Dale Spoonemore
Dale Spoonemore outdoors, smiling

Writing

What I’m trying, what I’m learning, and what still needs a person involved.

Practical notes on software and AI, alongside earlier writing, talks, and stories.

Practical guide

Getting better UI out of AI with image generation

One of the things I've found that makes a big difference in the UI I get from AI is spending some time working through the design with an image-generation model. I want to see a few directions and figure out what I actually like before I ask a coding agent to build the finished interface.

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Media appearancePublished · February 6, 2023

From Seed to Spoon & GrowBot — Down the Garden Path

Dale and Carrie joined Joanne Shaw and Matthew Dressing on Down the Garden Path to discuss From Seed to Spoon and GrowBot. The publisher’s notes list questions about the app’s audience, gardening information and how it differs from a web search.

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TalkTalk · June 23, 2021

How I Learned to Code and Build an App — Ioniconf 2021

A lot of books I read were written by someone maybe in Michigan, and I live in Oklahoma, and the growing conditions are radically different. There are lots of things to memorize and calculate. There were bugs everywhere, and some of the bugs were good and some were bad, and trying to figure out which ones were which, there was just a lot of stuff going on.

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Media appearancePublished · February 11, 2020

Adventures in Angular 275 — Building Seed to Spoon

Dale joined the Adventures in Angular panel to discuss learning Angular and Ionic while building Seed to Spoon. The original episode page identifies him as the guest and connects the app’s beginnings with his interest in gardening.

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TalkRecording published · January 20, 2020

Growing food with Seed to Spoon — 2020 OKC Home & Garden Show

Square Foot Gardening is one of the first concepts that I learned about. There's a book called Square Foot Gardening that goes into detail about this, but it's really simple. The basic idea is this: you take your garden bed and you divide it into square feet. Every square can be planted independently of the square next to it and has its own numbers for how many per square it is. With spinach it's nine per square, which is nine seeds per square.

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TalkRecording published · November 19, 2019

Mobile Wars: Ionic Strikes Back — ThunderPlains 2019

I built my app in Ionic version 3 originally, and that was three years ago. The app had a lot of issues. They were kind of under the hood, and we decided to rewrite the app this year in Ionic 4. It was an amazing experience, and I wanted to talk about that here.

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TalkTalk · November 1, 2018

Code the Change — ThunderPlains 2018

We started building user stories. This was really where the development of the mobile app started. It was just an Evernote or Trello or something back then, started building what we knew the app would need to be. But we still didn't really know what the app should be then. We knew what problems we had with gardening, but we didn't know if there was the same problems other people had, and the problems that we could solve for other people. That's when we started doing events. It started with kids events, and we would go to local nurseries and we would put on kid's gardening festivals. We made them completely free, and any kid could come out and they get to bring home a seed that they got to plant themselves. We had all sorts of different things that kids got to do, but it also got us an opportunity to talk: what would it take for you to start growing food? Why don't you grow food now? Questions like that. All of that is what led into the ideas for the apps.

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TalkRecording published · September 21, 2018

Intro to Ionic — OKC.js

Ionic is a framework that lets you build apps from one code base that is HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and then it builds out versions of each. It is different from native apps, and it's important to talk about the differences upfront. Ionic has a web browser that it pops up, and then it emulates everything inside of that to look like a mobile app. For iOS it makes everything inside of that look like it should look on an iOS. On Android it does the same for Android, and it has a CSS framework built into it that does that for you automatically, so you don't have to code anything special. There are some performance hits that you can get with that. Our app isn't doing anything too intensive, so for us it's fine, the pros outweigh the cons. But if you want to build a game or if you want to build something that does something graphically intensive, you probably need to look at React Native or just the native platforms instead.

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Media appearancePublished · July 25, 2018

Planting seeds — Oklahoma Gazette

Jacob Threadgill’s Oklahoma Gazette profile covers Dale’s path from gardening to creating From Seed to Spoon, including learning the development skills needed to build the app.

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TalkRecording published · July 22, 2018

Code the Change — CocoaHeads OKC 2018

I had to memorize a lot about vegetables and what vegetables can go next to each other. All of these things I had to memorize and keep track of, and I was constantly carrying around books in my garden trying to keep track of all this information. I wanted to build an app to make it easier. I wanted to make an app to make gardening easier.

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TalkRecording published · June 9, 2018

Code the Change — OKC.js 2018

The first step is to get inspired. Obviously my inspiration was the garden. I wanted to build something. When I took programming classes in college, the stuff that I was building was like rebuilding a calculator or doing something that I just had no interest in. The way that my brain works, got to be interested in something to be effective at all in that thing. If I don't care, then I might as well not even do it.

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TalkRecording published · May 20, 2018

Code the Change — 200 OK 2018

I wanted to make a mobile app. Last year I started learning how to code, and in January we released our free mobile app that helps people grow food. It's called From Seed to Spoon.

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Media appearancePublished · March 15, 2018

From Seed to Spoon — The Oklahoman

The Oklahoman published a short video about From Seed to Spoon and its gardening app in March 2018. The publisher’s description connects the app with the upcoming Oklahoma City Home + Outdoor Living Show.

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TalkRecording published · March 13, 2018

How I Learned to Code and Built My First Mobile App — OKC#

For me it went back to the garden. I had an app I wanted to build. I had a goal in mind. In the past when I had tried to learn I had failed because it was a college course, building a calculator. I just didn't care about it. It took me having something I cared about in order for me to do the steps I needed to do in order to learn.

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TalkRecording published · March 2, 2018

Getting Started on a Project — freeCodeCamp Oklahoma

You've got to find something. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is. Find something you're passionate about building, something you're excited about building, because that will keep you focused on a goal. It's really easy to get overwhelmed if you're just doing example projects one after another. You'll end up with a pile of fifteen different example projects and no idea what you want to build or where to start. I was there for a long time.

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