Welcome to my blog. I'm Kurt. I'm a software engineer going through a mid-life crisis with a longtime desire to start my own business. I am going to use this as a public forum to document my start-up experience. Follow along through all my lessons learned, failures, perseverance, and (hopefully) successes.

I originally got into software development 10+ years ago with an ultimate goal of creating my own business. Years passed, promotions came and went, and urge to create something of my own remained. No time like the present to pursue it.
I have primarily been a Ruby on Rails developer within the start-up world for my career so that will be the technology that I will be using to build and test my ideas. I am going to be using AI to help me along the way. I have a strong distrust of AI and the some of the usages and manipulations that we are already seeing in its' infant existence, but I also see the power in it's capabilities that will help automate daily tasks. I kept hearing about Vibe Coding, but never paid too much of mind and assumed it's another tech fad that will come and die off quickly.

For those that don't know Vibe Coding, the TLDR is that you send prompts to AI to generate code, features, etc. with minimum human interaction. I built this blog through vibing as an opportunity to test it out... and I am sold on it. It feels similar to my experience as a Senior/Staff Software Engineer where the focus is more on system designs, code reviews, and mentoring - mentoring computers and algorithms instead of humans. From my limited time of vibe coding, I have noticed that having software development background has definitely helped fixed some issues created by AI and prevented other future issues, so I don't see vibe coding as the end-all-be-all ...yet. Progress is happening at lightning speed in this space, so we'll see where the future takes us.

The inspiration for all of this; the blog, the fast implementations, etc. came when reading Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan. It was the kick in the butt that I needed and combined with my recent obsession of vibe coding it became a no brainer to start testing all those ideas that have been brewing for decades. I have always started projects and have never seen them all the way through. And I think that's because of a simple concept that Noah talks about throughout his book:

It's that simple (for me). I have always been self critical and have always been afraid to actually deploy my own projects in fear of others rejecting them. Not anymore. I've been learning and observing the start-up life from an individual contributor perspective and it's time to dive into the unknowns and embrace failure instead of fearing it. 

I'm not sure where I'm going in this whole process. I have been bouncing around the concept of starting a YouTube vblog (do they still call them that?) that details my vibe coding experience and different business ideas I will be implementing and marketing to see what sticks. We'll see what type of response any of this brings. For now, welcome to my journey. Thank you for reading and welcome to the ride.

🤘 Kurt