Bobtail.app
Jun 2024
Bobtail.app is no longer live — I've learned what I wanted to from the project and keeping it running was a small but ongoing cost. This post was originally published on Linkedin. I’m moving it here for posterity.
Every year I set myself a new creative resolution – this year, it was to learn (enough) development skills to launch an app. The goal explicitly wasn’t to start a viable business or to reach an arbitrary KPI, simply to stretch myself and build my skills.
I settled on exploring the space between the asynchronous qualities of early-2000s forums with more current influences – social media and ‘walled garden’ products like Slack and Discord.
I pushed my first code on January 8th. Over the next few months, I continued to iterate on the design and development of a multi-user platform with most of the features of the platforms that were my inspirations – user profiles, content uploads, reactions, channels, and more.
I started with basic knowledge of what I wanted to accomplish but very little idea of how to get there. I leaned heavily on ChatGPT to help me make progress – not in terms of ‘write the code for me’, but ‘help me understand’. I’m certainly not going to be hired as an engineer any time soon, but over the course of building this app, I steadily earned confidence and know-how – my AI queries trended from “is this right?” to “will this do what I think it’ll do?”.
Though I set out to learn only engineering skills, along the way I also picked up knowledge in engineering’s orbit: server provisioning, database management, configuring CDNs, and much more. I also gained a heightened respect for my engineering colleagues who manage this complexity day in and day out.
In my opinion, AI won’t turn a non-coder into a coder. But: it can unlock low-knowledge coders (like myself!) to expand their reach significantly. It’s unbelievably worth it to create for the sake of creating – I’m already pumped up about what I can do next. Jumping into unfamiliarity and discomfort hasn’t just made me an okay-ish developer, but a more thoughtful designer.
If you’d like to see where I ended up, you can sign up right now. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Am I very proud of what I was able to accomplish, starting from zero? You bet.