I AM a journalist. I have never written a line of code in my life. And yet six months ago I decided to build an app — and somehow it’s now live on Google Play with 945 destinations across Britain and Ireland.
The idea came from a simple frustration. I kept driving to the coast with my family and arriving to find cloud. Meanwhile, thirty miles inland, it was glorious. Britain’s weather is hyperlocal. The sun is almost always shining somewhere, you just need to know where.
So I built something to find it.
Chase the Sun scans real-time weather forecasts across nearly a thousand handpicked destinations: beaches, castles, waterfalls, forests, country parks, hidden coves. Then it navigates you turn-by-turn to whichever one has the best sunshine right now. Think Waze, but for good weather.
I used AI as my coding partner. Two people working together, one of whom can actually code. Every product decision, every destination, every judgement call about what belongs in the app was mine. Every line of code was the AI’s.
The disasters were spectacular.
One coordinate was sitting in the middle of Loch Ness. An entire national park was pinned on a mountain summit with no road to it. My Google Play listing advertised 353 destinations when the app actually had 945. And the payment system had been silently returning error codes since launch, meaning no user could subscribe for three full months without either of us knowing.
Every single one of those things was invisible until it wasn’t.
But here’s what six months of disasters taught me: the bugs aren’t the story. The story is that a journalist with no coding experience, no development budget and no technical co-founder built something real. Something that works. Something that on a grey Saturday morning in Birmingham will find you sunshine in the Brecon Beacons, the Pembrokeshire coast or the North York Moors and drive you straight there.
With the bank holiday weekend coming, that feels like exactly the right moment to share it.
Chase the Sun is free on Android now. iOS coming shortly.
Download Chase the Sun on Google Play
