Onboarding to Coding: Trial by Fire

I never thought I'd be able to build email notifications—not without substantial training, not without months of learning, and definitely not in an afternoon. But that's exactly what happened yesterday.

What We Needed

We needed to get notified whenever someone joins a challenge in Are You Curiouser?, and I had no previous experience with email notifications, Supabase migrations, or local database environments (or any coding at all). Still, the feature would be helpful and I wanted to more directly contribute to our build, so I dove in.

I installed Cursor, Homebrew, git, bun, Docker, and then Supabase. Getting everything running locally meant setting up the environment, learning to type commands into a terminal, understanding how migrations are structured, and how local and production databases differ. Once Supabase was running and I could inspect the database and execute SQL, the rest became much more approachable.

I built the core components: a migration to track challenge joins, a new Resend email service to notify our team, and an integration into the challenge join flow. Daniel helped clarify a few sticking points, but I prompted the models and tested the code myself and got it working end-to-end. I couldn't wait to show Daniel. Then we deployed the code to production and confirmed that real emails were firing when real users joined challenges.

It works. It's live. And I built it.

What Made This Possible

I was able to use AI agents to help me plan and then do a bulk of the implementation. I had clear direction from Daniel when I hit unfamiliar territory. I had in mind a concrete, valuable feature that was worth the effort to implement. And, I think importantly, I had curiosity that kept me iterating instead of getting stuck. I really wanted to know if I could do it! I kept getting excited as I saw the plan come together and could imagine what else might be possible. I could go from nearly zero context to a working production feature in a single afternoon.

This is what we're trying to build into Hypandra: curiosity as an active force in our lives. We can dive into something unfamiliar, ask questions, experiment, and figure it out piece by piece. I'm still learning, but now I know firsthand how quickly you can pick up new skills when the goal is clear, the tools are accessible, people are there to help, and you have that itch to try.

I'm not a developer now—let's be clear. But I shipped something real, and I understand more about how our product actually works than I did 24 hours ago. And now I want to know what else we can build.