Sharpening My Craft Through Side Projects

The idea

This year I set a goal to ship 12 products in 12 months. One idea each month. Small, focused, and complete.

The ground is shifting under our feet. AI models combined with agentic coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code mean designers have superpowers to build fully working apps in hours, not weeks. The best way to keep up is to play — and side projects are a low-risk way to do that.

No roadmap pressure. No design by committee. Just craft.

January — Mockery

My first native iPhone app: a curated directory of mocktail recipes (my other resolution this year is to quit drinking). Intentionally simple — a list of drinks, a recipe page for each. Recipes powered by structured Markdown. Built with SwiftUI in Xcode, using Cursor as a coding partner and Figma MCP to translate design mocks into code.

February — TM Timer

I practice Transcendental Meditation twice a day, and most habit trackers don't support that rhythm. TM Timer is a minimal tracker with a built-in countdown. The home screen is a monthly calendar of dots — filled for both sessions, half-filled for one. Two screens total. No backend, no accounts. Built entirely with Claude Code from the terminal.

March — Personal website redesign

At the end of February, I was laid off work, along with 40% of Block's workforce. It was time to scrap my old website template, and re-build my personal site from the ground up. Using Claude and my trusted team of agents. Make sure you press that little button in the bottom right, for a theme-switching easter egg.

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More projects coming throughout 2026.