Projects

Side projects and ideas: the digital and real-world things I made on the side. The big things, the companies and the roles, are under Work.

145 of them, so far

Worth a look

The ones I would point you at first.

Attending
Simple, social event pages: free to make, and guests said they were coming with one click.
Ten thousand users before it had properly launched, and number four on The Next Web's list of web apps for planning an event in September 2013.
Wrangler
A simple way to query and analyse data, and collaborate with your team around reports.
Aila
Oak National Academy's AI lesson assistant, open to every teacher in the UK.
Unicorn Hunt
A job board for tech jobs, built with 3beards in London.
Launched in January 2015; sold to Tiny in 2019, who run it as Tiny Boards.
Linkydink
The simplest way to share links with your team
One of its groups was Product Hunt: Ryan Hoover started it on Linkydink on 6 November 2013 and moved it to a site of its own three weeks later.
Hire My Friend
A service for people who are in a job but want a new one: use your social network to find opportunities without your boss finding out.
Help Me Write
A very simple service aimed at bloggers and writers facing the common problem of 'what shall I write next?'.
Confirmic
A cookie consent widget for websites, taken over from Metomic in 2021 and run under a new name.
Took over Metomic's discontinued cookie widget in March 2021 and kept it running, uninterrupted, for the thousands of sites already using it.

Everything else

The rest, newest first, with a note of how far each one got.

2023Autism Eyes An AI and VR healthtech spinout from Cleveland Clinic; as fractional CTO I helped carry the product out of the innovation lab, to its acquisition by Floreo.
2018The ICE List Built the website for The ICE List, a volunteer-run members' network of technology founders and investors, as its Tech Lead.
2015The Memrise Prize Built a tool for a head-to-head research competition to find the most effective way to learn foreign vocabulary — rival academic methods tested against each other on thousands of real learners.
2014The Awesome Box A custom-built flight-case filled with inspiring, hackable, educational technology, travelling from school to school a term at a time.
2014Planned Outage A trip for tech people to turn off and get away in the wilderness, kayaking in the Norwegian fjords.
2013Listerly Make and manage a list of people
2013Bitsy A tiny little service to help makers, musicians, designers, crafters, developers and small business owners sell their stuff directly to the people in their networks.
≤ 2013Crafty Fox Box Helped Emily with design and tech around her monthly craft box subscription service.
2013Savemates Create a monthly savings group
2012The Startup Wife Emily wrote about her experiences of #startuplife — moving her blog to something more sensible to let her grow and improve it.
2012The Comic Relief Exploralaboratorium A two-month long series of hacks for Comic Relief — a small team installed in their HQ hacking and making digital ideas, one a week.
2012Change Nation An Ashoka initiative to address some of the societal problems that Ireland was facing.
2012Accenture: Festival of Ideas A one-day strategy event for ~1,000 staff of Accenture's Dublin office using real-time visualisation of conversation data.
2012Convotate A web-app to make sense of hundreds of conversations happening simultaneously at a conference or event.
≤ 2012Eiggbox - Geek in Residence Eigg's 'geek in residence', on the Inner Hebridean island — an artist in residence programme for technologists and designers.
2012Red Bull Flow A camera app and web viewing experience for Red Bull: sequences of very short sports video clips.
≤ 2012Sketching with Code Research into culture hacks, and how cultural organisations were embracing hacker culture.
2011Stories from an Invisible Town An online space for a Hoipolloi theatre project: a map of a childhood, built up story by story.
2011GoGenie An ambitious project to create a structured WIKI for accessibility information, initially for all UK cultural venues.
≤ 2011Buddy A software tool that helped people deal with depression by keeping a 'mood diary' via mobile, web and SMS.
≤ 2011Budge An Arduino-based game with a web-based tool for visualisation and tracking.
≤ 2011Manage Places A pre-launch beta product that aimed to help people with large areas of land under management to comply with various environmental legislation.
2009Help Me Investigate A website to help those who want to investigate questions in the public interest
2009Modern Love Mashed up Twitter and Soundcloud to make a neat label site: a new home online for Boomkat's labels.
2008I So Wish A site all about users sharing 'wishes' and helping others to make them actually happen.
2008Odadeo A social site for dads, launched in a very early beta for Father's Day 2008.
2008The Big Picture A web-art experiment to win the world record for the largest ever photo-montage - in fact it was the size of a football pitch.
2007Emily Quinton Photography Wedding and portrait photography website.
2007First Light Movies Website rebuild for a UK-wide fund for inspiring young film
2007Jamie At Home Tips sharing platform for Channel 4's Jamie Oliver series.
2006Created in Birmingham Blog about the creative and cultural city of Birmingham.
2005V&A Arts and Crafts The V&A's International Arts and Crafts exhibition microsite: a virtual tour in QuickTime VR, a zooming object viewer, and a tile designer that drew over 14,000 visitors' designs.
≤ 2004LINE / ACG Snowballing A flash game for the LINE / Nike ACG UK ski team
2004BBC Midlands Today A touchscreen game for the Public Space at the BBC's new Birmingham home
≤ 2004Doctor Freeze A six level platform game developed for Jersey Insight.
2004Khonnor - I See Stars A Flash game to promote the new Khonnor album "Handwriting"
≤ 2003Mansion Impossible An addictive, free property trading game: buy and sell houses on your way up the property ladder, making enough cash to get the $10 Million mansion.
≤ 20023edit A website updating system that let site owners keep their own website up-to-date quickly and easily.
≤ 2002Default A 'warm electronica' night in Birmingham with various electronica musicians performing.
2002VivienneWestwood.com A content-managed website for this international fashion house
2001Sprite Freestyle Arena Promotional site for a £500,000 extreme snow sports arena at the Sheffield Ski Village.
≤ 2001Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery website A showcase for Birmingham's world class collections of Art, History and Science.
2001Type Records website and graphics A new website and graphic package for a fresh new UK electronica label
2000White Noise Central Art and literary site focussing on the travels of two music writers.
1996Robots in Disguise VJ crew with Toby Harris — seven years of live visuals at some pretty great shows around the country

