projects
Celebrate!
> glowing compliments for your daily achievements
Celebrate! is a small webapp, promoting positive thinking. I built it during a time when overwhelming responsibilities meant I was getting nothing done. The idea is simple: once a day, write down everything you achieved (no matter how small) to earn a glowing compliment.
By listing all the small things you’ve done in a day, you can reduce stress about productivity: seeing a long list of small things such as “drank water” or “rested” is often more heartening than a short list of uncompleted projects or no list at all.
Once you’ve completed your list, the site will think for a moment before giving you a compliment in a warm orange colour.
Celebrate! is written in vanilla HTML, CSS and JS. It uses a 1-column design to emphasise its simplicity and encourage users to focus on the content. The loading bar is animated with random delays to make the site feel more dynamic and genuine, since the compliment is selected at random from a pre-determined list (even knowing this, users still enjoy the site and have benefited from its use).
One of the simplest projects I’ve ever made, it is also my favourite. It has made a great positive impact on my and many others’ lives and is a great place to seek judgement-free affirmation.
Eurotally
> Eurovision fun with friends
Eurotally is a Eurovision companion app allowing friends to rate each performance in different categories, ranging from the vocals to the outfits. It uses a following / follower based system to show you your friends’ votes and calculate the average for each category. It allows friends to see what they think, even if they’re halfway across the globe.
I won’t be able to watch Eurovision with my family this year, so I wanted to create a way that I would still be able to enjoy it with them. Eurotally gives me the opportunity to see what they’re feeling in real time, and share my own thoughts as well.
The website is built with Vue as a SPA and uses Pocketbase for authentication and database backend services. Pocketbase was great fun to build with, due largely to its ease of use, though it did have shortcomings in its flexibility that will be featured in a blog post soon.
This site pushed me out of my comfort zone, as I had to create something that was fun to use and echoed the noisy and vibrant atmostphere of Eurovision. A plain black and white wall of text would not work here!
As it stands, there’s a great deal more that could be done to improve the site, but that will have to wait till next year!
Monument to Stupidity
> share your mistakes and revel in their humanity
The Monument to Stupidity is a place to share your mistakes with the world. Sometimes we mess up and that’s OK. Share your stories completely anonymously and join us in celebrating our ongoing stupidity.
While Celebrate! is a place to take pride in the good things, the Monument is a place to laugh at the bad. When I make a mistake, I want to learn from it and share it with the world, so I created a place to do that free of judgement.
This website uses Pocketbase for its backend and is essentially a paginated list of people’s most recent mistakes and a form where you can submit your own. Its design is very simple, taking inspiration from the Neurodiversity Design System to make the site as easy and pleasant to use as possible.
muse
> free yourself of the past
muse is a webapp for stream-of-consciousness journalling. It limits you to 99 short lines of text, with no ability to edit any but the current line, encouraging you to write exactly as you feel in the moment. Then, you can save your musings, before watching your words fade into the past.
I have found the site most useful when I’m feeling confused or disoriented. Writing down my thoughts and feelings allows me to better understand them and muse gives me the freedom to do so without worrying about the words themselves.
The site works without signing up, allowing you to write and download musings, but an account is required to save your musings online to read later.
The site is written in vanilla HTML, CSS & JS and use Firebase as an authentication backend and NoSQL database. I opted not to use a framework for this project to aid in simplicity (despite more repeated code) and to improve my understanding of the essential tools I use.
This approach to journalling is very opinionated and not for everyone. If you like to express your emotions but don’t want them to weigh you down, give muse a go.
website
> personal website and blog
My personal website is designed to be a space where I can communicate with no distractions. Since the focus is on communication of my work and writings, I placed special emphasis on the text while designing the site.
This emphasis grew into an obsession so, for the first time, I’ve created a site with no fancy animations, no buttons calling for your attention and no JavaScript.
The site is written in Astro and I tried to apply some of the principles of CUBE CSS to simplify the styling logic. I found this method enjoyable to use, though I gleaned little benefit since the site is deliberately simple and the component-oriented nature of Astro allows scoped styling anyway.