The best escape from reality

Keeping your mind busy on the right thing at the right time is a dark art. It’s so easy to get dragged into a spiral and have it become the only thing you can think of, any time of any day.

Trying to break that routine requires diligence, patience and most importantly a plan to realise the escape.

I’m not sure if you, the reader, will see this one coming, but vibe-coding has been my perfect escape plan!

I’ve written before about vibe-coding, both here and on Mastodon, sometimes sporadically, but I’ve now reached a point where I wanted to consolidate few additional thoughts together.

What did it was reaching the milestone of having 4(!!!!!) apps live on the AppStore, from 0 only four months ago. The number of apps in itself is not the point.

The point is this level of creativity that I’ve never felt before!

Actually, I need to correct myself. I’ve always had creative ideas and thoughts, but I was lacking the time to learn and get the tools required to turn some of those ideas into actual things. Since getting my first iPhone, I’ve always had desires to create apps and I did try in the past; mostly wrapping web technology into a glorified app; nothing I was ever proud enough to show.

With a full time job, I continued to consider the possibility of creating apps as a dream – enter AI.

I’ve been a paid subscriber to ChatGPT for quite a while now and over the last few months AI has grown and grown in daily usage for all sorts of things. Daily as a Google replacement, but also as THE tool that unlock the door to unlimited possibilities.

I’ve been very public about my usage of AI and even at work it’s something that I often talk about and to those who ask, my standard reply to question of “how/why/what do you use AI for” has become simple: if you can imagine, you can build it.

And when I say you can build it, it’s not just software, but it’s hardware too. You may have seen my Project Tako series in the past, a remote controller for Home Assistant that combines software and hardware – none of it would have happened without AI.

Still, for all the successes and advancements, that still wasn’t the perfect escape. It still felt like “work”, but the direction was set. And it was set in a very specific direction.

Ever heard about the Happiest Place on Earth? For the un-initiated, I’m referring to Disneyland, and to be even more specific, for me it means Disneyland Paris.

That’s when I had the lightbulb moment! You see, I don’t just like
Disneyland Paris, I pride myself in identifying as a Disney Adult and obsessed on all the small details, the Easter eggs, the ride history and backgrounds, the change to the park…and I could go on…

Disney Parks are the ultimate escape from reality. Once you step in, all the weight immediately lifts from your shoulders and the escape and detachment from the world is real, and beautiful. Of course, the Disney blues are also very real, when you find yourself dealing with leaving that magic behind and turning reality back on!!

But what if there was a way to keep your brain tuned to those feelings and emotions even when you are miles away from those Parks?

That was the prompt for Ride Radar.

At its core, Ride Radar allows you see and keep track of live queue times for every ride in any Disney Park worldwide.

But it’s also so much more!

It’s my way to let my brain escape from reality and be “forced” to think about nothing but those parks, finding info and reading about them, to be updated on all the latest developments so they can be integrated into my app. And in doing so,I find myself opening the app multiple times a day just to see what’s going on somewhere around the world: are queues higher or lower than average? Have new rides moved queues and crowds behaviour? What’s happening on a random Wednesday that has queues suddenly skyrocketing? Oh wow, Guardians of the Galaxy Rewind is down again?!

Learning how to shape and apply Codex to the development of iOS apps took a while for sure, but no where near how long it would have taken me to actually learn Swift development from scratch and not just Swift. Ride Radar has server side components, live activities, a growing database of historic wait times to eventually learn from and become aware of and intelligent about. It’s a small ecosystem and microcosm of joy that just keeps growing!

I’ve also met and shared ideas with a bunch of fun people online,some going on a similar journey as me, others already established in the world of development. Overall, I’ve been learning and growing and now that the genie has left the bottle,there’s no way back inside!

If you’ve read so far and you happen to have an iPhone, why don’t you join me on this greatest escape? It’s free 😉