Side Projects, FTW!
I love working on side-projects—sometimes to scratch an itch, sometimes to explore a wild idea. I believe it’s the best way to learn anything. You get full control over the creative side of programming. Here’s is a partial list of side projects I have built over the last few years:
alarmism.watch
One page website that tracks the accuracy of alarmist headlines. There are good reasons to be aware of the dangers we have to face in the future, but alarmist claims, like “world would run out of food” don’t help anyone.
SVGBox
SVGBox.net is a free API to let devs use thousands of icons for free without the hassle of handling SVG Files. It has been featured on CSS Tricks and Smashing Magazine.
As of June 2022, it’s serving hundreds of websites and handling over 3M requests / month.
EightColors
EightColors is a sliding puzzle game where you need to make the grid reach a certain state. It starts off easy but gets progressively difficult.
EightColors went on top of Hacker Newsand was universally liked as being simple yet challenging.
TextQuery
TextQuery is s work-in-progress app to easily run SQL over various data files and create simple visualizations over the analysis.
UTM Builder
UTM Tags are complicated. There are five of them and it’s unusually hard to know which tag to use when. This is a simple wizard which makes it easy to generate UTM tags for any campaign.
It went to top of Product Hunt with 330+ Upvotes.
Autosave
Autosave is a Cloudflare app that automatically saves form fields (except passwords and credit cards) to localStorage and restores them if the form hasn’t been submitted. This saved the user from losing all the typed data if they accidentally close the window.
It is currently installed on 5000+ websites.