#1: Derby or Not
Background
I built this app while drinking beer and making sure my daughter didn’t accidentally smash her face. It was an experience I think I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
We were in Hawaii, taking a break from the pool, while my daughter was jumping on the furniture despite both my wife and I begging her to stop. While I was scrolling Twitter, I saw a tweet that caught my eye. It was the day of the Kentucky Derby, and somebody made a graphic showing the names of the horses in the race. And I thought to myself, “what the fuck are these names?”
I was about to share the tweet with my friends and say “if you give me one of these names and nonsense, I couldn’t tell you which one’s actually a horse’s name” when an idea hit. Instead of saying this point, why don’t I show it by building a simple quiz app?
It was a fun and simple idea, but in the past, it probably would have gone nowhere. To actually build an idea from scratch and get the experience and corner cases right would have taken me longer than I’d like. I’m not a bad engineer, but I’m not cracked, (at least not yet) and pre-GenAI, it would have taken me hours at best and realistically a couple days. And that’s assuming I would have had dedicated time to focus and concentrate, which any parent of a toddler knows, is like hoping the sun will rise in the West.
But these types of projects are perfect for the AI tools, and I’d bought a Bolt subscription earlier that month, so I asked myself “how fast can I whip this up?” It took a few iterations and tweaks to the UI but the answer was “10 minutes.”
What I Built
The result was Derby or Not.
The app is pretty simple: you’re presented two names and have to guess which one is the Kentucky Derby horse.
You do that 10 times and at the end you’re told how many you got right.
If you try it out, let me know your score. It will be just as important as points in Who’s Line Is It Anyway?, but maybe you’ll have fun. [1]
What I Learned
My reaction to building and deploying this app was a lot like Ashton Kutcher seeing Josh Gad’s PC for the first time (i.e. first 12 seconds of this trailer). I’d seen the Loom videos and heard the testimonials of people who quickly built and deployed web apps using tools like Lovable, Bolt, and Replit, but it was another thing entirely to do it for myself. To put it bluntly, it was a “holy shit” moment.
So what did I learn?
If you have a simple idea and know what you want, you don’t need to know how to code. You can Rick Rubin it.
The integration of these tools is more mature than I expected. While I used Bolt to design and build the app, it automatically linked to Netlify to host it. I didn’t even have a Netlify account!
Anyway, if you want to build something silly and fun but don’t know CS, that’s fine. Take the leap! And if you have questions, feel free to reach out.
What’s Next
Similar to Calvin Candie in Django Unchained, where GenAI once had my curiosity, it now had my attention. I had another idea I’d been wanting to build out for months … could Bolt one-shot that as well? Read this to find out. [2]
[1] One of my friends got 1/10, which is incredible, because if you guess randomly you should be able to get 2 or more 99% of the time.
[2] No. No it couldn’t. But I did build it.