My fitst open source project: A Linguee card adder

I have always been fascinated by Open Source software. The fact that people put the effort to write a piece of software and put them out in the world for all to use for free always seemed so cool to me. And ever since I knew how to code, I have tried again and again to make something for this purpose. But every time I tried to do this, I realized I am trying to invent a problem for the solution that I am creating. This quickly drained my focus and caused me to burn out before it ever gets completed. I am sure many of you as well have a long list of side projects that have long been abandoned. And I feel most of these also started and ended the same way. Everyone wants to feel useful in come capacity and the fact that we can write software means we know how useful we could potentially be. And this does suck just a bit every time this cycle repeats itself.

So what should have been dead obvious but surprised me nevertheless is that this first idea came to me when I was learning German, an activity that has conspicuously little to do with software engineering. It was when I was adding words I didn’t understand from a German book that I had been reading did I realize, I am doing the same task i.e. looking up the word, then opening Anki and typing what I just saw again and again; did the thought that there can be an app for this strike me. What was even better was that not only am I am likely not the only one doing this, but there would be many others who would be using flashcards if only they were not so hard to make. This was the thought that ultimately motivated me to finish my first project.

I would be remiss though if did not mention the role of AI in doing this task. Though I have worked in automation throughout my (admitted short) career but it was in PLC/Python-based automation. I have never written a browser extension and would have taken several weeks to learn the art of writing extensions to do this task. But writing this only took me a weekend and $5 in DeepSeek tokens to do accomplish.

But I think the main takeaway form this whole ordeal is that the harder part of being a software engineer was never writing code, it was knowing what to write. This is more true in the age of AI, which has made the art of writing code itself nearly obsolete. However, software engineering did not get any easer. On the contrary, the field have never been more competitive. And to be honest, at this moment, it does give me solace in my decision to go from automation to the field of high-voltage engineering.

Oh, and the extension is out now so do check it out please!! https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/jjohfiolffldbnahfnnacfkladlcbnbg?utm_source=item-share-cb