I spent some time going through the side projects I’ve built. Digibank was probably the first ever one, created with my own sweat and blood.
I built it when my kids were young and they didn’t have a real bank account yet. I wanted a way for them to keep track of how much money they had, and how much it would relatively decrease if they chose to buy something. It’s no longer live, but I found some old blog posts talking about it, on LinkedIn sadly. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/summer-learning-project-update-jocelyn-mae-englund/ )
I had temporarily blogged it on a self-hosted WordPress that I stopped paying for, so I have now lost all that content. I need a way to extract the LinkedIn content, and dedup that with my current blog that is hosted on WordPress.
Anyway, reading all the old posts, it seemed like a bit of a saga building such a simple app. I had to go through some UX exercises, but maybe that was more for me to actually apply things that I had learned then. The year was 2019 and I was interested in practicing all those skills related to user experience, scrum methodologies and TDD.
Fast forward to 2023, not sure why it took a few years before I picked up another summer project, but I worked on https://wishlist.itsybit.se. This one is at least still alive. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/trying-out-co-pilot-build-side-project-summer-jocelyn-mae-englund)
This was probably my first AI-assisted project, although that wasn’t so much agentic coding but more having AI as a resource to bootstrap things. This project also took the entire summer break to actually get out, although a lot less tedious, and well, I guess I didn’t pay much attention to UX and all these other processes, as I really just wanted to get an app out to solve a problem I had — managing my kids’ birthday/Christmas wishlists.
Looking at this app now, I feel like it’s almost time for a V2, vibecoded version, though it has been working quite well, and our kids have been happily using the app.
Now 3 years later, we’re not even in summer yet, I’ve already built quite a number of apps thanks to AI agents. I had to create a page on my home page (also put together finally thanks to AI) in order to keep track of all the apps that I’ve been experimenting with, 7 apps and counting! https://itsybit.se/projects
The speed at which we can take idea to product now is mind blowing. I can’t even keep up, not sure if it’s a good or bad thing yet. I do know that this should be something that is made available to everyone. Everyone should be able to build tools that will make their own lives easier.
being in tech 