenAI’s API and uses Pandoc to generate styled Word docs. It works great 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.

At work

I won’t get into specifics but I built little tools that help me with analytics, prototyping etc.

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. I got yawns. 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
  • SQL/Postgres
  • AWS (SES, Lambda, DynamoDB, EventBridge, S3, SNS, CloudFront, Bedrock, Route 53)
  • Figma for design
  • OpenAI/Gemini API’s
  • Vue, Astro, Htmx.