So.. why keep posting?

It has been 3 months since my first blogpost, and I am one with the vibes, and the vibes are with me. For those of you who get the reference, I salute you.

But from a distant future, to the present. I've spent the last few months expirimenting while my better half has been watching her korean dramas on Netflix, and I can honestly say, I think I've learnt more in these hours in the evening then I have done the last couple of years.

I think my journey started, where most of us start, with a basic understanding on LLM's, chatbots, coding, hosting and such. I've also in my career been deply involved in application development, but never done it all on my own. One thing is to know something on a teoretical level, another thing is to actually do it in practice. All in all, it's been great to use this time to actually understand how these things work when have to do it all on your own. And ofcourse, when I say "do it on my own", I mean have Claude do it, and then have Claude explain everything it did while I ask stupid questions.

This blog post on the other hand, is written entirely by own intelligence. I applogize for the terrible structure alle the spelling mistakes.

What has been done so far?

When I started out experimenting with Claude Code there was one idea I've been thinking about for a while. I want to creat my own personal website. I've experimented with website builders in the past, but never been impressed with the tools, the templates or how they work. And I've definetly not been impressed by the pricing. Paying 10-30$ a month for a personal website was a bit too much.

So step one, could Claude help me build one? And what would it cost me? It turns out it could, and it only cost me 5$ for the domain (per year).

The website is basically unchanged today and is based on the initial Claude version. The only thing that has been changed since launch is I used Claude Fable 5 to update the design to the "cyberpunk" version you see today.

The website itself is hosted on Vercel which is a free service as long as you dont have any much traffic. Vercel has been a great way to learn the basics of hosting and website management. Its clear and intuitive interface along with all the tools and service they provide has made this process quite easy.

The second part of the learning experince was to add the "Showcase". The idea here is to have a rather clean website and blog. All the juicy bits are locked behind the Showcase. If your interested in one or more of the apps below. Just give a word and I will grant promt and easy access to the showcase.

The showcase contains "links" to all the apps I've created and small descriptions of what they do, plus the tech stack their buildt on.

The app journey

When working with Claude og Copilot the end result is quite often a HTML file. The layout is great, but getting people to open them, or actually showing them to someone else is a bit difficult compared to regular PowerPoint or Word files. So the first app was as easy as creating a HTML site and getting it hosted in the showcase. This turned out to be quite easy. The showcase was allready built for this and one small deployment later the first app D365-Dashboard was ready.

The second idea was to make something a bit more interactive. I'm quite familiar with HTML so I know what is possible, so the next few apps contain more interactive HTML pages which gives the user some more feedback, and can be seen as simple tools hosted on the web. The D365-licence-estimator, D365-Migration-scorer and D365-Integration-Scorer are all based on this model.

Next idea was to create something that is a bit more interesting and complex. The main problems with these HTML pages are twofold. A. They have no persistent memory (database) and reset every time you close the browser. B. They are based on user inputting data or staged demo data. To solve this i created a few HTML sites that where connected to data sources via an integration through PowerAutomate. PowerAutomate fetches the data from a source and displays it to the user. The integration is fairly simple since it relies on a standard PowerAutomate webhook and then waits until the flow returns with new data. Both D365-Data and D365-AI-Analysis works on these principles.

The next part to solve was the forgetfullness of the HTML pages. I needed storage. I needed a database on the backend.

After many searches on the web, and any questions to Claude I landed on using Supabase. Supabase is a "Database as a service" and means its quite easy to deploy and costs (when you dont have any users to speak of) nothing.

The next project was the Project-management application. This is a simple app that gives a project manager a few tools. Firstly to create a project plan (or a portfolio of projects) and to allocated workers to a project. The results are then displayed in a gant chart which gives you an overview over which works are overallocated and which are underallocated. This first application is not great, and it would require alot of rework to be functional for anyone, but it proved a point. Actually creating an app with a database was not that hard. So now we are off to the races.

In quick succession we created the FDD-Tool, OKR Tracker, Dinner-Planner and many many others. A allmsot full list is shown at the bottom of the post.

What has been learnt?

The one huge takeaway I have from this entire process. If you need a tool for a specific purpose along with perhaps 3-7 collegues? Then, go make it yourself!

Creating an app from the bottom up for a custom business process has never been more available. Especially if your IT department can set up some policies and make available the resources to do it safely.

One of the major problems in large ERP system implementations is how do we handle these small custom processes. Im most projects these fall in the "nice to have" pile. Which means, they will never be implemented in the main ERP system. Up until now, for most business users, the only tool they have then is Excel.

I believe, if we can support it in a structured way, the day of excel sheets that are business critical, can be over.

Secondly, the sky is the limit when it comes to new business models. In my experience way to many great ideas in business are beeing ignored because development has been locked behind the IT department or overly relient on external consultants. Creating a business case, getting an estimate and then getting it approved has usually been something that happends over many months, and when you finally get something approved. You have to wait, or recruit, a project team to actually deliver on the idea. From idea to actually delivering a solution could often take more then six months. In some organisations even six months is optimistic.

