The part I'm actually bad at

I built a thing I had no idea how to build.

Six Degrees is a 3D star map of how games connect to each other: real data, physics, accounts, the works. I did not write the code by hand. I described what I wanted, over and over, and steered the AI tools until it existed. They wrote the code. They even found a lot of the connections, ones I never would have, like the Call of Duty crew walking out and going off to make Titanfall, just sitting there in the data waiting for somebody to notice.

So I’m not going to stand here and tell you I’m some genius engineer. I’m not. What I had was a thing I’d wanted to see for years, a head full of game history I never sat down to memorize but somehow can’t forget, and enough stubbornness to keep describing it until the machine got it right. Forty-nine days. Five hundred and sixty commits. Fifty games an AI hard-coded to get me started turned into a galaxy you can fly through on your phone. I walked in knowing how to do almost none of that, and came out the other side actually knowing my way around databases and WebGPU and a pile of stuff that used to scare me.

And then I did what I always do, which is nothing. Showed it to a handful of people, they said it was cool, and I stopped. Didn’t post it. Didn’t tell anybody. Let it sit there, done and quiet.

So that was the hard part, right? The databases, the physics, all the stuff I walked in not knowing.

No. I figured that out. The part I’m actually bad at came after.

Here’s the bit that’s genuinely stupid: I ship constantly. Give me a deadline somebody else is holding, a client, a teammate, a job that needs doing, and it goes out the door and I don’t think twice. I’m the guy who’ll stay up until 2am hardening a login screen nobody asked me to touch. When other people are counting on it, I’m good at this. Really good.

It’s my own stuff I can’t seem to show. The things nobody asked for, the ones that are only mine to put out there: those I sit on for months. So the bug isn’t that I can’t finish, and it isn’t that I can’t ship. It’s narrower and dumber than that. The for-somebody-else switch flips every time. The here’s-a-thing-I-made switch is the one that sticks.

So I’m doing the part I’m bad at on purpose. You don’t fix a bug by feeling bad about it, you fix it by running the thing again and watching where it breaks. This post is me running it, out loud, where I can’t quietly close the tab and pretend I didn’t.

If you’ve got something you made sitting in a drawer because showing it turned out harder than building it, you and me both. Same bug.

I made this. Go look.

Open Six Degrees of Play on the live site ↗