Working with Code: My Journey to Development

It’s been a little while since my last update, and most of that time has been spent diving much deeper into coding than I ever planned to.

I’ve never really considered myself a coder or a developer. My background has always been in infrastructure — solving problems, keeping systems running, and making changes when the situation required it. But building Word VBA scripts for the trivia books pushed me into territory where simple edits weren’t enough anymore. I needed more accuracy, more reliability, and more ways to validate the work before it ever reached the page.

That’s what started this whole shift.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been developing a collection of tools: fact-checkers, generators, parsers, and other pieces meant to keep the trivia books consistent and correct. Each improvement led to another one, and before long I found myself spending entire days refining logic, tightening rules, and integrating API-based checks where VBA simply wasn’t capable.

It’s been demanding work — and yes, it has pulled focus away from some of my other responsibilities — but the payoff is already noticeable. Tasks that used to take hours of manual correction are now handled automatically. Errors that would have slipped through before are caught immediately. The overall quality of the books is improving because the process behind them is improving.

Working with API keys, external models, and more structured logic has been a very different experience from what I’m used to, but a useful one. It’s given me tools that I’ll be able to use across future projects, not just trivia books.

I’ll share more details in the coming weeks as the system continues to evolve.