If we organize properly, I dont see why this now should take more than a week. It takes very little effort to actually create something to put in the hands of the user. And if it works, and solves a problem, then take the time to create a stable and enterprise ready version that can scale. If it doesent work, then let it die.

Where do I go from here?

Well.. my journey continues. I've moved on from Vercel and Supabase and will be slowly transitioning everything, included this site, to my own server which is hosted by Hetzner. This is a part of my learning journey. Instead of relying on the service that got me here, I want to take even more responsibility and try to get even further down into what it takes to create business applications that can scale, and where you can control every aspect.

I am also doing alot of experiments with different, AI (LLM's) and trying to find good usecases for the different technologies. In addition I learn alot along the way.

Currently on the Hetzner server I'm hosting a Hermes instance which lets me run "local" LLM's in additon to Claude (api) and other providers. The Hermes instance has been a greate tool for automating webscraping activites and building small databases locally for the items that it finds. One recent example is having Hermes scrape Microsoft docs every week, and it something changes, write a report and send it to my phone. In that way I can allways be sure that if something new and interesting is happening, I will know about it.

Next up in the todo pile is machine learning. I'm a great fan of LLM's and especially harnesses like Claude and Hermes to enable even better outputs from them, however, there are several critical drawbacks to relying on LLM's.

The next app I'm planning is a forcasting tool. The forcasting should based on some real data and in the end provide the user of the app with a solid analysis based on a machine learning model.

How I will do it, I dont know yet, but I'm quite sure me and Claude can figure it out together

Until next time!

The Showcase:

D365 tools (Dynamics 365 F&SCM)

App	URL	What it does
D365 HTML Dashboard	/showcase/d365-dashboard	HTML dashboard built on D365 data (prototype).
D365 Live Data	/showcase/d365-data	Fetches live data from Dynamics 365 via a Power Automate flow and displays the results in a table.
D365 AI Analysis	/showcase/d365-ai-analysis	Triggers an AI-powered analysis of D365 data via Power Automate and displays the result as a table.
D365 F&O License Estimator	/showcase/d365-license-estimator	Estimates licensing costs for D365 Finance & Operations across user types, with adjustable prices and USD/NOK currency toggle.
D365 Migration Complexity Scorer	/showcase/d365-migration-scorer	Scores the complexity of a D365 F&O data migration per object: risk ratings, migration guidance and an overall complexity assessment.
D365 Integration Complexity Scorer	/showcase/d365-integration-scorer	Scores each integration in a D365 project across 7 complexity factors, with risk ratings, guidance and an effort and cost estimate.

Business & productivity apps (Supabase)

App	URL	What it does
Avviksregistrering (Discrepancy registration)	/avvik	Register and process discrepancies on suppliers and orders at goods receipt in D365 F&O. Processing log, case detail with email draft and return line (simulated D365), registration wizard and supplier statistics.
Project Manager	/project-manager	Full project management with projects, tasks, resources and assignments. Includes a Gantt view with real-time overallocation warnings. (Supabase Auth)
FDD Tool	/fdd-tool	Author, save and version D365 F&O Functional Design Documents. Guided form with live Markdown/Mermaid preview, drafts and published versions (semantic numbering) and export to Markdown/PDF.
OKR Tracker	/okr	Set and track OKRs across company, department, team and person. Hierarchical visibility (up/down, not across), Key Results with targets/progress and check-ins over time, plus alignment to parent OKRs. (Supabase Auth)
Avstemming (voting/polling)	/stem	QR-based real-time voting: create a poll with proposals, let participants vote via QR code without logging in, follow the results live and reveal the winners with an animated podium ceremony. (Supabase Realtime)
Middagsplanlegger (Dinner planner)	/middagsplanlegger	Generates a balanced weekly dinner plan from ~200 dishes: vegetarian and fish on weekdays, meat on weekends, avoiding expensive/disliked dishes and week-over-week repetition. Searchable dish library with ingredient registration (basis for a shopping list).
Reskontroavstemming (Ledger reconciliation)	/avstemming	Reconciles internal (intercompany) transactions between companies: upload a sales sheet and a purchase sheet, map the columns, and match on invoice number (±0.01 tolerance on absolute value). Flags amount discrepancies and invoices that exist on only one side. Manual many-to-one matching, export and saved history.
EHF Konteringshjelper (Invoice coding assistant)	/kontering	Upload an EHF invoice (XML) or PDF and get account-coding suggestions per invoice line from a dynamic rule set you control (field + operator + value, prioritized – first match wins). Lines no rule matches are coded by a language model (Claude) using your own API key. Custom chart of accounts and saved history. (Supabase + Claude)
Product Org Maturity Model	/showcase/maturity-model	Track the maturity of a product organization across 7 dimensions and 5 teams. Score each area 1–5, store historical assessments and visualize trends over time. (SQLite)