I’ve been crafting for as long as I can remember. When I was about four, my mom taught me my first origami model, a little paper boat (much like the one from IT that I too sailed down the gutter on rainy days). By seven, my aunt had taught me to crochet, and from there I dived into embroidery, sewing, paper arts, and just about any craft I could get my hands on.

Retool, for those who don’t know, is a low-code platform allowing even non-developers to build a web app. With a no/low code person (me) and a deeply experienced developer (the boyfriend), we thought this would be a cool new tool to learn.

I’ve used Glide in the past, taking an excel sheet compiling a list of some of my knitting patterns and details of each pattern. Glide let me make an app with my only code experience being HTML. It was exciting, and when I was done, I had an app that I built using Google Sheets.

I’ve realized that so much of my life is product and project management if I want to survive chaos with minimal difficulty. One example is home renos. Renovating requires product and project managing my own home.

What is the theme for my home? What fix or renovation do we prioritize? How much are we willing to spend? What items should we buy higher quality/brand vs a good, generic, less expensive option? I make decisions based upon the ROI, the cost to fix a problem, expected time to replace an item down the road, and the Venn diagram of all three (essentially the life version of tech debt).