Lab

The fun little things I made quickly, usually in under two days, most of them at a hack day. Most stayed sketches. Now and then one grew into a product, and those are above.

92 of them, so far

Sketches

Made in a day or two and left as they were.

2023Differentiated Homework Create differentiated homework based on the needs of the student
2023LLMs are going great “A crowd-sourced collection of everything you shouldn't be building with LLMs. You're… not doing that right?” Made in twenty-four hours at the inaugural AI Hackathon London.
2020WPStatic Test Proving out WP2Static so Oak National Academy could come off WordPress — flattening the site to static assets to cut its attack and performance surface.
2020Emily Quinton Emily's personal website, built with Gatsby
2020Perfectly A small web performance sketch: it ran Lighthouse in the cloud and measured what real visitors experienced.
2019Makelight Router 1 A two-file path-routing rule set that split makelight.com between the old Heroku app and a new Next.js front end, one URL path at a time.
2015Smalls The Smalls — “where brands and filmmakers get together to make short films”: brands post a video brief, filmmakers pitch for it.
2015Yester An "old news" service based on Wikipedia entries about today's date in history
2014Internet Of Things, Where Are You? A WebGL visualisation of the devices and services around your device right now
2014Story Jar Inspire your kids by making up stories for them
2014Teh Guardian A comedyhack that introduced misspelling's, and typos' into theguardian.com
2013Rumbleroll Keep up to date with your favourite blogs
2013Shhare Share passwords securely
2013DMAURL A one-day hack that got around Twitter only allowing white-listed URLs in direct messages
2013Doacourse Easy to create online courses
2013Flounder A tiny tool for small teams that helped them follow the people they were all most connected to to their company twitter account
2013Hugbase Making Crunchbase more useful by adding Datahug
2013Product Punt A no-code, landing page hack responding to the fact that Product Hunt had lots of people who wanted to post, but couldn't
2013Tentoring Ten minute mentoring
2012Croft 6 A git-powered site for a small museum
2012Linetime Simple visualisations of history
2012Skit Use Dropbox to create and manage a small website
2012The Lockin An experiment in reinvigorating the After Dark TV format for the digital age
2012Tales you Win A platform for artists to create multimedia location-based stories
2012Ulyssize A James Joyce Ulysses page generator
2012YeBay Itemes of importe of which ye may purchase to thine heart's content
2012Demarco A simple HTML5 mobile/web app to showcase the work of photographer Richard Demarco
2012Kitty How could artistic residencies be crowd-funded?
2012Storyland User-contributed stories about Scotland made readable on mobile devices
2012Is it smoggy in London? Mobile and web tool to find out about pollution levels
2012Smoggle An urban pollution game
2012Chircle A little charity idea — a single direct debit with a nice interface that let you give to charities really quickly and split up a fixed amount.
2012Dare Roulette Get your mates to do stupid stuff for money
2012Fence Subscriptions A way of supporting a record label via monthly subscriptions
2012Fundeer Get sponsored to give your skills to Comic Relief charities
2012Loftify Tackling the problem of poor home insulation for older people
2012Mega Miles Runners raise money by running long distances
