I'm an app developer at 57.
That's the actual point.
Most "About" pages list accomplishments. I'm going to do something different. I'm going to tell you what I actually am, in 2026, so you can decide whether to read what I write.
Who I am
I'm Annette Thompson. I'm 57. I have a BS in Medical Technology with a cytogenetics concentration from UTHSC Houston (1989), with three years of biochemistry at Texas A&M before that. I'm a certified teacher — Texas credential — with public-school ESL and GED experience and a stretch teaching internet development at a community college in the late 1990s, back when "internet development" meant teaching adults how to open a web browser.
In 1995 I taught myself ColdFusion over a winter and built adoption.com. I sold it years later. I raised seven kids I'd adopted, ran orphanages in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Haiti, and along the way founded Bone Voyage Dog Rescue in Mexico — twelve virtual assistants, hundreds of dogs placed, the kind of operation that taught me what AI was for before I had the vocabulary for it.
Then I walked away from tech for the better part of two decades.
Why I came back
I didn't plan it. In April 2024 I asked ChatGPT to draft an article about dog vaccinations in Mexico. The draft took ninety seconds. I sat at my kitchen table with a dog asleep on my feet and realized I had just cut my content operation by 80%.
Two years later I'm building software again — Claude Code, Astro, Cloudflare, a stack of tools that didn't exist last time I shipped production code. My AI collaborator is named Charlie. I named him on April 21, 2026. He's trying to live up to it.
Why I write this
Because a lot of women my age have heard about AI for three years and quietly assumed the train left without them. It didn't. I'm proof. I'm an app developer at 57. Not "I dabble." Not "I'm learning." I ship software. The win, for me, is not the code — the win is the identity. That's what I want to give you.
I'm not a teacher in the lecture-hall sense, here. I'm a peer showing her work. Every essay names a real thing I did this week, a thing that broke, and what I learned. If a piece doesn't pass that test, it doesn't ship.
Where I write from
Half my year is in Ajijic, Mexico, where I admin a 65,000-member Facebook group of expat retirees. The other half is in the United States. I'm writing this from a kitchen table somewhere — that's the honest answer most weeks.
What you'll get if you subscribe
- One Tuesday-morning issue a week. Always free at minimum.
- A real thing I built or broke that week — not "10 ways to use AI."
- Tools by name. Claude. ChatGPT. Astro. Substack. Whatever I actually used.
- Honest about failures. Including my own. Especially my own.
- Faith-respectful, never doctrinally specific. You're welcome here whatever you believe.
You're not too old for this. You are not too late. You're just starting from a different place — and that place is, it turns out, an excellent one.