Twelve years ago, I traded the web design field for a gig as a creative director, and while it’s been challenging to move to management from the trenches, I’m glad I did it. By the time I hung up my spurs I’d been doing it for 15 years, and I was pretty burned out. I also noticed that our shop was beginning to utilize templated designs more and more, and I could see the writing on the wall, especially at that place. I loved web design, and what it did for me, and I miss parts of it very much.

Meanwhile, I’ve kept a Google spreadsheet of my parts inventory for the trucks for several years. After parting out the green Travelall, when the number of rubbermaid bins full of parts overwhelmed my brain’s capacity to remember what was where, I did a sweep through each one and catalogued their contents. This worked well for a while, but the search function in a spreadsheet sucks, and updating the sheet is even worse on a phone. I’ve resisted spending money on yet another app because I’m cheap.

This evening I asked Codex to help write a basic PHP script for me to query the spreadsheet and return search results with the name of the bin and its location. After it helped me navigate the wilderness of Google API authorization, it built a small web app that gave me solid search results in a phone-optimized format. When I had that nailed down I asked it how hard it would be to include a way to add new items, and within a few minutes that was done as well. There’s even a flag that allows me to note when I’ve pulled something from a bin, which colors the field in the Google sheet so I can update it later.

Half of the fun of learning programming languages was the feeling you got when something you wrote actually worked. But my personal success ratio was generally 1 minute of joy vs. 59 minutes of frustration. Codex got me to where I wanted to be much faster than I ever would have been able to do on my own.

I’m glad I’m not doing web development anymore.