2012Richerlist Enrich a mailing list of emails with more data to make it more useful
2012Spotted A mobile nature game
2012The Last Laugh Put a gift to Comic Relief in your will
2012Topic Telly Educational video content for Schools from Comic Relief
2011Screened A demonstrator mapping where films of different kinds are shown around the UK, built on the BFI's archived film screening data.
2011Wrangl A simple tool that visualised two sides of an argument.
2011Pretty-Textmate-Ruby-puts Outputs nicely formatted puts statements for Ruby developers using Textmate
2011Culturegrid Simple Ruby access to the CultureGrid API
2011CultureGrid JSONP JSONP front end to the Culturegrid XML API
2011Culturegridmobile A mobile consumer for the CultureGrid API - several thousand cultural artefacts on your phone!
2011Culturescraper A tool to grab the biggest image from a web page so you can refer to it elsewhere.
2011Stefoto A neat little site for a wedding photographer — open source, usable by any photographer quite easily.
2011FilmFlexicon Browse Filmflex films by their RottenTomatoes.com ratings.
2011Metcha Mobile serendipity accelerator
≤ 2011Mini Pub Crawl Make it easy to arrange a multi-venue evening out with friends
2011Mixilist Youtube app for online-and-offline parties
2011Mo' Monsters! A random monster generator, the precursor to the company More Monsters
≤ 2011New Homely A quick mashup based on scraping Pinterest to make a small single-page web-based mood board.
2011Phenomenal People A quick experiment at a content site for Women of the World festival
2011Twitter Backup Download all your tweets as a JSON file
2010Microjsonp Get all the microformats from a URL as JSONP
2010Caboodle A set of mashups for common services for Sinatra, so you could easily pull together bits from elsewhere on the web to make a website.
2010Sleepy Memcached API calls using Weary
2010GeoPilsen British Council hack with the people of Plzn
≤ 2010Many-headed A forked Ruby gem, never described.
2010DIY-Council An easy to use alternative way of using the web for local authorities in the UK
2010Email Your Candidates Send an email to the people standing for office, to ask them all the same question
≤ 2010Conversatives Comedy hack using a proxy to swap words for their opposite on the Conservatives.com website
2010Pat Simple access to UK postcode geo and administrative data
2010Geopinion A little app that let you gather people's opinions about places, particularly for planning.
2010WPRipper If your wordpress site died, scrape it back from the Google Cache using a sitemap
2010LaserBlazer Write words in the air using your mobile
2010Spiro Arduino spirograph drawings
2009Ruby GEOAPI Ruby interface to GeoAPI
2009Cached Resource Transparently caches ActiveResource data in a memcached instance by extending cache_fu
2009Twadio A twitter-based silent radio station — a virtual DJ tweets the name of an 'ear-worm' track and you play it in your head.
2009BCCDIY A community-generated version of the Birmingham City Council website, developed in two weeks flat using Ruby on Rails, tea and biscuits.
2009Debillitated A quick mashup to illustrate the progress of the Digital Economy Bill through the process of 'washup' in parliament.
2008Tweetlet A pregnancy twitter service that would direct-message you child development information in the first person

The cutting room floor

Quick tools, tests and throwaways. Nothing survives but the code, kept because a record of making includes the offcuts.

