Side Quests

A wise man said that if you get distracted by a side project, you should at least write about it:

My outputs are more modest than Simon’s, but I’m using AI to cook at a rate I couldn’t have imagined just a few months ago. Apparently the limiting factor is ideas now, so.. let’s roll!

README.md on GitHub explains what and how. These write-ups are the why, the journey, and cool stuff I think I learned along the way.

So far, in January 2026, I’ve:

• Built a computer vision app, to prove some math inspired by a Mark Rober CrunchLabs experiment (Galton’s Goalie)
• Migrated a 10,000+ line codebase, twice, to resurrect a passion project originally built by over 50 Engineering students many moons ago (Legend of the Greasepole: Resurrection)
• Resurrected a Frontpage 98 “museum” site, bringing back a museum of history and optimizing its taxonomy (The LegendWeb: Resurrection)
• Built a health-system integration that I now use daily, published to the cloud as an AWS Lambda (a technology I’d never touched before (Withings to Garmin Sync)
• While on a plane, cooked a “Side Quest Helper” that helps me update my WordPress site and document the “why bother” of these experiments (p.s. yes I write these)

My north star: field notes from (near) the frontier of building with AI.