A prior iteration of this site had a page called "Project ideas" that listed a bunch of things that I'd like to build. This was a good idea and useful in its own right (I got a few people to build companies and projects based on them, and it was a useful avenue by which folks could tell me which ideas were already implemented.)
I still haven't quite worked out how this current iteration of my site should handle these sorts of long-form mutable catalog-style posts: the whole thing is really organized around a central timeline, and in lieu of search or a colophon page its harder to designate a given post as an evergreen dumping ground. So instead, I'm just going to batch a few ideas every few months.
(If you end up exploring any of these ideas, please let me know!)
Fuzzy search atop git history
There's a lot of interesting work around applying LLM-powered search to software development workflows; many of these are inordinately ambitious (You gotta be able to taste the kool-aid), to the detriment of the more mundane but solvable problems. Things like:
- "Which commit introduced the
Automationmodel?" - "Which of my myriad stashes contains the exploration work I was doing on a new splash page?"
- "What un-merged branches touch the markdown rendering engine?"
API wrapper around RDS Performance Insights
One genre of project that I stubbornly refuse to change my priors on despite a dearth of success stories (RIP Briefmetrics!) is: "UI wrapper around obscure/arcane/annoying but valuable FAANG API." RDS Performance Insights is a great example of this, and one can even purloin the great work done by Planetscale to find an early form factor that works well.
A better search around chat.db.
iMessage is one of the biggest social networks in the world; every MacBook has its entire iMessage history stored in a SQLite database called chat.db. It is wild to me that there aren't more projects that take advantage of this, given how annoying it is to actually search and collate one's iMessage history at scale?