2023Differentiated Homework Create differentiated homework based on the needs of the student
2023LLMs are going great “A crowd-sourced collection of everything you shouldn't be building with LLMs. You're… not doing that right?” Made in twenty-four hours at the inaugural AI Hackathon London.
2023Autism Eyes An AI and VR healthtech spinout from Cleveland Clinic; as fractional CTO I helped carry the product out of the innovation lab, to its acquisition by Floreo.
2023Aila Oak National Academy's AI lesson assistant, open to every teacher in the UK.
2021Confirmic A cookie consent widget for websites, taken over from Metomic in 2021 and run under a new name.
2020WPStatic Test Proving out WP2Static so Oak National Academy could come off WordPress — flattening the site to static assets to cut its attack and performance surface.
2020Emily Quinton Emily's personal website, built with Gatsby
2020Run A Strava-powered Gatsby website for sharing a training blog
2020Perfectly A small web performance sketch: it ran Lighthouse in the cloud and measured what real visitors experienced.
2019Makelight Router 1 A two-file path-routing rule set that split makelight.com between the old Heroku app and a new Next.js front end, one URL path at a time.
2019Graph.cool Export A fault-tolerant export script for Graph.cool
2018The ICE List Built the website for The ICE List, a volunteer-run members' network of technology founders and investors, as its Tech Lead.
2018React Bulma Components Next A failing demonstration of attempting to get React Bulma Components to work with Next.js
2018Redis-cached Prismic API A demonstration of using Redis to cache the Prismic API in a Next.js and Express app
2018Roboshopper Automatically create Shopify orders in your test store using fake data
2018Cloudinary Cleaner Make a local database of your cloudinary images so you can manage deletions
2015Nao Jokes Collaboratively write jokes using Hackpad and have your Nao robot perform them
2015Smalls The Smalls — “where brands and filmmakers get together to make short films”: brands post a video brief, filmmakers pitch for it.
2015Yester An "old news" service based on Wikipedia entries about today's date in history
2015The Memrise Prize Built a tool for a head-to-head research competition to find the most effective way to learn foreign vocabulary — rival academic methods tested against each other on thousands of real learners.
2015Unicorn Hunt A job board for tech jobs, built with 3beards in London.
2014The Awesome Box A custom-built flight-case filled with inspiring, hackable, educational technology, travelling from school to school a term at a time.
2014Internet Of Things, Where Are You? A WebGL visualisation of the devices and services around your device right now
2014Planned Outage A trip for tech people to turn off and get away in the wilderness, kayaking in the Norwegian fjords.
2014Story Jar Inspire your kids by making up stories for them
2014Teh Guardian A comedyhack that introduced misspelling's, and typos' into theguardian.com
2013East Dulwich Forum A quick hack to see if the East Dulwich Forum could be more mobile-friendly and accessible
2013Linkydink The simplest way to share links with your team
2013Rumbleroll Keep up to date with your favourite blogs
2013Shhare Share passwords securely
2013Wrangler A simple way to query and analyse data, and collaborate with your team around reports.
2013Hire My Friend A service for people who are in a job but want a new one: use your social network to find opportunities without your boss finding out.
2013Pogoid More hackable Active Record models with Postgres
2013Help Me Write A very simple service aimed at bloggers and writers facing the common problem of 'what shall I write next?'.
2013Listerly Make and manage a list of people
2013Bitsy A tiny little service to help makers, musicians, designers, crafters, developers and small business owners sell their stuff directly to the people in their networks.
2013Attending Simple, social event pages: free to make, and guests said they were coming with one click.
≤ 2013Crafty Fox Box Helped Emily with design and tech around her monthly craft box subscription service.
2013DMAURL A one-day hack that got around Twitter only allowing white-listed URLs in direct messages
2013Doacourse Easy to create online courses
2013Flounder A tiny tool for small teams that helped them follow the people they were all most connected to to their company twitter account
2013Hugbase Making Crunchbase more useful by adding Datahug
2013Product Punt A no-code, landing page hack responding to the fact that Product Hunt had lots of people who wanted to post, but couldn't
2013Savemates Create a monthly savings group
2013Tentoring Ten minute mentoring
2012The Startup Wife Emily wrote about her experiences of #startuplife — moving her blog to something more sensible to let her grow and improve it.
2012Croft 6 A git-powered site for a small museum
2012Linetime Simple visualisations of history
2012The Comic Relief Exploralaboratorium A two-month long series of hacks for Comic Relief — a small team installed in their HQ hacking and making digital ideas, one a week.
2012Skit Use Dropbox to create and manage a small website
2012The Lockin An experiment in reinvigorating the After Dark TV format for the digital age
2012Peter Gregson A personal site for the cellist and composer, using Songkick, Lanyrd, Soundcloud, Foursquare...
2012Tales you Win A platform for artists to create multimedia location-based stories
2012Ulyssize A James Joyce Ulysses page generator
2012YeBay Itemes of importe of which ye may purchase to thine heart's content
