Aaron Pickering

This month marks 10 years in Germany for me. It’s a big milestone!

But, after all this time my German is still cringe. I’m in this real weird zone where I can understand fine, I can hold a conversation, but I make a grammar mistake about twice a sentence. I’m like a toddler with a vocab. Not good for the Stadtbild 😦

So, to get my bum into gear I’ve decided to rectify this by just hardcore rote learning – articles, cases, declination, word order.

And I’ve made a little app to do this. Most of the paid apps out there don’t hit my specific problem hard enough, they add a whole bunch of fluff. Plus, this gave me the opportunity to get some more practice with AI coding tools.

While this is just a simple little thing, any other strugglers out there are welcome to use it. I have no plans to charge for this and I’ll keep it running as long as it doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg.

Stimmt So: German Practice App

Well, enough talk – the app is called Stimmt So. The name comes from an embarrassing error I made for far too long – I thought the expression for tipping was ‘stimmt zu’, like ‘I agree’, and I said this to too many people for too many years.

https://stimmtso.eu

AI Coding

To wrap up this post, I want to mention how easy it is to create apps these days. I mainly used Lovable to make this, which is an AI coding tool.

I want to say that my experience helped me to avoid any difficult traps, and set some best practices. However, the reality is that going from idea to deployment was incredibly simple. Particularly, the front end React stuff – I have very little experience with front end development and yet, this whole thing came together in a day or two.

If I were to build a fully fledged web app to support a scalable application, I probably wouldn’t rely on Lovable so much. In particular, I’d ditch the Lovable cloud and mange the deployment & back-end myself. To me,its more of a boilerplate or prototyping tool. However, what an amazing tool it is! Without the AI tooling here, I probably wouldn’t have even attempted this one. I’ve got kids and busy life, last thing I want to do is spend weeks on a free tool. But if it takes a couple of days? That’s much more tempting.

FYI – This blog entry references my recent LinkedIn post on the same topic. Feel free to follow me hear to more about my Data Science, AI & ML work and interests.