I just got back from a trip to Disney, so between the Haunted Mansion being on my mind and Halloween being right around the corner, this impulse buy was unavoidable. I saw people posting this Hologram Crystal Ball on social media with uploaded videos of Madame Leota from HM. It turns out, you can upload […]
Adding a Hologram Crystal Ball to My Halloween Setup (and Filling It With My Own Ghosts) Read More »
Two months ago I wrote a post about turning my middle grade novel into a podcast. In it I said the whole thing hinged on cloning my own voice — Mike meets an alternate version of himself every book, so I’d need two Mikes, and an AI clone of me was the obvious answer. I’m
I Was Going to Voice My Kids Podcast Myself. Then I Didn’t. Read More »
The Goal I needed a way to test a short-form video idea for my demotivational speaker alter-ego, Desmond Vance, without sitting in front of a camera every time I had a thought. The plan was simple: I wanted a zero-friction pipeline. I wanted to go from an idea in my head to a published TikTok
How I Cloned Desmond Vance in Gemini and Shipped 10-Second TikToks with Canva Read More »
At my day job, we sometimes host competitive events, and tracking scores on whiteboards or messy spreadsheets was getting old. The goal was to build a dedicated, public-facing leaderboard site to track ongoing bragging rights. The requirements were simple but specific: The Toolkit You don’t need to know how to code to build something like
Tracking Office Bragging Rights Read More »
I roast coffee on a FreshRoast SR800. I also sell roast logbooks for it — paper ones on Amazon, digital files on Etsy. Not a fortune. A handful a month. But “a handful a month, every month” is the cleanest signal there is: people want to log their roasts, and some of them will pay
I Built My Own Coffee Roasting App Read More »
A few years back I started writing a middle grade novel. It’s about a kid named Mike McNulty who lives in a small Jersey Shore town, turns 10, and finds out he has a power passed through his family that can drop him into alternate dimensions where he meets other versions of himself. In his
I wrote a kids book. Or Is It a podcast? Read More »
The app itself was the easy part. Next.js 14, Supabase auth, Tailwind, a calendar view for scheduling Build and Bail posts across TikTok, Shorts, Reels, Reddit, and the blog. Standard stuff. Claude Code knocked that out before I even got seriously involved. Then I tried to deploy it to Cloudflare Pages. Three days, four separate
I built a content calendar app. Shipping it took three days. Read More »
People email me their picks. I put them in a Google Sheet. Every week during the playoffs I manually look up every stat line for every player on every roster and update the numbers by hand. Then I announce standings in the group chat like a town crier reading from a scroll. Six seasons of
Build: WhoStat → Flippa listing Tools used: Claude (chat), Claude Code, Flippa This is the first Build and Bail project to complete the full cycle. Idea. Build. Ship. Bail. WhoStat is a daily sports stats guessing game — Wordle but for sports nerds. You get a career stat line with no name attached and three
I Listed My Sports Guessing Game for Sale on Flippa Read More »
Build: WhoStat — a daily sports stats guessing game Time spent: A few hours Tools used: Claude (chat), Claude Code, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare The idea was simple: Wordle, but for sports nerds. You get a stat line — career numbers, no name attached — and three guesses to figure out which player it belongs to.
I Used Claude to Plan a Sports Guessing Game, Then Used Claude to Build It Read More »
