I'm a full stack engineer but I absolutely love working the frontend code, user experience and overall feel of the application. I'm always building up new and random projects for myself that are typically half-baked or incomplete. All public repos are just experiments and playings to learn something new or prove out an idea. My "real" work is done in private repos for the companies I work for. But here are a few of the fun projects I've worked on in the past as "Just for fun" or "Let me see if I can do X".

The LineUp Field Manager was built to help me manage painting soccer fields for my local club. It started out as a project to see how far I could take a PWA including things like Push Notifications and get exposure to other frameworks such as Solid, NextJS and Ionic Framework. It's now currently an Ionic PWA that is used by the club to help predict when fields need to be re-painted and helps coordinate when a field is needed for games.

I built this super minimal application just to help me work out and explain timezones to people and shows not only the UTC time and "local to you" time. I've spent a ton of time (pun?) and an embarrassing amount of time thinking out timezones and what that means for people when working on international applications. I've seen some horrifying code where dates are "just strings that look like dates" and totally incorrect assumptions where things were accidentally working because of the location of the server. Anyway it's just mostly a tongue-in-cheek site that I was inspired to slap together in a few hours. WTFTimezone

Built with my son during a MakeCode Arcade hackathon. This game is part of many of my projects that I do to simply learn and/or simply teach. I used the learnings from this to prepare for classes I taught for middle school aged students. This also inspired some fun hacking with handheld devices. It's a pretty fun game go check it out: Greedy Pirates

A fun side project that helped me learn and excersise some frontend-only limitations. I was inspired by some homework my kids where they had to do math problems to fill in a color-by-number piece of art. With my love of pixelart and wanting to do some "known" sprites, I came up with a way for people to upload a pixelart sprite and have it turn into a coloring sheet that you can print out. It has some limits but I wanted to see what some of the client-only file handling could do around parsing the image and then producing a printable grid. I even found a nice library that had a pretty solid color-to-name coversion! Check it out: 16 Colors.

This was done as part of a hackathon for Wasp where I ended up placing 3rd. I experimented with the early versions of AI and how I could create a choose-your-own-adventure engine that uses AI + LangChain. The real goal was to see how Wasp works and how it could help build applications at lightning speed. Overall I liked the framework and the idea but it's still in it's infancy and with things like NextJS being the "big boat" it's hard to propose using a somewhat propriatary language to describe how to build the application vs just building an application. Although it does cross my mind when I think about possible full-stack builds and re-builds of the LineUp Field Manager (just to learn a new path).