Side Projects
Small tools, built for one user
Between other work, I build small things for myself, usually because a normal day handed me a specific annoyance and the fastest fix was to write a tool for it. None of these are products. They're a look at how I think when the only stakeholder is me.
Instrument Builder
A freeform synth for designing instruments, not just playing them
Instead of picking a preset and tweaking a couple of knobs, this is a drawing-based synthesizer. You sketch the shape of a sound directly, with full control over volume, pitch, filter, pan, and spectrum across the length of a note. It supports layering multiple sketched sounds together, dropping in real audio samples alongside the synthesized ones, and playing the result back over MIDI, so a custom instrument you designed by hand can actually be played like one.
Zoom Volume Regulator
An automatic gain control that keeps your mic level steady
Built because the same call would have one person too quiet and another too loud, and manually riding the volume mid-meeting is not a great use of attention. This runs in the background during a call, continuously measuring speech level and applying automatic gain control to smooth it out in real time, with logging to see how it's adjusting over the course of a call.
GasBuddy Watcher
A tray app that watches nearby gas prices so you don't have to
A lightweight watcher that sits in the system tray, checks nearby gas prices on a schedule, and logs the changes over time. It builds a simple dashboard out of that history so price trends and drops are easy to spot at a glance, instead of opening an app and manually checking every station.
Custom Typing Test
A drill built for one specific weak spot: the number row
Not a general typing test. This one is purpose-built to train the number row at the top of the keyboard, the part of touch typing most people never actually drill. Each timed session tracks performance per digit, down to hesitation time before each keystroke, not just whether you got it right. Every run generates its own HTML report, and those reports roll up into a trends dashboard, so it's possible to see, digit by digit, which numbers are still slow and whether the hesitation is actually going down over time.
YNAB Insights
A forecasting layer on top of a budget, not just a ledger
Built on top of YNAB (You Need A Budget) to answer a question the budget itself doesn't: what's coming next. A statistical detector scans transaction history (no AI involved here, just pattern analysis) and picks out recurring income and bills on their own, then projects them forward as forecasts. A separate credit-card layer tracks each card against its payment account and estimates the next autopay amount before the statement even closes, growing the estimate as new charges land. When a forecasted transaction actually shows up, it's auto-matched against the real one by date, amount, and payee. On top of all that, a monthly routine reconciles every account and pushes a net worth snapshot out to Compass, so net worth becomes a tracked trend line instead of a once-in-a-while gut check.
Animation AI
Turning an audio track into an animated scene
An end-to-end local pipeline for going from raw audio to an animated video. It transcribes the audio, then opens a "director panel" where you mark scene breaks and drop in notes on what should happen where. From there, an AI step turns those notes into a storyboard, and a final step renders that storyboard into an actual animated scene, with every version auto-saved along the way so nothing gets lost mid-iteration.
Contact
Want to hear more about any of these? Reach out on LinkedIn.