I Accidentally Started Learning App Development

There’s a very specific kind of confidence that appears right before you eat something labelled “Cajun” despite having the spice tolerance of a Victorian orphan. You tell yourself, “It’ll probably be fine.”

It was not fine.

So naturally, that was the exact moment I decided to record my first podcast episode in weeks.

For anyone wondering where I disappeared to: I didn’t intentionally take a dramatic hiatus. There was no big plan. No artistic retreat. No mysterious disappearance into the woods to “find myself.” What actually happened was much less exciting and far more familiar. Life slowly became busier and busier until recording the podcast stopped being something I naturally sat down and did, and instead became another thing I had to strategically fit into the week.

And once your brain starts treating creative projects like overdue homework, things get weird surprisingly quickly.

Every week I didn’t record made me feel worse about not recording, which then made it harder to come back and record the next week. It’s a genuinely stupid little mental loop that I’m sure most people who make things eventually run into. The annoying part was that I still wanted to do the podcast. I still had things I wanted to talk about. I just didn’t seem to have enough mental bandwidth left at the end of the day to actually sit down and do it.

So I took a break. Longer than I expected.

In that time, I’ve mostly been trying to improve things outside the podcast. One of the biggest changes has been going to the gym consistently. Which still feels strange to say out loud because I have never really been “a gym person.” I think I always imagined gyms as places full of people who naturally understand protein powder and own several water bottles for no reason.

But I’ve actually started enjoying it. Well, “enjoying” might be slightly strong. I enjoy how I feel afterwards.

I’ve mainly been focusing on running because I’m planning to do the Manchester 10K next year after realising I wildly underestimated how much training it would actually take this year. In my head, I’d basically gone, “Three months? Loads of time.”

Turns out your body strongly disagrees with that logic when you haven’t run properly in years.

Still, I can feel genuine progress happening now. I’m faster. I don’t get out of breath as quickly. Walking around generally feels easier. There’s something oddly motivating about suddenly noticing your body quietly becoming more capable without making a huge dramatic thing about it.

Although I still refuse to shower at the gym. Partly because I’d rather just shower at home afterwards, but mostly because gym changing rooms seem to operate under completely different social laws where older men treat clothing as a personal insult. I don’t know why this phenomenon exists. I only know that it does.

The weirdest part of my time away though started because I needed to count characters in a document. That was it. That tiny, boring problem somehow changed the direction of the last few weeks of my life.

I assumed there would obviously be a quick built-in way to do it on my Mac, but every solution involved enough copying and pasting into different apps that it annoyed me. And annoyance is an incredibly powerful motivator when you’re the sort of person who likes tinkering with systems.

So I opened Apple Shortcuts.

I’d never really used shortcuts before because, if I’m honest, most shortcut examples online always seemed bizarrely over-engineered to me. People would proudly show off a shortcut that saves them half a second opening an app, while the shortcut itself looked like somebody had built air traffic control software.

But this felt useful.

I wanted something simple: press a keyboard shortcut, instantly get character count, easy.

Except it absolutely was not easy.

What I thought would take twenty minutes somehow consumed an entire evening because shortcuts require you to explain every single tiny step individually. You can’t just say “count this text.” You have to carefully walk the system through the entire process like you’re explaining language to an alien that arrived on Earth yesterday.

And somewhere during those four hours, something in my brain clicked. I realised I wasn’t frustrated. I was having fun. Now I have a Shortcut that not only gives me a character count but, also, sentence count, paragraph count, reading time, all of that. I may have got carried away.

The thing that made the difference this time was using ChatGPT. Only less like a machine that spits out answers and more like a teacher. Instead of asking it to simply build things for me, I kept asking why it was making certain choices, why certain systems worked the way they did, and what alternatives existed.

That completely changed the experience.

Because tutorials have never really worked for me long term. I always lose motivation once the tutorial ends because I don’t actually care about the thing I’ve built. Nobody dreams of passionately maintaining “To-Do List Tutorial App Number 6.”

But this was different because I was solving problems I personally wanted solved. And once that happened, things escalated quickly.

After the character counter worked, I wanted to build something else. So I asked ChatGPT what kinds of projects would actually fit the things I’m interested in, and it suggested building tools for Dungeons & Dragons.

Which immediately sent me spiralling into a creative black hole.

One of the ongoing things in our D&D games is that my son Toby insists on asking for the names of every random NPC I improvise. Every goblin. Every bartender. Every completely irrelevant shopkeeper I invent on the spot. And I am terrible at inventing names under pressure.

So I built a fantasy name generator.

Then I realised I could generate tavern names too. Then shop inventories. Then random loot. Then entire item tables. And before I knew it, I was sitting there at midnight building systems for fictional fantasy economies like a man who’d accidentally wandered into becoming a game developer.

At some point, I hit the limitations of shortcuts entirely and realised I needed something more powerful.

Which is how I ended up asking:

“What if we rebuilt this using Swift?”

That was about two and a half weeks ago.

Now I’ve got a functioning app running in Xcode that actually works. Not perfectly. Not elegantly. There are definitely parts held together by Strings (ha) and confusion. But it works.

And for the first time ever, coding has stopped feeling like this impossible wall of nonsense syntax and started feeling like a creative tool.

That’s the thing I didn’t expect.

I always thought programming was about memorising information. What I’ve realised is that it’s much closer to problem solving. You slowly learn how to think differently. You stop seeing apps as magical objects and start seeing them as systems made up of lots of smaller decisions stacked together.

Which honestly feels a bit like learning how stage magic works. Once you understand the principles, you suddenly realise the impossible thing was just lots of smaller simple things hidden underneath.

I still have no idea where this project ultimately ends up.

Right now it’s mostly just a weird little D&D tool I built for myself. It doesn’t even have an icon yet. But I can already feel it expanding in my head every day. New systems. New generators. New ideas.

And honestly, that’s probably the most exciting part.

I accidentally found something I genuinely want to keep building.