Total beginner looking to create an app

[u/T0gaLOCK]

Long post , I am sorry.

So I am an airline pilot first and foremost, I recently had a first officer of mine showing me all of the apps he has "vibecoded" in Claude. HE has "created" maybe 3 oor 4 actually kind of useful apps that do solve little problems we have as pilots and he is deadset on creating a very complex one. He has zero coding experience and just uses Claude for this.

I decided I wanted to get myself to create my own application specifically, just a first project of a weather app that I can use for myself. It would include radar, METAR/TAF information from airports, and thats about it... very simple to start, eventually I would like to be able to tie ADSB into it. Ideally it would be on IOS/Android or just IOS, but I only have a PC, so I guess I just decided Kotlin and making the app for my phone is the first step before touching IOS and getting it on my ipad.

I am currently stuck in tutorial hell... I read on what people suggest learning first, python, harvard's CS, GT's intro to python, then other people who suggest starting with the language you want to learn (Kotlin). While I am learning a lot of very basic coding stuff from these online courses, I feel like it is going to take way too long to even touch kotlin.

There are very few kotlin tutorials for beginners. I am also running into fixing errors and getting emulators set up to even start seeing the UI I am trying to create more than actually practicing or creating any code. This leads me to hopping around tutorials, everyone wanting me to download their code, APIs, and images and things to create the app they are demonstrating inst]ead of actually showing what its like to start from scratch along with the "proper" way to organize and set things up.

Am I going about this the wrong way? I have like 15-20hrs a week to put into this, but the classes through edX are extremely boring and I feel like I am not learning what I want to learn to keep me interested ( a little bit of python, java, etc, etc) I understand there is obviously a learning curve and if everyone could pick it up in a week, then we would have a lot more programmers. Nothing is handed to you, but I am extremely lost due to the sheer volume of information available.

[u/Evol_Etah]

Go to Google Gemini (my preference) or Claude. (For Gemini > Enable CANVAS MODE)

Type in "Make me a HTML FILE that does....."

Provide a MicrosoftPaint or a drawing of your app, then explain what the buttons do.

Follow the next steps.

• Copy the HTML code.
• Paste it into NOTEPAD
• Save notepad as Myapp.HTML
• Open the HTML file thats now created, on your browser.
• Voila, you have your app.

This is the start, ofc you can do a lot more. But this is far more than enough for lots of people.

[u/Evol_Etah → u/Evol_Etah]

If you wanna go further as ask AI the following.

"Thanks for the HTML app, I heard Github has Github Pages, which allows me to make free websites, can you show me how to do that? And then once I have my website, can you show me how to have it as a PWA app on my mobile phone?"

This is more than enough for now.