Learning that RCS is even more of a monstrosity and a lie than I thought a few years ago. Yikes. Lots of groundwork a decade ago setting the stage for "the carrier creates a common service anyone can interact with" (like sms/mms currently do, which would be great) but in practice it's pretty much 100% "only the carrier app or Google/Samsung messages has access to literally any of it".

Yeah I'm not gonna touch it and I'm going to actively encourage people to disable it. Use signal instead.

I've working on an AI Thumbnail Generator for making YouTube thumbnails and social media images the last few months. https://thumbnail.ai/

I wanted to see if I could use generative AI to build a whole business. Not just a digital product or an app — but the entire business from end to end:

(Spoiler: I did manage it and launched in just 75 days from start to first order)

- Three tier corporate structure with manager-managed LLCs and a private WY LLC as manager, complete with a knowledgebase-powered assistant that can write share registries, banking resolutions, meeting minutes, contribution contracts, loans and more

- Supply chain management with proprietary lot tracking that tracks PO line items from production to delivery

- Generated the base for all product images, helped write and research label design and text, wrote SEO titles and product descriptions

- Used Claude Code to build the entire Shopify theme for the site, all collections, product pages, legal pages and a COA database to boot

- Used Claude Code to build a custom Shopify app to integrate lot tracking into the shop so that when lots sell out the next lot is queued for sale and all lot-related metadata is synced to the product variant and displayed on the product page

- used Claude Code to build a super analytics platform that combines the data from GA4, Shopify orders, and Meta business suite into a single feature store where I can wrangle the data to ask/answer any question I can dream of about audience segments, product popularity, what’s working or not, and get insights on what to do next

If you care to check it out, the site is https://cosmicpeptides.com

What I am working on right now:

-https://salespark.app/apps/discount-spark: A Shopify app that allows merchants to create more powerful discount codes so they can create stronger offers for their customers.

What I recently built but didn't find a successful product market fit:

-https://wordazzle.com: A word game that's designed to expand your vocabulary with exceptional words.

-https://spicychess.com: Chess, meet boxing! Imagine playing chess BUT you can also smack your opponent. Now, if you smack em enough times to drain their health completely(yes, you have a health bar), you can steal their turn. It's fun, a little evil, but after thousands of $ spent on marketing, never found critical mass.

I'm starting to shift my energies towards building more hardware and less web/mobile apps for side projects.

I'm currently working on Dice of Sending - for when you want to roll physical dice but you play DND online. This is mostly just for fun with my DND group.

https://github.com/TravisBumgarner/dice-of-sending

Manabi Reader: Japanese learning through reading

https://reader.manabi.io

I recently added FSRS (besides also having Anki integration). Now I'm working on replacing the need for reviewing flashcards by having reading activity automatically mark flashcards (current and future) as reviewed, so that you can get many of your reviews in just by reading native materials that interest you instead of sacrificing most of your study time to contextless flashcard grind.

I'm also working on a manga mode using a new manga OCR tech I have licensed out of academia that is ahead of state of the art alternatives.

This project now sustains my full-time focus.

Working with a group of friends on a "microcontroller-for-makers" kind of thing called the MakerPort. (https://makerport.fun) Sort of similar to an Arduino or micro:bit, but uses the MicroBlocks programming editor (https://microblocks.fun) created by John Maloney, who was the original team leader for Scratch at MIT for 11 years. The hardware includes an mp3 player, I2C ports, accelerometer and true capacitive touch sensors.

Working on therapy software, for porn addiction.

https://zenstreak.app/

Working on https://libredesk.io/

It's a modern, open source, self-hosted customer support desk.

I recently started a local chess club, and did a quick search for software to use to allow us to manage the club, but couldn't find anything open-source/free.

I wanted something that would allow us to record members, games, etc., and also allow us to be assigned a local club rating. Anyway, after doing some searching and only finding paid software, I decided to just build something. That lead to https://openchessclub.org

You can check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/OpenChessClub/openchessclub.

I plan on building a QR code generator that allows club members to check-in during meetings, which will then allow players to be matched, and some other features, although it is primarily aimed at smaller chess clubs, so don't know how far it'll go.