Software is most interesting when it turns a vague idea into something useful. Here are a few projects that have shaped how I think about useful, flexible systems.

Tangential Solutions

Family Sessions

Visit Family Sessions ↗

A family activity tracker built for quickly logging how time is spent, whether an activity is happening now or was completed earlier.

• Ruby on Rails
• Hotwire
• SQLite
• Progressive web app

What makes it interesting

• A session can include multiple children, while validation prevents overlapping timers for the same child.
• Quick-start timers and manual entries support both real-time tracking and logging activities after the fact.
• Custom activity categories make the tracker adaptable to each household instead of prescribing a single routine.
• Daily and weekly rollups feed gentle goals for doing at least—or no more than—a chosen amount of an activity.

Tangential Solutions

Budget

Open Budget ↗

A personal finance app for planning monthly income and category budgets, recording transactions, and seeing at a glance how much remains to spend.

• Ruby on Rails
• React
• TypeScript
• PostgreSQL

Tangential Solutions

WebScrape API

View on GitHub ↗

An API for triggering customizable web scrapes, with an architecture designed to accommodate the changing shape of data on the web.

• Ruby
• MongoDB
• Resque
• Web scraping

What makes it interesting

• MongoDB provides a flexible home for scrape results whose schema changes from one source to the next.
• Scraping strategies are composable, making it straightforward to add specialized behavior for links, images, and other resources.
• Ruby's >> operator composes Proc objects, passing the result of one operation into the next.
• Background work runs through Resque so larger scrapes do not hold up API requests.

More experiments live in the Tangential Solutions organization.