A year and three months ago, I thought software was something other people made.
I had used consumer AI for about as long as it had existed. I would ask it questions, get it to help with drafting, lean on it to organise my life. But the idea that I could go from that to building something that looked like real software, the kind I used at work and happily paid for, felt completely alien to me.
My husband, Tom, is a computer scientist and a software developer. I used to look over at his screen, all black background and green text, his fingers going tappy-tappy-tappy like something out of The Matrix, and think: that is tech, and tech is not for me. It is never going to make sense to me.
I think a huge number of clever, capable people feel exactly that way. Not because they couldn't understand it, but because nobody ever sat them down and showed them it was for them. A lot of us carry a quiet mental block, where the idea of learning "all that" feels impossible and a little frightening.
Then I left my safe, sensible job as a lawyer to try to build a legal tech startup. I took my collection of ideas and I went looking for someone technical to build them for me. Tom said the thing that changed everything: "Why don't you start learning how to do this yourself? It's not that hard. I can get you over the first bit. And the AI coding tools are getting really good."
It took one person, in plain words, saying: you open this, you type this, then this happens, and that is what it means.
So he sat down with me and got me over the first hurdle. That was all it took. As soon as I was over that, I was off and running.
That was eighteen months ago. The tools were good then. They are in a completely different world now.
Today I run that same legal tech startup on my own. It is just me. I build the tools, I ship them, I run everything. I am not telling you that to show off, and I am not suggesting you need to go and found a company. I am telling you because if I can do it, the version of me from fifteen months ago who thought green text was magic, then you can absolutely build small tools that make your own life easier, at work or at home.
And that is the whole point of what I am starting here.
There are plenty of people, especially in law, showing off the clever things they have built with AI. Almost nobody is teaching ordinary people how to do it themselves. I want to be the person who does that. The Tom, if you like, who sits you down and gets you over the first hurdle.
So here is the rough plan, with an honest caveat at the top: I have not entirely decided yet how this series will be structured. What I do know is that I want to teach you to build a real, genuinely useful tool, and then run it yourself on your own computer. The big one I have in mind is a passive time recording tool: something that sits quietly on your laptop, notices what you are working on, and writes it up for you, so you barely have to touch your time recording software again.
I originally thought I would build that tool and sell it to law firms. But legal tech is deafeningly noisy right now, and honestly I don't think it is something I can sell (or at least, not right now). So instead I am going to teach you to build it, and release the code for free. If it would have changed my life back when I was billing time in private practice, then maybe it will change yours too.
Whether the passive time recorder is the right first build for a beginners' series, or whether we start somewhere smaller and friendlier and work up, I am still chewing on. The list of things I might teach is on the tutorials page. They are all "maybes" for now. I will figure it out in the open, and you will see me think out loud as I go.
By the time we have built something slightly ambitious together, whatever it ends up being, the simple things will feel easy.
I'm so glad you're here. Follow along, and let's get started.