I trained as a computer scientist back when that meant compilers, data structures, pointer arithmetic, and a lot of staring at a terminal waiting for something to finish. I loved it.
Then I did what a lot of people who are good at building things end up doing: I went into management. It is genuinely satisfying work — you get to make a much larger dent than you can with your own two hands. But the further up you go, the further you get from the thing that made you want the job in the first place. For a long stretch, the closest I got to writing code was reading someone else’s.
What changed was Claude Code. Not because it writes the code for me — it is more interesting than that. It collapsed the distance between having an idea and having a working version of it. The tax I had been paying to start anything — remembering the build system, the boilerplate, the API I last used six years ago — mostly went away, and what was left was the part I actually liked: deciding what the thing should do and arguing with the machine about how.
What is here
These projects have no unifying theme, and I have stopped apologizing for that. Each one exists because something annoyed me and no one had built the fix I wanted. A visualizer because I wanted something better to look at while music played. A map because Yelp had fifteen years of my history and no way to see it. A ledger because babysitters are expensive and other parents are not. A dashboard because thirty-two years of financial records deserve better than a spreadsheet.
They are scratch-my-own-itch tools, which I think is the most honest reason to build anything. The upside of that is I actually use them, so they get fixed.
Free, and meant to stay that way
Everything here is free and MIT licensed. I am not trying to build a business out of any of it. If a tool is useful to you, take it — and if you improve it, I would like to hear about that.
A bias you will notice: most of these run entirely on your own machine and do not talk to a server. That is deliberate. Several of them touch genuinely personal data — where you eat, what you earn, who watches your kids. The safest place for that data is the computer it is already on.
Elsewhere
Code lives at github.com/neelyinferred.