I committed myself to learning AI and vibe coding over the summer, and I made more progress than I ever dreamed possible while returning to my programming roots.

I made more than 7 fully functioning web apps in next.js. No courses, just got my hands dirty and tried to build things I’d actually use.

1. An intuitive compound interest visualizer
2. A dynamic Instagram carousel post maker (and LinkedIn PDF maker) that turns my text posts automatically into gorgeous image sequences with custom, cryptographic Easter eggs that would never be possible with a human designer.
3. A dynamic custom podcast artwork generator with batch export that’s always procedurally generated, again with the same custom, humanly-impossible features.
4. A blog uploading app that takes Notion markdown, simultaneously reformats it for LinkedIn, HTML (Webflow), and my newsletter and puts it into Airtable after checking all my previous posts for redundancy. Then, a make.com automation that automatically posts to my blog, my newsletter, and LinkedIn daily from my database. (That’s how you’re reading this post.)
5. A truly flawless custom 5-star review carousel that randomly takes a selection of my best reviews from Udemy and puts them into a responsive slider for my personal website, better than any .js swiper library I’ve ever used.
6. A transcription app that has transcribed all of my past podcasts, chunked them for vector storage in Supabase, and a RAG agent that lets me query any of the hundreds of podcasts I’ve ever made.
7. And a living digital resume that lives on my site for speaking gig booking.

I feel like I know SO much more about the pros and cons of all of these platforms, how APIs all integrate with one another, and the fundamentals of the modern coding ecosystem.

In short, I’m blown away. This has by far been one of the most exciting times of personal knowledge I’ve ever had.