Zen and The Art of App Creation... and Motorcycle Maintenance

Throughout building Rukus, I kept noticing how similar the process felt to learning how to modify and maintain my motorcycle before a long solo trip. Both required patience, trial and error, and a willingness to sit with discomfort until something finally worked.

At the core, I like solving problems with creative, practical solutions. There’s an art to usefulness that really resonates with me. When I was creating Rukus, I didn’t think of it as “starting a business,” just like I didn’t see my nomadic trip as a “vacation.” They were both responses to a need—figuring things out as I went, learning by doing, and trusting that clarity would come through motion.

Starting a business wasn’t the goal. Building something meaningful was.

Problem-solving during my travels shaped Rukus in a very literal way. It reminds me of modifying my motorcycle’s gas tank before riding down Baja.

Having a larger tank was absolutely necessary for what I was planning to do. I knew, where I was going, there would be blank areas without gas for about 150 miles so I needed to be prepared for that.

This experience would unknowingly become my design philosophy: get excited, start somewhere, screw it up, keep going.

I was excited to imagine being on the open road with no next destination. I wanted to know that feeling. In hindsight, it was a feeling I was familiar with but in a different context in my life. But when I had this dream in mind, it was mystifying. So I bought a six-gallon tank, twice the size of the original, one that could get me close to 300 miles.

The tank sat in my garage for three months.

When I finally started the install, I looked inside and found some kind of nest I couldn’t clean out. So I had to swap it for another tank. Then I learned I’d need to drill into it and install a dual petcock. I’d never drilled into anything like that before and was convinced I might ruin a $300 part. Whatever. I did it.

The bike roared. I thought I’d crossed the finish line.

Nope.

On my victory ride, I flooded the engine because I didn’t know you had to turn off the petcock when the bike was off. Draining it, cleaning everything out, and getting it running again was brutal... but I learned. And I carried that lesson with me the entire way down Baja.

That’s exactly how Rukus was built. I didn’t overplan or wait until I knew everything. I built what was necessary, broke things, fixed them, learned why they broke, and kept going. The app is simple by design, adaptable by necessity, and forgiving by intention because that’s what actually works in the real world. With music, app building, and sometimes motorcycle maintenance... you don't need perfection. You need enough fuel to keep moving forward.

A really specific moment was when I let go of the idea that the app needed to be “correct” or structured from the start. My original vision was ordered chord progressions, very intentional, very musical. But early on, I couldn’t quite make that work the way I wanted, and instead of forcing it, I leaned into imperfection.

I let the app shuffle chords randomly.

At first, that felt like a compromise and almost wrong. But once I started actually using it, I realized something important: random chords removed pressure. There was no “right” outcome, no expectation to sound good. You just played, switched, struggled, and kept going. It made practicing feel lighter.

That imperfect solution unlocked momentum. It allowed me to move forward, test timing controls, experiment with pacing, and validate that the core idea: visual flashcards you could play along with actually worked. Later, once users confirmed the value, I came back around and added ordered progressions and customization. But that never would’ve happened if I’d waited to get it “right” the first time.

Embracing imperfection kept me moving. In the end, it led to a better, more flexible product than my original, more rigid plan.

Intuition plays a big role in how I make decisions for Rukus, but not in isolation. I often think about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where the main character spirals trying to define the literal meaning of “Quality.” What stuck with me is that quality isn’t just intuition. It’s also a shared understanding. It’s the quiet agreement we have, collectively, about what feels right and what doesn’t.

While designing Rukus, I had to trust that what I was building would eventually come together, even when I couldn’t fully articulate why something felt off yet. If a screen, flow, or interaction looked out of place, I trusted that feeling and kept hammering at it until it felt right. More than once, that instinct saved me hours of work later, because it aligned the foundation for features I hadn’t even built yet.

So intuition for me is a signal. It’s how I stay oriented toward quality before all the logic and implementation details catch up.

When I was starting out on my guitar journey, I was frustrated with the apps. The lessons, the in app purchases, it all felt like I needed to pour a bunch of money to show myself that I would be committed to learning how to play the damn thing. I wanted to avoid that experience altogether for my users, and deliver something that is exactly what it is. You buy a capo to press the strings. You download Rukus to memorize chords. It doesn't have to be so complicated. No pressure.

Postpartum is fucking hard. You’re sleep deprived, your body hurts in ways you didn’t expect, and all of it exists alongside the most pure love life has to offer: raising a baby. I picked up a guitar years ago with the intention of playing for my future kids. By the time I was actually in that future, I was nowhere near where I’d hoped I’d be.

Sitting there with my baby on my lap, watching my guitar collect dust in the corner, I felt grief. Grief for the memories I wanted to create, for the little songs and melodies I imagined playing, for the kind of mom I thought I’d be. I knew what I remembered was slipping away, and that I wouldn’t be the guitarist I once imagined. That’s when I decided to make the app for myself.

Once I had the basics working, I realized how many people probably quit an old hobby not because they didn’t love it, but because they felt behind. It’s hard to have fun when you’re trying to catch up to your old pace.

So I made Rukus for people like me. If you need something to brush the dust off your skills, here it is. You don’t have to put it down entirely.

Little did I know, building the app would become the perfect antidote. Designing something so technical during the most intense period of my life helped my mental health in a very real way. It gave me focus, momentum, and a sense of continuity with who I was before—while still honoring who I was becoming.