Defying Gravity: Why I Built DuckBuddy
Growing up, computers were treated like adult tools—serious, off-limits, and not for kids. I wasn’t allowed an email address until I was 16. Same with a computer. Social media had to wait until 17. The only reason I finally got access was because I started college at 16, and suddenly a computer became “necessary.”
But the interest had always been there. I was fascinated by the idea of typing something into a machine and having it understand me, how graphics for games and websites would change over time, how instant messaging worked differently than emailing. It was crazy to think how someone else built a webpage that was store "somewhere out there" and then my computer could ask for it so I could see it.
Years later, my curiosity about the tech world has only grown. The tactical meeting that led to the uniquely designed product roadmap that builds a SAAS product, the decisive meeting that led to the design of the new development sprint, and new testing methods QA teams are using with agentic AI to test code before it's deployed are all super intriguing to me.
Looking at a product roadmap, my mind naturally thinks, "How did they come up with that? Out of all the feature requests, market changes, and updates that we need to do, what was the process they used to prioritize all the items listed". Being updated by development that a new sprint is coming to a close and seeing the items listed getting ready to release to production, I think "How long did each of those pulses take, how did the development leader choose what went in this sprint (aside from the "bugs" that were so impactful that they had to get assigned and fixed asap)? How and what does dev record to track the programming changes? How does branching and pull requests work?" Hearing about a "bug" fix or new feature release, my brain says "What are all the programming layers they had to change in order to fix or create that? What type of QA testing did they do? How do they know what tests to do (considering there are a lot of ways to test)?".
Now with agentic AI, I'm curious to learn how it's helping product managers identify new features, prioritize feature requests, see market trends and come up with feature proposals for development, marketing, ops etc. I want to know how development is using agentic AI to write code, test code, document code etc and how much are they using it, side by side in an IDE or full on agentic AI coding where the agent does it all based on the guidelines that the developer gave it and what gets reviewed by the developer. And as far as automatic testing of code has come, how is QA using an agent to check code changes, auto perform different QA testing techniques, suggest QA tests that need to be done based on what code was changed and what still needs a person to test?
There is so much "magic behind the scenes" to explore, so much strategic and creative thinking and planning and executing out there. And I want to learn about it because I'm naturally strategic and creative too. This is how my brain is wired. I also need to/want to do it without paying $1,000's of dollars to go to college where everything will be outdated by the time I graduate because of how fast thing change thanks to AI. I would love to learn about all these things from someone, but in a world where "business" is always taking over and is moving as fast as it can to keep up with AI now, that's seeming impossible. I would love to work with people on projects to learn things, but same thing or "other reasons". I've tried to change my environment to accommodate this, but it's a catch-22, I've never done this officially as my job, so I can't be in a place where I do this as my job.
So the question is "How do you learn something new, deep and complex, when there is no extra money, no one to teach you, and no place for you to do it, how do you do it? It's so hard that it feels like trying to figure out "How do you defy gravity?"
Well, looking at history, how does a seemingly small community of 13 foreign colonies defy the greatest reigning empire of their time and win their independence? How does a group of 400,000 people stop at nothing from creating, inventing, and breaking every existing rule to build essentially a skyscraper and send it to the moon with people on it? How do they follow out a president's decree and give a nation that is battling racism, hate, and the first televised war with a gruson enemy some hope that we can still work together and achieve greatness. How does a small team overcome years of disbelief from others, criticism for ruining a movie industry based on their new animated technology, and years of being unprofitable only to become so great and successful that the biggest movie industry in the world wants to buy them? (Pixar, in case you didn't guess that last one).
As an American, the answer is "Do what all the others did before me. Create the opportunity." In a world so fully enwrapped in AI, the way to do it is "Use AI!" So I created DuckBuddy. By having a concrete example of a company, I can have my agent build what my front end, service layer, and backend would look like, even give examples of code snippets (and I have). My agent designed it all in a personal Jira account, organized into Epics, Stories and issues and sprints in Jira. I had my agent build the initial landing page for DuckBuddy, create a guide to record its style and design layout, marketing documents for it, documents describing and showing the Swim Lane for new feature releases, documents showing how to integrate with other companies, how a user would sign up, create an account, and find others to connect with, documents on how and why my developers would use various non-SQL and 1 SQL database to have DuckBuddy run efficiently and so much more! It's a dual learning effort, 1. I get to interact with my agent, learn to prompt and build things and 2. I get to read all the output, keep it, and share it with others in case it inspires them.
Now I can keep building, keep prompting my agent to go further, keep evaluating what I have, keep suggesting, keep making changes based on my agent's evaluation, and keep learning. The possibilities seem endless! Sometimes an idea or concept is all that you need to build a foundation and with AI, we can build anything now. And learning is the best part of the journey. I can get as granular as I want because it's based on a real and distinct concept. I can compare it to others, I can ask, "What if it was built like this or had this feature, how would my development implement that, how would my team market that?" "How many layers of code (front, service and backend) would a bug like this effect or a new feature like this affect?"
Hey, some people watch grown men run around after a ball, getting paid way too much money to do so while wearing the team's colors painted on their bodies and screaming at the men running around from the sidelines. I do this instead. This is not crazy, this is me creating and building a chance to learn and grow in ways that I want and that, for now at least, no one else will make for me. For me, DuckBuddy is my independence, it's my Saturn 5 Rocket, it's my Pixar, it's my finally figuring out how to defy gravity and use the skills that I have to follow my passion. Maybe someday it will be more, but there is no promise of that.
Not everyone who sets out to learn and grow is given the opportunity to officially do something about it, much less get paid for it. Not every musician, dancer or person becomes a "Lindsey Stirling". Walt Disney loved to learn about basically anything. He studied how cities were built, learned details like housing, roads, traffic flows etc. Although he did plan out and intended to build Epcot as a true city where people could live and grow, he didn't live long enough to see the version that we have today. But he also learned lots of other skills and bits of knowledge because he loved learning, whether it turned into something or not. Learning is this grand thing that we in a first world country have the privilege to do. It leads you to understand new things, stretches how you think, makes you see the world in a more holistic view and appreciate the complexity that surrounds us. Plus it's just plain cool!
Technology and business processes these days are so complex and intricate that learning about it is like seeing the behind the scenes of the incredibly hard working and detailed Disney engineers. Exploring how they build things that are only imagined in the real world as if they really are "real".
People often question if this truly is the land of equal opportunity and argue one way or the other. I'm not going to comment on that, but what I do know is that companies like Jira, Canva, Grok, and Bootdev, who offer a free plan for individuals, are keeping that chance for individuals like me to pursue what they want. For now, my dream is to just learn, maybe someday someone will offer the opportunity to do more, but for now and until then, I am incredibly grateful to the companies everywhere who give people like me at least the ability to use their product to grow and learn.
What's your dream or goal? Are you doing it? Are you taking your opportunity to do it and daring to defy gravity?
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