Here’s a quick post to update on current projects, work, priorities, and everything in between.

Day job: Relevance AI

I joined the design team at Relevance AI a few months ago and have been loving the role so far. The company is full of such talented people, everyone’s so genuine and kind, and very passionate about the product.

I’m learning heaps and really enjoying being part of a larger team, and I’ve been loving being in a physical office a few days each week again after almost ten years working remotely.

Learning to code

Up until this point all of my projects have been built using either Bubble or Webflow. I’ve found the process of working on both these platforms really enjoyable, and have been consistently so impressed by what can be done with no-code platforms.

However, I think timing’s finally lined up for me to spend the time learning to code properly. I’d love future/current projects to be custom builds, especially with LLM-assisted coding being the hot thing right now.

So I’m going to be spending the next 3-ish months following a bunch of courses and doing a bit of a personal learning immersion each evening and weekend, with the goal of rebuilding both Milestones and DrawKit as fully custom web apps and platforms.

I am SO EXCITED about this. I’ve wanted to be able to fully code my own projects for over a decade, but between always having limited time and runway, and it just not clicking in my mind, I never committed to fully learning. Strangely enough though, building full apps in Bubble seems to have unlocked the concepts I needed to understand how everything fits together, and it’s finally feeling achievable. Especially having LLMs to ask as many clarifying questions as I need.

Milestones

I started Milestones as a weekend project one year ago and have been loving seeing it slowly grow. Being able to interview amazingly talented and creative people has been wonderful, and I’m excited to see where it will evolve to.

I had to drastically reduce time spent on the site for the last few months due to the busyness of starting a new full-time role, but now that I’m getting more used to the day-to-day I’m looking forward to working on it on weekends and evenings once more.

As mentioned above, I’ll probably pause new interviews and features for two months or so while I learn all I can, and then will be relaunching the tool outside of the Bubble platform.

DrawKit

As part of designstripe closing down I reacquired DrawKit (read the original story of starting DrawKit while travelling Europe here), and will be running the company independently. I have some plans for the platform that I’m incredibly excited about – working with creative illustrators has always been so fulfilling – so similar to Milestones above, I’ll be rebuilding and relaunching the site as soon as possible as a custom web app.

Until then the site still functions; you can sign up, download packs, or access the free packs with no issues.

Painting and Guitar

While I’m working through the rebuild of both DrawKit and Milestones, I don't want my creative projects to be standing still. I think this is a great time to focus on growing an audience for both painting and guitar.

I'm feeling super comfortable with digital paintings now, and have started learning how to work with oil paints on canvas.

I've also landed on a style and method I feel works for guitar compositions and arrangements and am keen to explore more here.

So between these two, the plan is to be filming and posting YouTube videos for both projects while I'm working through learning and rebuilding DrawKit and Milestones.