Small Tools Built Along the Way

It all started with thoughts like “this password generator is great, but it would be helpful if I could create batches at a time” or “this is a really good conversion tool, but it’s horribly full of adverts.” So I started making one or two little apps to solve those particular issues, and the idea eventually germinated to put these little tools together on a website.

The earliest apps tended to be very specific responses to something I needed, then branched out to things I had always been curious about, and finally encompassed requests from friends and odd problems I came across online. This has led to some extremely niche tools appearing.

Still other apps stemmed from concepts I’d always wanted to create but had never got round to. I’ve always been fascinated by prime numbers and their association with the Fibonacci sequence — initially I built something specifically to compare the two sequences, but this ended up being less useful than I’d hoped since numbers in the Fibonacci sequence rise so quickly. I then reverted it back to simply being a Prime Number Generator; having grown up in the 8-bit era of computing, the speed you can accomplish this just using vanilla JavaScript in a web browser still impresses me.

My childhood interests continued to play a role, such as graphical creation techniques using equations — fractals and ray-tracing, for instance — and others came from the hobbies of friends, such as 3D printing utilities.

Who knows where these experiments will take me next? I sure don't...