This is a submission for the WeCoded 2026 Challenge: Echoes of Experience
I told my wife to keep her phone close. “I could call you to come pick me up early,” I said, already plotting the exit in my head before she even pulled away from the sidewalk. Large groups of strangers in new environments are not my thing. I never have been. I had a whole contingency plan: polite excuses, maybe a headache, the classic escape through the back door if the time came.
That was this morning, March 8th. International Women's Day. I was walking into a SheBuilds on Lovable event to celebrate by doing something I wouldn't have imagined doing a few years ago: building an app in a room full of people I'd never met. Lovable opened its AI app builder for free for 24 hours, powered by Anthropic, and gave each participant $100 in Claude API credits and $250 in Stripe credits. No application. No eligibility requirements. Just show up with a laptop and an idea.
I showed up with both and a detailed exit strategy that I never used.
what I was building
Memories of live music fade. You remember the feeling but not the setlist. You remember the place but not the year. You have ticket stubs in a shoebox or maybe just a mental list that gets shorter every time you try to remember it. I wanted a way to preserve that history and really see the story it tells about you.
Post-show atlas. A personal concert history tracker with an Old Hollywood marquee aesthetic. You record a show you attended (artist, venue, date) and the app pulls the actual setlist from setlist.fm, places a marker on your map, and enters a memory line for each show.
The feature I was most excited about is Musical DNA. It reads your concert history and tells you who you are as a music fan. Not statistics. Interpretation. "A devoted alt-rock archaeologist excavating the grittiest gems of the '90s underground, returning time and time again to worship at the altar of Shirley Manson's defiant anthems. They chase the raw, unpolished edge of rock's rebellious daughters across continents, from the punk halls of Dublin to the intimate venues of Mexico." That kind of thing.
I spent the night before putting together the entire report with Claude: design system, database schema, edge features, accessibility requirements, a 14-section build document. I came prepared. What I didn't come prepared for was what the day would actually feel like.
What happened in the room?
Christina, our host, gave us about an hour and twenty minutes to build. I remember her announcing that time was up and I really didn't believe it. As? We had just arrived here.
But that's the point. We don't just build. We met first. And then even as I was building, I talked to Billie, Alison, and Kushboo about what they were working on, what they were experiencing, and what problems they were trying to solve. Share ideas with strangers. Get excited about someone else's project. Offering a suggestion. Asking a question I wasn't sure I was smart enough to ask.
I don't think I've talked to any builders who had engineering experience. Not one. And everyone was building something they cared about.
The identity of the builder.
One of the conversations Christina led, and one I keep coming back to, was about embracing the builder identity. Not the identity of the engineer. Not the identity of the developer. The identity of the builder.
We may not be building unicorns. Our apps could stay on v1 forever. The code may not be elegant by anyone's standards. But we are building. We are taking up space and filling it with our ideas, our products, our passions. And we're doing it together, which means we can shine in our strengths and support each other through the parts that are difficult.
That rethinking mattered to me. Because when you come from judicial operations, not computer science, when
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