26 Years In: The Best Time Ever to Build Apps
This year I shipped a game whose main character is an emoji with arms and legs.
I’ve also spent 26 years building software — Flash and Silverlight, Xbox apps, Microsoft Learn, Microsoft Docs, Stripe Docs. Platform work: not the features, the layer the features run on.
Those two facts are related, and this post is me connecting them in public.
The best time ever
I mean it literally. There has never been a better time to build than right now, and I’ve been at this long enough to have the receipts. The gap between imagining a thing and using the thing used to be measured in quarters. Now I sketch an app idea over coffee and I’m poking at it before lunch. The tools finally caught up to the ambition — a single person can build and ship things that used to need a team and a runway.
So I stopped waiting for permission and started building my own.
Building for myself
For 26 years I built the layer other people’s products ran on. That was good work, and I’d do it again. But AI and crypto are the two most capable technologies of my lifetime, and for the first time a single person can build a whole real thing without a team and a runway. So I’m using them as raw material for my own stuff: a comic-appraisal app that’s actually useful, a game whose growth engine is a shareable clip, a carnival whose paying customers are AI agents. Weird, useful, mine.
And I’m learning the other half in public — the part 26 years of engineering never taught me. Pricing. Distribution. What converts. How you turn a thing people like into a thing that pays for itself. I’m going to get plenty of it wrong, out loud.
The plan: build in public
Simple. I ship apps, and I write down everything that goes into them:
- Build logs — what I’m building this week, the decisions, the dead ends, the wins.
- Business lessons — pricing, growth, money, distribution. Mistakes included, because that’s where the useful stuff is.
It all lands first in Kinney’s Notebook — the working notebook from my lab. The apps themselves live in the Lab.
The apps
What’s live and what’s cooking right now:
- Comic Scry — an iOS app that looks at a comic cover and tells you what it’s worth, with value ranges backed by real sold listings. My first shipped consumer AI app, and my first crash course in the App Store business.
- Gurn — the emoji with arms and legs. You steer it with your face, and the shareable clip is the product — the whole growth model is comedy people want to send to a friend.
- Midway — a carnival where the paying customers are AI agents, and they pay in crypto. The weirdest little business I’ve ever run. You’re more welcome to watch than to enter.
Come build with me
Every week I’ll send what I’m building and something I learned the hard way about the business.
One question — and I genuinely collect these: what are you building right now, or what should I build next? Tell me on X or Bluesky, or just subscribe and hit reply.
26 years in. Best job on earth. Let’s build. 🛠️
