The Second Language · by Derwish Rosalia
Build practical tools for your work and life with AI, even with little coding experience. The Second Language helps you create, check and adapt something of your own, and discover what else you can do.
Free. In English. By Derwish Rosalia. Unsubscribe whenever you want.
You know your work. You can see exactly what a small tool would fix. A dashboard, a checklist, a tracker. But building it always meant waiting for IT or paying someone else.
You have little coding experience. That used to be where the idea ended. With AI it is where it starts. You describe, you test, you adjust. The code becomes a detail.
You want to understand what you use. Not a black box you copy and hope for the best. Something you can check against the source, change when your work changes, and explain to a colleague.
That is what The Second Language is for. One guided project at a time, you build something real, check that it works, and make it your own.
I'm Derwish Rosalia, an AI trainer and consultant. I've personally trained more than 5,000 professionals in AI. Before that I spent fifteen years as an accountant and auditor, which is where I learned to check work before trusting it.
I taught myself to build with AI. No computer science degree, just curiosity and reps. Today I build my own tools and agents, and I help professionals do the same.
I write about building useful things, learning new skills and taking an active role in your own development. Everything I share, I test on my own work first. More about me.
How this works
01
Each issue is one guided build. Small, useful, finished. A dashboard, a checklist, a tool for your own work.
02
You build with AI as your coding partner, then check the result against the source. Counts, filters, empty fields. Trust comes from checking.
03
One change of your own, so you feel how a tool grows. The reps compound into confidence, and into whatever you build next.
Free. In English. By Derwish Rosalia. Unsubscribe whenever you want.
First issue in preparation
We'll start with a small project dashboard: filter your work, spot missing information, and update it with a new spreadsheet. Join the newsletter to receive the first build when it's ready.
Essays
10 June 2026
Recipes, contracts, month-end closes, bedtime routines. Once you see the instructions underneath, AI stops being a chatbot and becomes a compiler for your life.
Read the essay
3 June 2026
Nobody warns you about the comfortable trap. A respected title, good money, and the slow realization that you traded your freedom for furniture.
Read the essay
27 May 2026
In nature, everything grows toward its maximum potential, as long as there's light and water. Only humans decide they've learned enough.
Read the essay
What I'm building
Not for clients. For my own life. One for my mind, one for my money, one for my time. The fastest way to understand AI is to live with it.
Meet the team and read how I build them on the agents page.
For organisations
I do that work through Upvance, the company I co-founded. Two routes, equal weight.
AI literacy and practical skills for knowledge workers and finance teams.
upvance.nl
Microsoft Copilot adoption, AI agents and putting AI into practice.
upvance.nl
The Upvance website is in Dutch.
In nature, everything grows toward its maximum potential. Grass doesn't stop growing because it learned enough. Only we do that.
You were built to keep growing too. Building something of your own is how you feel it.