The Crocher Shelf is a project I made because I was tired of everything being social powered. When things are gamified and algorithmically curated, its easy for the wrong incentives to be in play. The crochet shelf is a curated collections of crochet patterns curated by me and designed to be a calm place where crocheters dont need to feel perfomative pressure. Users have a persistant account (powered by Clerk, Neon and Drizzle) and can save patterns to 'custom shelves' and view them later. The only public content they can post is the finished results (with a note) to help others see how the outcome may look.

Everything in The Crocher Shelf is moderated before it is made public and there is a whole backoffice to create custome collections for the site, accept (or reject) new patterns and moderate submitted reults.

The site was really fun to design and build without havting to think about how it would work to monetize, advertise or stoke engadgment. Stepping away from some of the accepted patterns of modern web design make you realise how driven everything is by user engagement and virality and social.

For every question there are many answers. Some consider their relevant experience and expertice to help guide and hone. Some empathise with a delicate emotional state and help assure and fortify. Some are dumb. but what they have in common is they arent wrong.

Manywise is an app I made to help people find the answers to their questions from all differnt perspectives by selection a council of trusted agenets to weigh in. Select agents (or create your own) and watch a diverse range of perspectives and opinions respond, explore, ponder and discuss.

Althouhg a somewhat silly project on the surface, Manywise is an exploration on how to build an app that openly shows the temprement and biases between an answer. As humans it is a complex mix of nurture and nature, on Manywise its specific prompts and character steers. this leaves an app you know is wholly artificial, but ends up exploring just how easy it is to trust a generated answer and steer it with whatever biases you want.

Manywise uses Clerk, Neon and Drizzle to provide presistance across sessions. It uses Vercels AI SDK for the interaction with the LLM's and the whole thing is built with Next.js and Tailwind.

After seeing how much my partner would visit my previous codepen experiment with Nonograms on codepen, I thought it was time to upgrade. Using Next, vercel, postgres and Auth0 I created a platform for her to be able to create and rank new puzzles, with her fastest time being persisted to a database for each one.

I also played around with Next themes to create, not only a light and dark mode but also custom themes that can easily be added to.