All posts tagged Side Projects - thoughts on AI-first development, staff engineering, and building with Claude Code.
At my dad's retirement party, in the gap before England vs Norway kicked off on the garden projector, I built him a digital time capsule. Guests scanned a QR code on the big screen and left sealed notes and predictions that nobody - including me - can read until 27 March 2027. The best part was watching the counter tick up all afternoon.
A Discord bot I help run quietly serves 1.4 million users across 11,000+ servers. It has been running since 2021. On a recent Saturday it broke - really broke - and the fix involved a Cloudflare tunnel, an old Raspberry Pi sitting in my parents' living room, and exactly zero dollars of new infrastructure. Here's the story.
I asked Claude a question this evening - 'any cars on the drive?' - and thirty seconds later it described the cars, where they were parked, and that they hadn't moved in the last ten minutes. The thing that answered wasn't a smart-home plugin or a cloud service. It was an MCP server I'd written hours earlier, bridging my home CCTV to Claude Code. Here's what I learned building it in one evening.
I spent eleven days building an ambient AI agent on a Raspberry Pi. It fused my calendar, watch, location, and phone state into one decision loop, then nudged me throughout the day. I drank more water. I moved more. I was more present. Then I killed it. Here's what worked, what failed, and what every habit app has been missing.
I wanted to track my travels across Europe without handing my location data to Google. So I built a self-hosted GPS system that pings every 5 minutes, stores everything on my Raspberry Pi, and displays it on a private map only my devices can see.
A friend built a weather app for a town in Germany. I thought - why not Wigan? Here's how I built a full-stack weather intelligence app on nothing but free-tier services.
I wanted to see how well AI could detect things from images. A fridge seemed like the perfect test case. The result is an app that identifies your food and suggests recipes - and roasts you if you ask it to.
I'm planning a nomad trip across Europe in 2026. With geopolitical tensions escalating, I built a real-time travel risk dashboard powered by a two-agent AI validation pipeline.