Man, September 2021. That was a weird time, you know? I remember staring at my screen, scrolling through stuff, feeling like I was just kinda… floating. Not in a good way, more like being adrift. My job, it was alright, paid the bills, but it didn’t spark anything. It was just a thing I did from nine to five, then shut the laptop and forgot about it until the next morning. It felt dull, like I was stuck in a loop. I kept thinking, “Is this it? Is this all I’m gonna do?”
I needed something else. I felt this itch, deep down, to actually build something, to create something that was mine. I’d always tinkered with little projects, just for fun, but never really pushed any of them. September, though, something shifted. Maybe it was the change of seasons, or just being tired of the same old grind. I saw that horoscope title pop up, about unlocking potential, and even though I don’t really buy into that stuff, it kinda stuck in my head. Like, what is my potential? Am I just letting it sit there, gathering dust?
The Push to Start Something
So, I decided to actually do something about it. I had this idea kicking around for a simple little tool, nothing fancy, just something to help me organize my thoughts better. I’d sketched it out a bunch of times, but always stopped there. This time, I made myself a promise: I was going to actually build it. From scratch.
I started by clearing off my old desk space. It was a mess, full of junk. I threw out a bunch of papers, organized my cables. Just getting that physical space sorted felt like a small win, a first step. Then I dove into the actual work.
- First, I picked a language. I’d messed with Python before, so I figured I’d stick with that. No need to learn something totally new and get bogged down. Just use what I knew, or at least kinda knew.
- Then, I outlined the features. Simple stuff: input text, save it, retrieve it. That’s it. No complicated user accounts, no fancy graphics. Just the bare bones. I kept telling myself, “Keep it simple, stupid.”
- I started with the database. Got a little local one running. That was a headache. I remember spending two whole evenings just trying to get the connection to work right, kept hitting error messages. Felt like smashing my keyboard against the wall, honestly.
- Then came the backend logic. Writing the code to actually save and load text. This part felt a bit smoother, probably because I’d done similar stuff before. I wrote messy functions, didn’t care about making it pretty. Just wanted it to work.
The evenings became my project time. After dinner, instead of zoning out in front of the TV, I’d open my laptop and just get to it. Sometimes I’d be in there until midnight, my eyes burning. My wife would come in, tell me to get some sleep. I’d grumble, but I couldn’t stop. It felt good, the feeling of actually creating something. Even when it was frustrating, it was a good kind of frustrating.
Hitting Walls and Pushing Through
I ran into so many walls. So many bugs. There was this one time, I coded for like three hours, thought I had fixed a major issue, and then I ran it, and the whole thing crashed. I mean, crashed hard. Lost some progress too because I hadn’t saved properly. I just sat there, staring at the blank screen, wanted to throw the whole damn computer out the window. I almost gave up right then and there. I really did.
But then, I don’t know, something just clicked. I went for a walk, cleared my head. Came back, looked at the code fresh. Started deleting stuff, line by line, until I found the error. It was something stupid, a misplaced comma, or a wrong variable name. Just something tiny that broke everything. Fixed it, and suddenly, boom, it ran. That feeling, when something finally works after hours of banging your head against it? That’s pure gold.
I kept at it. I added a basic front-end, just a simple text box and a few buttons. It looked terrible, like something from the early internet, but it functioned. I could type stuff, save it, come back later and see it. It was real. It was mine.
Seeing It Through
By the end of October, I had a working prototype. It wasn’t perfect, still clunky, but it did what I set out to make it do. I showed it to a couple of friends. They looked at it, clicked around, and one of them actually said, “Hey, this is pretty neat. I could use something like this.” That was huge. Just that one comment, that little bit of validation, made all those late nights and frustrations worth it. It felt like I had actually unlocked something, like I had finally taken that potential, whatever it was, and actually built something with it. It wasn’t about the money, or being famous, it was just about doing it. About proving to myself that I could. And man, that feeling of accomplishment? That’s something else entirely.
