As some of you may have seen, I'm using ChatGPT to help me create my personal website. It's a bit more complicated than it seems, as I'm not choosing to use a website builder. I'm actually creating a React App powered by a Headless CMS (Strapi) to do so. It's been great.

In a previous post, I talked about how empowering this was because 10 years ago, I wasn't able to do all this myself. The learning curve and feedback loop were too steep, as good as Ruby on Rails and sites like StackOverflow were. My progress has been inspiring to me. Most of my previous projects were dependent on other people. This one has been all me.

At the same time, I'm really enjoying some of the features I've created for my site, mainly the fitness features. I really like logging my workouts and getting a trailing 7-day look at my progress. Moreover, I'm loving the fitness metrics portion of the site, where I can see my progress on various fitness tests. These two things coming together have caused me to consider launching a standalone app that is a lot like WODstack, which I created and sold 10 years ago.

It's taken the better part of two weeks to get the basics done. I'm not mad about that because I only address this in 30-min sessions after the workday is done and the fam goes to bed. I've tried to simply scaffold a React and Strapi app with user authentication, the ability to post, and protected routes three times now. Each time, hitting a wall and wondering if I should start over.

Today, I made the most progress yet and took my local efforts to a GitHub repo. A big moment (if you know, you know). Here are some screenshots of what an early idea looks like: stark, rough, and not very impressive to those who haven't tried this before. For those who have, they know that hours of work and the simple task of creating a successful path is a big deal, especially when you are rolling it from scratch.

Given my station in life, I don't know how much further this project will get. I'm motivated, but at 45 with two teenagers and a demanding job, who knows. But for now, I'm proud of myself.