I have a habit of building things nobody asked me to build.
Sometimes they begin with a practical problem. Sometimes with a question. And occasionally with an idea that seems perfectly reasonable until I realise how much work it would actually take.
A sensible person might write the idea down and move on.
I tend to open my laptop.
I’ve always enjoyed understanding how things work. Not necessarily because I need to, but because there’s something deeply satisfying about taking an unfamiliar problem, pulling it apart, and gradually making sense of it.
And once I understand something, I often start wondering whether I could build something better.
That’s usually where the trouble begins.
A question becomes a project
RidePrecision is a good example.
I enjoy cycling, and like most people who spend enough time on a bike, I’ve developed an interest in the endless details that influence how it feels and performs.
Bike geometry. Fit. Tyre pressure. The relationship between equipment, body mechanics, and comfort.
Some of these questions have relatively straightforward answers. Others turn out to be considerably more complicated than they first appear.
Take tyre pressure.
It sounds simple enough. You have a bicycle, two tyres, and a pump. Surely there must be a reasonably straightforward way to figure out how much air to put in them?
But start looking closely and suddenly you’re considering rider weight, tyre dimensions, rim width, surface conditions, load distribution, and the trade-off between rolling resistance and comfort.
One question leads to another.
Eventually, curiosity becomes research, research becomes calculations, and calculations become an interface someone might actually find useful.
That’s how a small personal interest can turn into a digital product.
I find that process endlessly fascinating.
Not every idea needs a business case
In my professional life, I spend a lot of time thinking about business performance, digital development, customers, and how to make systems work better.
There are targets, budgets, priorities, and plenty of good reasons to ask whether something is worth doing.
And rightly so.
But outside work, I enjoy having the freedom to explore ideas without needing to justify their commercial potential.
Viska grew from an interest in what conversational AI might make possible in e-commerce.
Tingstad explores an entirely different question: what would happen if autonomous AI inhabitants shared a persistent world, made decisions, and gradually created their own history?
One is grounded in a practical business problem. The other is an experiment in artificial societies and storytelling.
They have very little in common on the surface.
Yet to me, they come from the same place.
I wanted to understand something, and building seemed like the most interesting way to find out.
The interesting part is often the part that doesn’t work
There’s a popular image of creative work where someone has a brilliant idea, sits down, and brings it to life.
My experience is considerably less elegant.
An idea looks promising. The first version works surprisingly well. Then you discover something fundamental that you hadn’t considered.
A calculation behaves strangely.
An interface makes perfect sense to you and absolutely no sense to anyone else.
An AI model produces a convincing answer that happens to be wrong.
And suddenly the simple idea isn’t so simple anymore.
But that’s often when things become interesting.
It’s easy to feel knowledgeable when everything behaves as expected. It’s when something refuses to work that you’re forced to question your assumptions.
Sometimes the answer is to rethink the architecture. Sometimes it’s to simplify the problem. Occasionally, it’s to admit that the original idea wasn’t particularly good.
All three can be useful outcomes.
I’ve also learned that building something and finishing something are two very different skills.
Curiosity is excellent at getting projects started. It’s less interested in documentation, edge cases, and the final ten percent.
Unfortunately, that final ten percent is often what separates an interesting experiment from something genuinely useful.
I’m still negotiating with my curiosity about that.
The joy of being a beginner
One of the things I appreciate most about personal projects is the opportunity to enter unfamiliar territory.
There is something refreshing about not knowing exactly what you’re doing.
You have to ask basic questions. Read things you don’t fully understand. Experiment. Make mistakes. Gradually connect the pieces.
AI has made this process even more accessible.
It allows me to move between an idea and a working experiment faster than before, and explore areas where I might not otherwise have had the time or technical depth to begin.
That doesn’t eliminate the need to understand what you’re building. If anything, it makes judgment more important.
But it does make curiosity easier to act on.
And I think that’s a wonderful development.
So what’s the point?
I sometimes wonder why I keep starting new projects when I already have plenty of things competing for my attention.
I suppose the simplest answer is that I enjoy it.
I like the moment when something complicated begins to make sense.
I like turning an abstract idea into something tangible.
I like discovering that my first assumption was wrong.
And I like the freedom to explore something simply because it seems interesting.
Some projects might grow into useful products. Others may remain experiments, unfinished ideas, or lessons learned along the way.
I’m comfortable with that.
Not everything needs a market, a business model, or a carefully defined destination.
Sometimes a question is interesting enough on its own.
And sometimes the best reason to build something is simply to discover whether you can.