Generative Ai is taking the world by storm. LLM’s find a home very naturally around text dense workflow. Email is the obvious use case. This is already a product the likes of Google, Microsoft and Superhuman are looking at extensively. I thought it would be fun to play around with an email client straddling human centred design while enabling extensive Ai features.

This design asks questions about what type of user get what benefits, how many colour is too much colour, and the importance of good iconography.

Pile Up is a desktop to-do app whose goal is to stress you out.

I was annoyed by my own habbits, abusing to-do apps as a burial ground for tasks. So long as it was somewhere I didn’t have to think about it. This lead to piles of task left undone or quietly moved into the “someday” section never to be seen again. To attempt to solve this I have been moving to more and more minimalist productivity software, the latest of which is a simple list in a markdown file. However, even this simple system could not escape the same fate.

I resolved that what I needed was a to-do which indicated to me the amount of stressed out I should be. Over the next few weekend I designed and developed Pile Up a to-do app which stresses you out.

Monotonus is a digital fidget tool designed to improve attention and concentration in adults with ADHD… Mostly my attention and concentration.

Fidgeting helps people with ADHD remain focused for longer, specifically in low stimulation environments (like the classroom or office meeting). This is a fact seen conclusively in the research but also understood through years of anecdotal experience.

My own experience saw me using excel during meetings, I though I might be able to elevate my own experience with something on the web but When I came up short I designed and developed Monotonos to fill that exact gap.

I’m not very good at chess, but I do like to play, and in the hopes of getting better, take notes on openings. I am not however able to understand the notation. I wanted to be able to look at my notes and instantly understand the position the notes where describing. like this I had been playing around with Golang and wanted to learn more about framework distribution and serverless apis so though I would quickly build a tool which would enable my chess notes to be that much better.

Since then I have spent a considerable amount more building the tool then taking or reading the notes… such is life.

This website has been designed and re-designed over the year to accomplish a never ending list of tasks and support vital features which have since become irrelevant. It current state, however, I believe is its best state, and I’ve learnt a lot in the process of re-designing it once again.