Where Are the Super Simple Steps?

When I first started taking software development seriously, I struggled with the breadcrumbs.

One piece of outdated documentation would link to another, which introduced new methods and dependencies, which required an investment in time and energy I simply didn’t have. The popular developer forums weren’t much better—threads years old, replies that said “read the documentation,” pointing back to docs with deprecated methods for versions that had been end-of-life’d before I even started.

The developer voices on social media made it worse. Nothing was off the table: which programming language is superior, what design patterns are dinosaur-aged, why design patterns don’t matter at all, clone this template repo, don’t listen to that guy. You have to understand that large accounts are compensated to some degree, and discourse is the best tool for engagement. Anonymized forums like Reddit encourage users to deliver shock value at the expense of your learning.

And now we have tools that can produce answers for you. In many cases, this works. If you’ve set up your environment to optimize for correctness, if you understand the context well enough to validate the output, if you’re patient enough to iterate, an LLM can accelerate your workflow dramatically.

But if you attempt to “one-shot prompt” a complex issue with “pls fix” and a code snippet? The results will be unsatisfactory. You’ll spend more time arguing semantics with a model whose knowledge cutoff predates the method, class, or entire dependency you’re trying to use. The tool that was supposed to save you time becomes another source of noise.

This cycle—documentation decay, forum noise, LLM hallucination—invariably led me to the same places: significant refactors with no material gains, context switching to another feature, or dropping the project altogether in favor of the next shiny idea.

You probably see where I’m going:

Grit is often equated with courage, but it’s closer to wherewithal—the ability to chart a course and press on regardless of the opposing pressures. And right now, the loudest opposing pressure is the signal-to-noise ratio in how we learn to build things.

Why I Started Writing

For most of my life, I carried a self-limiting belief: my voice didn’t really matter. It would be dominated by those with more followers, more perceived experience, more credentials. So I stayed quiet, consumed content, and built things in private.

But I kept running into the same problem. The tutorials I needed didn’t exist. The ones that did were either too abstract (“here’s the theory”) or too specific to someone else’s stack (“here’s my bespoke config that won’t work for you”). What I wanted was something in between: simple, repeatable patterns with real code from real projects. So I started writing them myself.

What This Series Is

Super Simple Steps is my attempt to document the patterns I’ve actually used to build production software—specifically Thrifty Trip, an inventory management app for resellers that I’ve been developing on the side for the past year. Every post follows the same format:

• A real problem from a real project
• Working code you can copy and adapt (Apache 2.0 licensed)
• Architecture diagrams so you see where the code fits
• Key takeaways so you remember what matters

The Invitation

If you’ve ever rage-quit a tutorial, mass-closed Stack Overflow tabs, or watched an LLM confidently generate code for a library that doesn’t exist: this series is for you. The signal is out there. It’s just buried. I’m trying to dig some of it out. Let’s build.