04 / blog
Notes on what I'm building, learning, and figuring out.
On Friday I was at a total loss for project ideas, so I made a basic haiku generator. Over the weekend I almost scrapped it. On Monday I decided to build on top of it instead.
Several of my portfolio projects need API keys to run. I didn't want to put my keys in the code and I didn't want to ask recruiters to bring their own. So I built a token system that gives them up to 5 free uses per project.
The grid is filling up. Which is exciting. But I clicked through several of my own projects today and realized an outsider couldn't tell what half of them did from the title alone.
I needed a way to brainstorm ideas for the remaining 37 projects in my 50-day challenge. So I built one: a spatial concept map powered by Claude that lets you drill from a vague topic all the way down to a specific, actionable idea.
I built a web game that turns your iPhone camera roll into a geography quiz. The biggest challenge wasn't the quiz itself, it was convincing browsers to read GPS data from photos.
Upload a video once, then run as many plain-English queries as you want to find specific moments. Built on the Gemini Files API.
A no-backend typing test with live WPM, accuracy, and error tracking. A good exercise in state management without reaching for AI.
A three-phase app that takes your free-form brain dump and hands back an organized task list with dates, durations, and priority buckets. The interesting part was the prompt design.
A Chrome extension that captures page context and shares it with AI agents via REST or MCP. The interesting part wasn't the extension itself, it was building an MCP server into the same Cloudflare Worker.
Building a theme switcher with AI-generated styles taught me something unexpected: Claude can write perfect code for a visual effect it has never actually seen.
Why I decided to build one small project every weekday for 50 days, what I hope to learn, and how I'm going to track it all on this site.