Even a few months ago this might have felt like a weird question.
Have. You. Built. An. App. Today?
Seriously? A new app, every single day? How is that possible?
It used to be that creating something in the software space took a LOT of time. You need design time – what are you building? You need coding time – how are you building it? You need a reason for building it – who is your audience?
Today? If you start from an audience of one, yourself, and just try and find ways to solve simple problems that you are facing in your daily life then it is incredibly easy to build an app every day.
An app doesn’t need complexity. An app doesn’t need massive security if it is for you running locally on your internal network. An app doesn’t need the cloud.
As someone who has been in this space for many years, it is mind-boggling to me to see how much it has changed. While I did not ever have the pleasure of actually working with this type of system, I got to see and talk to professors who used to teach software via punch cards in college.
For the uninitiated, this would be where you write a software program. You need to be really, really good at this because once you write, tested, debugged the theoretical program, you then used a machine to translate that code onto cards where the instructions would be literally punched out as small holes on cards. These cards would then be fed into the computer which would read the instructions and execute the program.
Had a bug? Didn’t run as expected? Start all over again.
And heaven help you if you got the cards out of order. Don’t drop the cards!
Even beyond punch cards, once we have actual computer memory there is code like Assembly. Very raw, low-level coding to write to and read from registers. Math, multiplication, planning, debugging was a nightmare.
We have extrapolated all of this complexity into higher and higher planes of the computing space until the code that is written today is a mind-bending abstraction of high-level concepts and ideas.
Spoiler alert – somehow that fancy code all boils down to simple 1s and 0s on a disk somewhere.
Which brings us to AI.
We are somewhere near a tipping point here. It used to be that someone could get very, very good at writing code. Then they would pair with someone very, very good at creating ideas. Add a few more pieces around them and you have an engineering team and soon thy are spitting out products that other people want.
That paradigm has shifted.
What AI is, what it represents right now isn’t a replacement for all of these people. Instead, it allows the coder to create designs and the product manager to write code. These aren’t replacements for each other. They are impact multipliers. There are real human skills there that cannot be replicated by an AI. This brings both of these people closer together, but right now the creativity, connective tissue, and overall solid architecture cannot be generated from a prompt.
So, what is AI?
In my opinion, AI is the best, most amazing tool ever invented to grow and learn.
Which brings me back to the original question: Have you built your daily app today?
I have. I have used AI to learn and to build something new every single day for the past few months. The challenges I used to hit when wanting to simple build and engineer new things are not walls, they are reduced to speedbumps.
Want to dive deeper in Typescript? Standing up a dev environment and getting a foundation going was no fun and would take a while. Now? Skip right past most of it and get onto coding and learning and building something tangible right away.
See an article about more Rust support on Linux – learn and dive right in.
The thing is, I learned a long time ago that the concepts that tie together software are common across software languages and technologies. You must find a way to build up your foundational knowledge of how all of this works.
For me, this came from college and a desire to keep learning. Build your base. AI can’t do this for you. If you don’t learn this then you will not make it in this field.
The rest of it comes down to creativity, curiosity, and drive. Can you come up with a simple problem every day to solve? Are you curious how that next technology works or to go deeper on something you already know? Do you have the desire to build something new every day?
If you can build up both halves of this coin – the base fundamentals, data structures, learn some SQL and how databases work – and then pair that with your own imagination and keep the fire of learning burning bright then you have a great recipe for success.
As for me? My next app is calling.
As always, thank you for reading and have an awesome day!