Stuff I've Done

Learn X in Y Minutes

Screenshot of Learnxinyminutes.com

LearnXinYminutes is a static site (via Middleman) featuring short coding tutorials for a variety of languages. Nothing too interesting in the stack, but it has survived some good traffic storms for being a straight Nginx+static deployment, despite living on a 512mb virtualhost that also serves a bunch of other sites (this one included).

Learn X in Y minutes is a site for short programming language tutorials designed for professional programmers to get up to speed quickly on a new language. It started as a blog response to a Lua tutorial I saw on HN. I made my own Clojure version, and was encouraged to set up a site and accept contributions via Github.

As of this writing (a month later), LearnXinYminutes.com features over 20 community-contributed language tutorials, excluding translations, all accessible and editable via one public Github repository.

Later for Reddit

Screenshot of RedditLater.com

The first edition, called RedditLater, was a Clojure Ring web application. I used Middleman and Enlive to generate HTML, and Compojure for routes. The datastore was MongoDB.

About 5-6 years ago, I rewrote it. It's still using Clojure, but now it's a GraphQL API with a Typescript frontend, and it uses Postgres like a sensible application.

Later for Reddit is a free service that lets you post to Reddit on a schedule. I often finish my projects late at night and want to post about them right away, but this turns out to be a poor strategy for actually getting picked up by Reddit. Turns out there are certain times to post that just work better.

Defunct Projects

There used to be a lot more stuff here, but most of it went unmaintained and I decided to take it down.

  • Stripe Invoice Generator - An invoice generator for Stripe, produced to render invoices with VAT information because Stripe didn't do that when I built it.
  • OneStrangeThing.com - A subscription service where I'd drop-ship you something cheap and weird from a chinese wholesale site.
  • ExtSearch - I was going to make an Elasticsearch-powered search service, but eventually I thought the better of competing with Google.
  • Open Recipe Search - An Elasticsearch-powered recipe search that mostly served as fodder for a Sitepoint article.
  • Your Personal Dot Com - A service that searches for domains containing your name. I had plans to do more but never did.
  • Address Bin - An email marketing system that operated by receiving and forwarding messages sent to a generated email address. Turns out this was already a thing, but it had some neat drip marketing features that I just didn't have time to build out.
  • Wagr - Record your silly post-dated bet, and it contacts you on the due date. Not sure if it ever worked, come to think of it.
  • Ladies' Choice Victoria - A local dating app where only women could send messages. Actually got a little local press, but never quite made it.