Notes from building apps solo, with no coding background. What worked, what broke, and what I actually learned — written for people who think they're disqualified from building.
Excellent AI teaching techniques, scattered across a dozen sites, each wanting its own subscription paid by a volunteer weekend teacher. Why the gap wasn't knowledge, and what Hangeulmaru is trying to be instead.
The businesses are everywhere; the directory isn't. On word of mouth as infrastructure, why it fails exactly the people who need it most, and the app version I'm building now.
Six applications, six rejections, and for five of them I changed almost nothing. What my site actually was, why "resubmit and hope" is not a strategy, and the three things I'd fix first if I started over.
On building without credentials: what AI tools actually changed and what they didn't, why learning everything backwards from bugs works, and the strange advantage of not knowing which projects are supposed to be hard.
There's a public, real-time wall on my front page that anyone can post to. Writing the privacy policy for it found three design decisions I'd never actually made.
Nothing crashed and no error appeared — my site just silently cut the top and bottom off every phone screenshot. Fixing it taught me about aspect ratios, why phones store photos sideways, and why transparent images turn black.
I added photo uploads to this site's project cards. The upload succeeded, the file existed, and every single image still showed a broken icon. The bug was one missing prefix — but understanding it meant finally understanding what a URL actually is.
A QR code on the sanctuary screen, a congregation with phones, and a real-time drawing wall built by someone who can't code. How the first Hatch & Build project went from idea to live event in three days.
Practical how-to guides for running a live drawing wall at a real event. These live on the Drawing Playground site, where the tool itself is: