About the Creator

The Vision Behind CityHenge

Modern life pulls us toward screens. Notifications, feeds, and algorithms compete for our attention in ways that often leave us feeling depleted rather than fulfilled. I wanted to build something different: an app that actually encourages you to put your phone away.

CityHenge exists to reconnect people with the natural world hiding in plain sight within our cities. That moment when the sun aligns perfectly down a city street, painting everything gold. The moonrise framed between buildings. These fleeting intersections of urban geometry and celestial movement have always been there. We've just forgotten to look.

The app's purpose isn't engagement metrics or time-on-screen. Success means you opened CityHenge, discovered a moment worth chasing, walked somewhere beautiful, and experienced something that made you feel small in the best possible way. Then you put your phone in your pocket and just... watched.

That's the opposite of how most apps are designed. And it's exactly what I wanted to build.

An Unconventional Path

I knew what I wanted to create. I understood the technical concepts: REST APIs, database schemas, coordinate systems, astronomical calculations. Years of working alongside developers and architects had given me fluency in how software systems think.

But knowing how systems work and actually building one are entirely different things. I had zero knowledge of Python, TypeScript, React Native, or any of the technologies CityHenge would require. No computer science degree. No bootcamp certificate. No side projects in my GitHub history, because I didn't have a GitHub account.

Traditional paths existed: hire a development agency, find a technical co-founder, or spend a year learning to code before starting. None felt right.

Building with AI

In November 2025, I started using Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding tool. Two months later, I had a functioning mobile app with user authentication, astronomical calculations, interactive maps, push notifications, and a backend serving 17 Australian cities.

Claude Code wasn't just writing code for me to copy and paste. It was a collaborative partner that explained why certain approaches worked better than others, caught errors before they became problems, and helped me understand the systems I was building. I learned more about software development in those two months than I had in ten years of adjacent work.

CityHenge exists because AI tools have genuinely democratised software creation. Ideas that would have remained sketches in notebooks can now become real products, built by people who understand problems deeply even if they've never touched a compiler.

What Drives This

I believe technology should serve human flourishing. That means building things that respect attention rather than exploit it, that connect us to nature rather than isolate us from it, and that leave people feeling better than they started.

CityHenge is my attempt to prove that's possible, and that you don't need a traditional background to build something meaningful.

If you've chased a sunset down a city street because this app told you it would be beautiful there, that's the whole point. That moment of awe, that pause in an otherwise rushing day, that reminder that we live on a spinning rock orbiting a star. That's what I built this for.