Question: If you had limited experience with graphic design software but wanted to do basic stuff for web design, what software would you use? Leave the answers in the comments or email me.

As I play around with Vibe coding, I’ve decided to take a new topic each week. For context, look at my Dinostroids: My Journey into Vibe Coding. Or just go play Dinostroids.

This week, I’ve been learning how to modify WordPress themes. My website has a complex theme that is impossible to change without getting under the hood. The Foundry website is also excessively complex for what it is, but they both turn out to be great to learn on.

I understand PHP well enough to read it. After working through WordPress Studio, GitHub, and Cursor, I’ve set up my development pipeline.

While the code is a little gnarly, it’s not too bad, and it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. But the wall I’m running into now is that I’m a lightweight at graphic design.

While Adobe Photoshop is an obvious choice, and Canva is another obvious choice, I’m looking for “what’s best for a graphic design novice.” Thoughts?

Dinostroids, my first vibe-coded software project, is live.

The last time I wrote any meaningful amount of production software was in 1990. At the time, I was running a software consulting company with my partner, Dave Jilk. We’d reached the point where, as we grew, he became responsible for all the software, and I handled all the network integration stuff we had to do for our clients. Every now and then, I’d have to do maintenance on something I had written in the past, but it was pretty minimal.

After we sold Feld Technologies in 1993, my job quickly changed, and within a year, I was deep in a bunch of M&A stuff and making angel investments with my own money. As the commercial Internet began, I’d fantasize about writing software, but I had no time to do anything other than play around with Perl, and then PHP, and then Ruby on Rails, and … well, you get the idea. I knew enough HTML and CSS to poke around, but I wasn’t doing anything that was anywhere near production.

As the last 30 years have passed, I’ve learned a few new programming languages, including Python (I’m reasonably proficient) and Clojure. But I never learned JavaScript, and everything I did was baby steps beyond “Hello World.” So, my professional coding days ended with Basic+Btrieve, DataFlex, and Pascal.

Over the 2024 holiday break, I started playing around with Cursor after several people, including Quinn McIntyre (my partner Ryan’s amazing kid), told me about it. I was comfortable enough with VS Code, so I just dove in. I started working on a Personal Health Manager project (PHM) using Python, Django, Render, and Claude 3.5. I made some progress, but the holidays ended, and I got busy again.

About a month ago, I started working on Dinostroids. All of a sudden, everyone was talking about this new vibe coding thing, and while I planned to do more on PHM, I thought it would be fun to dive into something completely different. I spent a weekend starting from scratch with Cursor, JavaScript, Vercel, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet. By the end of the weekend, I had a functioning Dinostroids game working.

I’ve always learned by doing. When I was in my teens and 20s, I loved writing software. Over the past twenty years, blogging and subsequently writing books (Give First: The Power of Mentorship is my ninth book) have filled this hole for me. But I missed coding a lot.

If you look at my Goodreads page, you’ll notice that my reading pace has slowed significantly in the last 45 days. Instead of reading in the evenings, I’m vibe coding.

It blows my mind that I can create a functional game like Dinostroids without writing a single line of JS. Sure – it’s a pretty simple game. Still, a lot is going on, and working on it using the agent in Cursor, learning how to prompt it effectively, reading a lot of the code (I have “reading proficiency with JS now), getting a mobile browser working without generating absurd code bloat, and figuring out an effective workflow with Cursor, Github, and Vercel has been a ton of fun.

In the video game of software development, I feel like I’m at Level 4 now of an infinite level game after being stuck at Level 2 for 30 years.

Go play Dinostroids and see if you can get on the leaderboard. I expect GEG will be motivated to get going again after losing his fifth-place spot.

Big thanks to the McIntyres (Quinn and Ryan), my brother Daniel, Sam Ritchie, and a bunch of people from my college society (ADP) for being testers and offering feature suggestions to be implemented.

littleBits just shipped their newest product – the littleBits Code Kit. If you have a kid, this product is for you (and them).

littleBits Code Kit leverages kids love of games to learn to code. It uses Google Blockly which has rapidly become a popular visual editor. My favorite line from a teacher so far is that littleBits Code Kit is “better than recess”, citing a situation where students would rather stay in the classroom and invent with Code Kit instead of going out to recess.

littleBits Code Kit is shipping today and aimed at kids in grades 3 to 8, although this 51-year old big kid is getting one also.

Terry Kawaja is brilliant. I give you three minutes of his amazingness.

That is all.

On Saturday I went to two films at the Boulder International Film Festival – Code: Debugging the Gender Gap and A Good American. Both were excellent and worth watching, but Code was special for me as its an issue I’ve been helping work on for over a decade.

When I joined the National Center for Women & Information Technology board as the chair in 2005, it was a nascent organization and the issue of the small number of women in computer science, while often talked about, wasn’t well understood. Today, not only is the issue well understood, but many of the solutions are clear and being talked openly about, such as in the article At Harvey Mudd College, the Ratio of Women in Computer Science Increased from 10% to 40% in 5 Years

While there is still a ton of work to do, I asserted at a recent NCWIT board meeting that I felt we were at a tipping point and we’d start to see rapid improvement on the number of women in computer science in the next decade. Movies like Code make me optimistic that not only are we figuring out what is going on, but we are getting the word out and having some real impact on the issue.

The video from the second panel I was on at Google I/O 2010 – Technology, innovation, computer science, & more: A VC panel – is up.  Dick Costolo – the COO of Twitter – is the moderator and my fellow panelists are Albert Wenger, Chris Dixon, Dave McClure, and Paul Graham.  Someone didn’t like the title so it was renamed “VCs Who Code” but apparently that didn’t stick with the official event panel namers.

While I stopped writing production code in the early 1990’s, I still fuck around with something each summer when I’m in Alaska (in past years it has been Perl, Ruby, and PHP.)  I haven’t decided what it is going to be this year, but it’ll probably be Python as I’m seriously considering taking 6.189 using MIT OpenCourseWare.

For the curious ones in the crowd, I’m a self declared “excellent BASIC programmer.”  When I got my Apple ][ in 1979 the only choices were BASIC and 6502 Assembler.  I learned each, but only wrote commercial software on the IBM PC in BASIC (and compiled BASIC, back when getting a BASIC program to compile was a trick in and of itself) between 1983 and 1985 (using Btrieve as the database manager.)  By 1986 I was doing a lot more work in Dataflex and Pascal.  At MIT, I learned Scheme (via 6.001) and was ok with it, but never did any production work with LISP even though every time I looked at a Symbolics machine I drooled.  I learned a handful of other languages in school, such as CLU and IBM System/370 Assembler (and something on a Prime computer – I can’t remember what) but never used any of it outside a class.  Feld Technologies did most of its work with Clarion, although I never really learned it well enough to do anything production quality since by that point I wasn’t coding regularly anymore.  While I was proficient with a bunch of database languages such as dBase, Paradox, and R:Base, I never liked any of them and we never really wrote production systems in them (although we took over and managed a lot of crap that other people had tried to write.)  Oh – and I was pretty good with Lotus 1-2-3 Macros.

In some parallel universe, I sit in front a computer all day and write code.