I got the kids home last week and they were going on and on about - riceballs.

Apparently, their riceball lunches have been a topic of viral discussion at school.

The traditional riceball lunch is known as “onigiri” in Japan. It is a dutch sandwich, but with rice instead of bread and wrapped in seaweed. Instead of the typical deli meat, you have flavored proteins and sliced veggies in them. It is triangular or round in shape, and typically shaped by hand. The rice is sticky and seasoned with vinegar, salt, and sugar.

I used to skip this seasoning until I realized that it serves three purposes: adds salt when you are out and active (riceballs are a great traveling, on-the-go, hiking food that also inspires great envy), it also preserves the rice since rice is high in starches and the perfect starting point for ferments of all sorts (including kimchi!) and lastly, the vinegar serves as a “glue” to keep your riceball together, conquering random slices and bits of vegetables I try to cram in for extra nutrition.

In 1985, a manga was released “Cooking Papa” and it is about a working dad (whose wife does not and cannot cook) who secretly loves to cook. I started reading it because I was looking for a fun way to teach lifeskills to my boys (and they all love comics - its an easy first reader). The creator of the manga, Tochi Ueyama, created a new form of a riceball called “onigirazu”. I started seeing pictures of onigirazu in Kinokuniya and I was like “what is this?!” It is a riceball but substantial enough to not carb crash and I can level out the proteins in it better!!!

Mark (of Portland, Oregon), longtime fan of JOC prototyped the first (that I have known of) onigirazu mold made of traditional woods that riceball tools are made of (they permit the water vapors from rice to dissipate slowly without reintroducing the moisture back into rice, making it soggy) sent her a mold as a gift and… onigirazu is a bit more popular in modern day.

I do love riceballs. I love rice.

Moving on from that tangent, I thought (hahaha! how many times has a tinkerer thought that) I could quickly throw up an ecommerce site for any kid who wants an extra riceball for lunch and two days later…, here it is: (dragon & bao)[https://dragonandbao.netlify.app/]

I have poor color theory sense, so I used Looka to quickly come up with a branding rough draft/idea/feel, I used Coloors to generate a few color palettes, I used uicolors to generate shades (matching hues) for an extended palette, I used Obsidian to track notes (and refer to old notes) of what I was doing. All free, if you know when to stop and pivot.

I also have an all encompassing subscription to Adobe currently (which I am absolutely loving because it takes care of all my graphics needs - I learnt Photoshop a couple of years back so I am able to navigate it fairly easily, Adobe Firefly generates everything else I need).

I get the rough draft, set up the file structure the way I like it, and because I am no frontend expert, I have aider run through and tweak any of the UI stuff I want tweaked without getting knee deep in css styling. I end up spending a night refactoring aider’s code (and it is supposed to be the best when paired with Claude), because the codebase ended up looking like an absolute rat’s nest. Again, for all you vibe coders out there, for all the companies thinking they don’t need developers, you are not there yet. I love pair programming with AI, it is life changing but I think I use it differently than a junior developer or a business person. Is it worth the electrical, water/cooling costs? No, it is not worth it as a learning tool or even motivational tool. But I suspect it is how progress in made, technology advances and optimizations achieved. You start with brute force and it is ugly, and exceedingly expensive because it is the way we learn. Literally, with pain.

Enough waxing poetic. I checked it into Github and connected my Netlify to that new repo and it deploys. Counting on low views and Netlify to stop the web crawlers/harvesters and the fact that I don’t advertise so I don’t have to pay for views and I do document my work/progress.

Could this be done via AWS Amplify using Github Actions? Yep. But I don’t need a big setup, this is at best a POC/MVP. There isn’t much traffic and it may not go live.

I spend so much time with this UI stuff to show the backend stuff, because backend is not showy nor sexy. The UI is work for me, and sometimes it is a lot of work for a small backend concept or a big backend concept. It is cogs and parts working together for a perfectly synchronized, harmonious, domino effect of what is essentially data moving and transitioning from one purpose to another. It is exhilarating when it works… perfectly. I love AI for being my UI crutch but a lot of my stuff will look more UI because I need it to get to the backend stuff.

The backend stuff, is what I love.