I started coding at 37 after spending 10+ years in academia as a molecular biologist. By accident. No grand plan. No childhood prodigy story. Just curiosity, a laptop, and the extremely dangerous discovery that making computers do things is addictive 😊

Asked AI to give me bigger boobs in a photo 🤣 It refused. We were promised AGI and this is what we got😭

We need to start AI Addicts Anonymous “Hi, I’m Tamara, and it’s been 16 minutes since I last asked an AI to build something.” “Hi, Tamara.” “I currently have 14 projects. None of them are finished.” :everyone nods knowingly: “My goal is to make it through one evening without opening Claude.” :silence: “Let’s keep our goals realistic, Tamara.” Meetings every Tuesday. Claude will take the notes 🤣

I think I accidentally built the perfect audience for not buying my services 😂 Most of the people who follow me are developers. I build software. Developers can build their own software. Excellent business strategy 😂

My AI Engineer interview the other day started with: “What prompting techniques do you know?” Prompting techniques?? Isn't that so 2025? I almost suggested to him that we should switch places 🤣

At a wedding. Considering going on that stage, taking the mic and asking if someone needs help with AI 🤣

'Be more lazy, make more money.' So I’m building a workflow that finds newly opened businesses in Croatia, filters the ones that might actually need help, and prepares personalized outreach. I’ll offer them a simple starter package: website + domain + business email + business card + a professional quote/offer form they can send to clients. And the outreach? Actual letters in the post. Starting with 25. Let’s see if anyone bites 🙂

For one company I: - built their website - bought + connected the domain - set up business Gmail - designed their business card - built a custom web form for creating offers, so they don’t have to use an ugly Excel sheet anymore I charged €150. In my defense, one of the owners is my father-in-law and I felt bad asking for more 😂 How badly did I undercharge? I will never make it as a business owner 🤣

How's Upwork these days, is that still alive or flooded with bots?

Is this the same for us all or does it differ much? Tuesdays and Wednesdays are dead. Friday night is a party, Sunday we're all on the couch chilling in the evenings and nobody's doing any work on Mondays 🤣

Eight years ago, this was basically the AI we had 😂 Put a monkey on my shoulder and I was impressed for the rest of the day. We’ve come a long way.

Added a retro visitor counter to my website, I love it! Thank you @oldstackjournal for the inspiration! Who else has one on their page? ☺️

My entire project management system is a little notebook, a pen, and the emotional high of crossing something off 😂 I also doodle through most meetings like a bored 12-year-old, so it’s not exactly enterprise grade 😂 Anyone else doing this?

Got paid for some work I did today. In cash. Inside a piece of paper folded into an envelope. This is how we do business in Croatia 😂

It's my last day of work at my first dev job. My dear boss sent a goodbye message, I cried a bit, I admit ☺️ Here's a part of it: 'Tamara, thank you for your knowledge, your reliability and your calm, especially when things were on fire. And thank you for taking on the hardest pieces of work without much noise. Whichever team gets you is very lucky. Over the past two years we've watched you grow. You adapted to every new technology we threw at you and learned everything about every task you took on. You always went beyond the task to really understand the technology: what it does and how it works. It has been an absolute pleasure to watch you grow into the engineer you are today. Tamara, we wish you all the best in your new endeavours at the new startup. The door is always open, and I have a feeling we'll be working together again soon.' He even made me a custom emoji 😍

Rookie database mistake: I added notifications and a cron job that checked the DB every 5 minutes. Storage: barely moved. Compute: “Oh, so we’re awake all month now?” 😂 90% of my free compute allowance later, I learned: A database doesn’t just consume GB. It also uses compute if you don't let it sleep.

I turned 40 this year and the plot finally picked up 🙂 At 33, after a whole career in science, I typed my first Hello World. At 38, I got my first developer job. Two months ago, I opened my own business. Now I build software people pay for, teach AI workshops, and next week start a new job alongside the business I’ve built. I thought I was starting a second career. Turns out I was starting a whole new life ☺️

I pimped up my PowerShell to make it look like Zsh 😍 • oh-my-posh with the robbyrussell theme • PSReadLine: history suggestions + dropdown • Terminal-Icons for ls • zoxide for smarter cd • A Nerd Font so the icons render

I finally opened my business bank account. And today I sent out my first proper invoice. Tiny business owner milestone unlocked 🥹

Vercel made deployment feel like magic. AWS just made it feel like I’m breaking into a government server 😂 I connected GitHub to an AWS instance and deployed changes from the server. I’m liking this infrastructure stuff so much that maybe my third career will be DevOps 😂