Cool Projects
These are projects that I either found inspiration from, reference often, or just generally think are neat.
This page is broken up into
Technical Projects
This is a collection of some of my favorite projects found online. They are usually a source of thought, inspiration, and often a good amount of imposter syndrome. I obviously don’t have strict criteria for what projects really stick with me, but I have found that most often their motivation statement could be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. These projects thrill me.
I will attempt to provide a decent summary of each, but please check out the original sources!
Button Stealer
A Chrome extension that “steals” a button from every website you open, adding it to a trophy wall of buttons you have encountered.
Extremely Linear Git History
Why use random checksums when you could use neat and tidy ordered numbers?
Open and Shut
Type in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut (Really worth checking out the readme for an example).
Copy Dialog Lunar Lander
Play Lunar Lander in the Windows copy dialog box.
Why I love this so much:
- The idea of landscape from file transfer speed
- Difficulty level based on connection stability
- Messing with system settings to get “different worlds”
- “OS built-in level editor”
WordTeX
A great video on typesetting in Word.
Also has a brief section on the Turing completeness of autocomplete, because why not.
The Fuck
A command line application that corrects errors in previous console commands. It also allows setting an alias for a cleaner console log…
Example:
> git push
fatal: The current branch master has no upstream branch.
To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use
git push --set-upstream origin master
> fuck
git push --set-upstream origin master [enter/↑/↓/ctrl+c]
Counting objects: 9, done.
Badness 0
A fantastic video from suckerpinch that has a unique approach to typesetting. An awesome amount of work for a really fun product.
Technical Articles
I have several blogs and technical sites I like to read. Usually get a batch of them every month then try to get through one a day. Gives a break from technical stuff, easy reading during lunch, or expand my range a bit. Started this a few years ago when a former boss suggested daily reading as a habit for expanding/connecting ideas and staying current with interesting things.
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Stack Overflow Blog: Mainly focused on Webdev and AI right now. Some interesting things in their history.
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Stack Exchange hot questions: A lot more random things, find something interesting every now and again.
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Stephen Wolfram Writings Math and technical heavy. His personal and work writeups are nuts.
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Halfbakery: Just for fun/fuel to my never-ending list of side projects I’ll totally get to one day…
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Joel on Software: Not many updates but older articles.
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Atlassian Blog: Most recent addition. Pretty liberal/HR heavy approaches but food for thought. I really like their concept of playbooks that they share in some of them.
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RJ Andrews is the data scientist who did the “Info We Trust” book and the moon landing website. I’m subscribed to his monthly(?) newsletter.
Documentation and Visual Tools
Sourced from some work notes:
Someone asked today about Mermaid, and it made me want to share some of the other documentation and visual tools I’ve collected. Figured I should share the list with the whole operation. Please add to it if you have anything else!
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Obsidian: Great general purpose notetaking tool. Has good plugin support.
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Obsidian Kanban plugin: Creates a Kanban board for small tasks I can move as needed.
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Excalidraw plugin: Integrates Excalidraw, a feature rich sketching tool, into Obsidian.
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Obsidian Git plugin: Allows automatic backups of your obsidian vault.
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Dataview plugin: Uses SQLite like commands to aggregate data from different files in the vault. I use it for totaling hours for my different projects to track percentages
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Obsidian Checkboxes: I recently found a cool theme that extended markdown checkbobxes for different uses! So here it is in snippit form, simply drop in your Obsidian Snippits folder and load into your application (May not work with all custom themes, but you can just modify the css).
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- [ ] open
- [x] complete
- [!] important
- [>] deferred
- [?] question
- [i] info
- [-] canceled
- [/] partial
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Excalidraw: Deserves its own mention outside of the Obsidian plugin
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Mermaid: Great for a range of diagrams, flow, sequence, class, and git! There is also Obsidian support for simple Mermaid style diagrams within code blocks
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Ascii Flow: Good tool for generating formatted text blocks with proper spacing for code comments
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Fighter Brief: Huge shoutout to John DeWeese for introducing this to me. Cool way to display a range of military equipment and movement. NOT CUI SAFE, just fun to mess around with.
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Symbl: for all your symbol needs
Written by a human.