Closing the Gap: How a Mac Mini and AI Reignited 20 Years of Ideas

I turned 40-something today. I'm not going to tell you the exact number because it doesn't matter and also because I'm a little bit in denial. What I will tell you is that I've been carrying a notebook — sometimes physical, sometimes digital, always somewhere — full of ideas for the better part of 20 years. App concepts. Business plans. Side projects. Systems I wanted to build. Problems I knew how to solve but never had the runway to sit down and solve them. The ideas were never the problem. The gap If you've worked in tech long enough, you know the gap. It's the space between knowing what to build and actually building it . Not because you're lazy — because the activation energy is enormous. You want to build an iOS app? Great. Learn Swift. Learn SwiftUI. Learn Xcode's opinions about how your project should be structured. Set up certificates. Figure out StoreKit. That's before you write a single line of business logic. You want to self-host something? Cool. Spin up a container. Config