Things have been pretty busy at my art studio lately. During the day, I'm teaching drawing classes, and at night, I'm working on websites and software.
My schedule has been so packed that I haven't had much time to update my personal website.
A little while ago, I added another computer to my workspace. Now I have three computers running side by side, some for web development and others for building Windows applications.
Having three computers definitely makes things more productive, but it also creates a practical problem: How do I easily share files between them?
I mean, I can't keep plugging a USB drive into different computers all day, right?
So I decided to build my own little tool called PebblePaste.
The idea was simple: make copying, pasting, and transferring files between computers feel as natural as possible. No complicated setup, no unnecessary features. Just something that works the way we're already used to working.
Then, after using it for a while, another thought crossed my mind.
If all three computers are sitting right next to each other, why can't they share the same mouse and keyboard?
So I kept building and added mouse and keyboard sharing, which eventually became PebblePasteX.
Now, switching between computers feels much more like working on one big machine.
Once I'd tackled the computer-sharing problem, I started thinking about something else.
I spend more than ten hours a day in front of a computer. But where does all that time actually go?
Some days, I feel incredibly busy. Yet when the day is over, I can't always remember exactly what I accomplished.
That led me to build another Windows application called PebbleTape.
It records computer activity and helps me look back at how I spent my day. I think of it more as a mirror than a monitoring tool. After all, if I'm spending that much time working, I'd like to know where those hours are going.
I've added all three projects to my website:
Looking back, it's pretty interesting how all of this happened.
My background is in fine arts and graphic design. I'm not a traditional software engineer.
But with AI coding tools, ideas that once existed only in my head are slowly turning into actual software I can use.
And I'm not building these applications just to increase my project count. Each one started with a real problem I ran into while working.
Of course, they're still evolving. There's more testing, polishing, and improving to do before they become truly mature software products.
But one thing I've come to appreciate is that the most exciting part of building software isn't how many lines of code I've written.
It's that moment when I realize:
Hey, that annoying little problem I deal with every day? I can actually build something to fix it myself.
So yes, my personal website has been a little quiet lately.
But I haven't stopped creating. I've just been spending more time building things than writing about them.
Drawing and teaching during the day. Building software at night.
Two things that might seem completely unrelated.
Somehow, they've become a pretty natural combination in my life.