The Three Phases of Developer Growth: From Chaos to Mastery

I have 143 commits in one codebase, 69 in another, and 23 in a third. Same project, three different versions, three completely different philosophies. And the journey between them taught me something that changed how I code forever. The Winter Storm That Started Everything For three intensive months during the winter storms, I've been working with Claude and Claude Code—building, iterating, learning. The first project was something I genuinely needed: MacRetriever , an application that indexes my entire Mac and lets me find anything in milliseconds. No more digging through folders. No more lost files. The problem? I had no idea how to build it when I started. But once I got something working—even something rough—I couldn't stop. I'd build a feature and think, "what if we also added..." and suddenly I'm adding Gmail integration, import from repositories, advanced search with custom filters, photo indexing, email classification. Just one more feature. And one more. And one more. The code