Blog · Post 1 · 2024 and 2025
How it began
How I got back into proper programming during parental leave, and why my first attempts at a children's book ended up in a drawer.
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- 2022I start programming again, in a small way.
- March 2024My son is born.
- 2024Parental leave. I'm programming properly again, and the idea comes to me for the first time.
- Jan 2025The first children's book prototype.
- April 2025The second attempt. It's already called SagaLino.
- Dec 2025A teddy bear with glasses looks almost the same everywhere.
- Summer 2026Bagger Wuff.
2022: a bit of code again
In 2022 I started programming again, at first in a small way. A few tools for work, a few scripts. With the AI tools it suddenly went much faster than it used to, and I properly enjoyed it again.
2024: parental leave
My son was born in March 2024, and I was on parental leave. We spent part of it in France.
That's when I really started programming, almost every day. And that's when I first had the idea that later became Sagalino.
I mostly programmed when the little one was asleep. Sometimes when he wasn't asleep, too.
The first thing I built
My first project was a baby monitor. A camera hung over the bed, and every few seconds an AI looked at the picture and wrote down how my son was lying. It would say things like “The baby is positioned on its back”, with the time. I called it “Baby Roll Live”.
Nobody needed it, he was lying three metres away from me. But it was the first time I'd built something myself with image AI, and it was running on the very first evening.
That's when I noticed how well the AI could read pictures. After that I wanted to know whether it could also paint pictures that a child recognises themselves in. Shortly afterwards I started a children's book at the same kitchen table.
January 2025: the KidsBook Creator
The oldest version I still have is from 3 January 2025. We were back in Hamburg by then. It was called “KidsBook Creator”, was completely in English and had four steps: character, story, scenes, preview. The story came from a text model, the pictures from DALL·E 3.
I kept rewriting the instructions to the AI. One of them says “maintaining exact same character design”. It rarely stuck to it.
The stories were already pretty good. With the pictures, there was a problem I couldn't solve for a long time: the character looked different on every page. Sometimes the child had red hair, sometimes brown, and the jacket was a different colour each time.
April 2025: the second attempt
In April I tried again, this time as a proper web app in German. It was already called SagaLino and had twelve steps from the title to the finished book.
It already looked like a book, but I wouldn't have given it to anyone printed like that. A Sagalino children's book depends on the child finding the characters, or themselves, on every page. If someone suddenly looks different on page five, children notice straight away.
December 2025: a teddy bear with glasses
Over Christmas I got the old site out again and rebuilt it completely. Two test books came out of it, about a little teddy bear learning to use the potty. For the first time the character looked almost the same everywhere.
I could really have carried on from there. But it was our first nursery winter. My son brought home every bug going, I caught all of them and spent quite a long time in bed. The project went back in the drawer. Every now and then I tried out a new image model and then shut it again.
The next post is about why children's books mean so much to me in the first place. How the drawer finally opened in summer 2026 comes in the one after that.