Building Knuckly, from 0 to 1.
I love building software, but in the past I’ve relied on engineers to build, while I focused on product work. My fascination with the business-building aspects were just more driving, and I felt, more impactful that implementation and delivery. However, I’ve always wanted to become productive and ship software so I can execute on my own ideas.
What held me back was a support system. I’ve been technical and done programming in bits for a long time. But, I always had trouble with local environment setup, and even more so, getting stuck. I work with fantastic engineers who are happy to help me, but they’re not going to dig in to the degree that I need.
My goal is simple: I want to be able to build and ship custom websites. Eventually, custom apps that build on these skills.
I know what I want to build first, and have done the market research. I have the foundational skills. Now I just need a support system. ChatGPT has been amazing as that support system. I’ve been using it as a paired programming partner, which is a perfect use case. Sometimes ChatGPT is wrong, sometimes it doesn’t have the context of my code and setup, and sometimes it’s wrong. I consider this a fearture, not a bug, because it forces me to think critically about the suggestions it makes, and challenge the approaches it suggests.
One of my concerns is that I’d use ChatGPT as a crutch, and not really learn the technology. The fallability of the LLM has been a feature, not a big, for my needs.
My specific goal has been to build this site using Gatsby as the static site generator so that I have a live project I can use to apply what I learn as I learn Javascript. It’s been incredibly effective.
I’ve only begun my beginner javascript classes, but had to stop because of a medical treatment I was undergoing. I didn’t have the mental capacity to learn all the new concepts, but I could work on existing code in chunks to understand it. It sounds similar, but the approach of building and launching Knuckly was something I could do.
So, with ChatGPT I was able to customize a Gatsby template to be what I needed, learn how it thinks, and get the site deployed without actually knowing javascript (more than superficially). This is what I needed to prove to myself that I can build and ship products.