Hell yes. I’ve written a unit price calculator, a tip calculator, a “how many plates do I need to put on this barbell to reach X weight?” app, a “am I connected to the Internet” app, and a few other small things. Other people have already written apps like these. But these apps work the way I want them to, and they were good learning experiences.

Great article! For a few years, I was always deterred from projects because they had already been done and better, so there was no reason to do it. Now, though, I just enjoy implementing things in my own janky way and learning a bit along the way.

If you’re into doing these kinds of projects I wholeheartedly recommend Sebastian Lague’s YouTube channel. Each video is a new project and it is presented in an accessible and inspiring way.

I like Shortcuts as a way of implementing a more declarative understanding to create toy programs. These satisfy a modular and immediate need and you can chain them together to build bigger programs too

Scriptable is a javascript version of Shortcuts which I love for this purpose also

Actually just did this (used ChatGPT haha blush) to create a script to take a songlist and output it reformatted so it says what time each song plays and now i just need to find a good source for album tracklists and I’ll have a great toy solution for that problem

I dont want to spend 3 days or even 3 hours on tinkering to get that right, its enough for me that if it doesnt do what I envision I know how to reprompt or reframe or do some trial and error tests that help nudge the approach to where it produces what I need from it and i can move on to the next problem or iterating on this to refine and improve the solution. Maybe even my overall process, who knows

I made a lot of these things when I was starting learning coding like a cash register app to make change which I’m actually super proud of but I kinda prefer to work a bit higher-level and limit the extent to which I have to reinvent the wheel. I have other innovations I’d like to pursue