Keeping the Weekly School Digest Alive with Gemini
ChatGPT lost Google Drive access, so I moved the weekly digest entirely into Apps Script, dropped in a Gemini key, and let Google handle the schedule end-to-end. About 45 minutes of work.
Blog
Madison & Lucy Make a Website in an Afternoon
Madison and Lucy organized Madison's room and thought it was fun. So they made a website for their "organization service." Canva for design, Antigravity for code, done in an afternoon.
Building a Game in 15 Minutes with Google Antigravity
Will had an idea for a leaf-shooting game. We fired up Google's new Antigravity IDE with its spec-driven workflow and browser automation. Fifteen minutes later, we had a working game. Here's what the agentic IDE experience feels like.
Saturday Night Coding with Madison: Building the Wildcats Basketball Site
Movie on, laptops out. Madison and I built a complete basketball team website in a few hours on a Saturday night - just like we did with the soccer site.
From Soccer to Hoops: Adapting Our Stat Tracker for Basketball Season
Basketball season started. Parents asked for a stat tracker. Twenty minutes with Claude Code later, done. Same workflow as soccer: track stats, email summary, ChatGPT turns it into match reports.
Building a ChatGPT App in an Hour: First Look at OpenAI's Apps Platform
Between sets in my basement gym, I used OpenCode and Grok to build a ChatGPT calendar integration in an hour. A story about rapid prototyping, AI-assisted development, and why the security team had questions.
Automating Family Calendar Chaos with GitHub Actions
A Python script running on GitHub Actions automatically combines 6 family calendar sources into one feed every 6 hours. Free automation, 1,200+ events, zero manual work.
Vibe Coding with My First Grader
A 45-minute before-bed build with my son Will became a two-game mini arcade. A couple of Codex prompts, some HTML and JavaScript, and just enough glow to keep a first grader smiling.
Building a Soccer Website with My Daughter: A Quick Coding Adventure
When my daughter Madison's Junior Current soccer team needed a website, I saw a perfect opportunity for a fun father-daughter coding project. With the help of Kiro, AWS's agentic IDE, what could have been a lengthy development process became an enjoyable weekend activity.
Taming the Chaos: Building a Family Calendar System for Three Kids
Managing three kids' schedules across GameChanger, TeamSnap, school calendars, and volunteer commitments was driving me crazy. So I built a unified family calendar system that aggregates everything—and made it public so the grandparents can finally keep up.
Building an AI-Powered Engineering Workflow: My Workshop on Connecting Tools with MCP
I built a hands-on workshop teaching engineers to connect their entire tool chain—Jira, Confluence, AWS, Bitbucket—to AI assistants like Amazon Q and Kiro using the Model Context Protocol. Here's what I learned about breaking down silos and the challenge of maintaining consistent MCP configurations.
Bringing AI Into Everyday Life
I've been using AI heavily at work for a while now. As part of engineering, it's woven into our day to day — accelerating development, automating processes, and helping us think differently about how software gets built...
Running 100 Miles for Childhood Cancer: The Snowdrop Ultra Story
Sometimes the most meaningful challenges come from the most personal places. When my friend's daughter Lexie was diagnosed with cancer, I couldn't help but think about what that would mean for my own daughter and family. That's when I decided to run 100 miles...
Snider's 21 Favorite Podcasts of 2021
Here are my favorite 21 podcasts from 2021, covering everything from business strategy and technology to leadership and personal development. Each one offers unique insights that influenced my thinking throughout the year...