About Me

I started Built From Curiosity because I wanted to see if I could actually build my own website.

That was really it at first.

I also wanted somewhere I could put the things I'm interested in without having to throw everything onto social media. I like the idea of being able to give someone a link to a place I control, where I can write more than a quick comment, show what I'm working on, and actually tell the story behind it.

I don't really want this to be one specific kind of blog either. I'll probably write about tech projects, art, AI, things going on in life, stuff I'm learning, and whatever else I happen to come across. I want to keep some parts of my life private, obviously, but I also don't want to force everything into some perfectly defined niche just because the internet apparently demands we all become a category.

A big reason I finally started doing more of this was AI.

Watching everything happening around AI has reminded me a little of the stories about the .com boom in the 90s. Everybody is using it, companies are putting it into everything they can, people are arguing about how amazing it is and how terrible it is, and an unbelievable amount of money is being thrown at it.

Maybe all of that works out exactly the way people think it will. Maybe parts of it turn into a giant bubble. I have absolutely no idea.

But I knew I didn't want to sit around watching it happen and realize later that I never even tried anything.

The thing that really changed things for me was when my boss talked about an idea for an AI bot that people could ask questions, but it would only answer using documents we gave it.

I took that idea and ran with it.

I actually made something real.

That changed the way I looked at a lot of the ideas I'd had over the years.

I've always been pretty good at starting projects. Finishing them was another story. Usually I'd hit a point where I didn't know what to do next, didn't know who to ask, or didn't want to ask online because, well, if you've ever read the comments under a beginner question, you probably understand.

Sometimes you're lucky if anybody answers at all. Other times someone answers just to explain why you shouldn't have asked.

Having tools that I can actually ask questions and work through problems with changed that for me. It doesn't magically build everything, and it definitely doesn't mean I suddenly know what I'm doing all the time. But it makes it a lot easier to stay moving instead of getting stuck and abandoning the whole thing.

Since then I've been working on things like Music Mode, actually documenting projects instead of forgetting half of what I did, building this blog, and experimenting with tools like Hermes to see what else is possible.

That's really what Built From Curiosity is about.

I'm not an expert trying to teach everybody the right way to do things. I'm just some dude who had an idea, finally decided to run with it, and figured I might as well see where it goes.

I'll probably make mistakes. Some ideas will probably be stupid. Some might actually turn into something useful.

That's kind of the point.

There hasn't been a better time to be an idiot with an idea.