2012Demarco A simple HTML5 mobile/web app to showcase the work of photographer Richard Demarco
2012Kitty How could artistic residencies be crowd-funded?
2012Mongotank Mongoid and Indextank sitting in a tree
2012Storyland User-contributed stories about Scotland made readable on mobile devices
2012Change Nation An Ashoka initiative to address some of the societal problems that Ireland was facing.
2012Is it smoggy in London? Mobile and web tool to find out about pollution levels
2012Smoggle An urban pollution game
2012Accenture: Festival of Ideas A one-day strategy event for ~1,000 staff of Accenture's Dublin office using real-time visualisation of conversation data.
2012Chircle A little charity idea — a single direct debit with a nice interface that let you give to charities really quickly and split up a fixed amount.
2012Convotate A web-app to make sense of hundreds of conversations happening simultaneously at a conference or event.
2012Dare Roulette Get your mates to do stupid stuff for money
≤ 2012Eiggbox - Geek in Residence Eigg's 'geek in residence', on the Inner Hebridean island — an artist in residence programme for technologists and designers.
2012Fence Subscriptions A way of supporting a record label via monthly subscriptions
2012Red Bull Flow A camera app and web viewing experience for Red Bull: sequences of very short sports video clips.
2012Fundeer Get sponsored to give your skills to Comic Relief charities
2012Loftify Tackling the problem of poor home insulation for older people
2012Mega Miles Runners raise money by running long distances
2012Richerlist Enrich a mailing list of emails with more data to make it more useful
≤ 2012Sketching with Code Research into culture hacks, and how cultural organisations were embracing hacker culture.
2012Spotted A mobile nature game
2012The Last Laugh Put a gift to Comic Relief in your will
2012Topic Telly Educational video content for Schools from Comic Relief
2011Stories from an Invisible Town An online space for a Hoipolloi theatre project: a map of a childhood, built up story by story.
2011Screened A demonstrator mapping where films of different kinds are shown around the UK, built on the BFI's archived film screening data.
2011GoGenie An ambitious project to create a structured WIKI for accessibility information, initially for all UK cultural venues.
2011IVES Ruby gem to access the IVES Venue ID API
2011Wrangl A simple tool that visualised two sides of an argument.
2011Pretty-Textmate-Ruby-puts Outputs nicely formatted puts statements for Ruby developers using Textmate
2011Culturegrid Simple Ruby access to the CultureGrid API
2011CultureGrid JSONP JSONP front end to the Culturegrid XML API
2011Culturegridmobile A mobile consumer for the CultureGrid API - several thousand cultural artefacts on your phone!
2011Culturescraper A tool to grab the biggest image from a web page so you can refer to it elsewhere.
2011Stefoto A neat little site for a wedding photographer — open source, usable by any photographer quite easily.
≤ 2011Buddy A software tool that helped people deal with depression by keeping a 'mood diary' via mobile, web and SMS.
≤ 2011Budge An Arduino-based game with a web-based tool for visualisation and tracking.
2011FilmFlexicon Browse Filmflex films by their RottenTomatoes.com ratings.
≤ 2011Manage Places A pre-launch beta product that aimed to help people with large areas of land under management to comply with various environmental legislation.
2011Metcha Mobile serendipity accelerator
≤ 2011Mini Pub Crawl Make it easy to arrange a multi-venue evening out with friends
2011Mixilist Youtube app for online-and-offline parties
2011Mo' Monsters! A random monster generator, the precursor to the company More Monsters
≤ 2011New Homely A quick mashup based on scraping Pinterest to make a small single-page web-based mood board.
2011Phenomenal People A quick experiment at a content site for Women of the World festival
2011Twitter Backup Download all your tweets as a JSON file
2010Microjsonp Get all the microformats from a URL as JSONP
2010Website-Redirect Redirects all GET requests from www.example.com to example.com (or similar) using Sinatra
2010Sinmetrics kontagent, mixpanel, etc wrappers for sinatra
2010Heroku_Memcached_Hello_World A quick test: Server Marked as Dead on Heroku
2010Caboodle A set of mashups for common services for Sinatra, so you could easily pull together bits from elsewhere on the web to make a website.
2010Sleepy Memcached API calls using Weary
2010GeoPilsen British Council hack with the people of Plzn
≤ 2010Many-headed A forked Ruby gem, never described.
2010DIY-Council An easy to use alternative way of using the web for local authorities in the UK
2010Email Your Candidates Send an email to the people standing for office, to ask them all the same question
≤ 2010Conversatives Comedy hack using a proxy to swap words for their opposite on the Conservatives.com website
2010Pat Simple access to UK postcode geo and administrative data
2010Geopinion A little app that let you gather people's opinions about places, particularly for planning.
2010Google-Cache-Sitemap-Downloader Use your Google sitemap XML file to download a copy of your website from the Google Cache
2010WPRipper If your wordpress site died, scrape it back from the Google Cache using a sitemap
2010LaserBlazer Write words in the air using your mobile
2010Spiro Arduino spirograph drawings
2009Ruby GEOAPI Ruby interface to GeoAPI
2009Cached Resource Transparently caches ActiveResource data in a memcached instance by extending cache_fu
2009Twadio A twitter-based silent radio station — a virtual DJ tweets the name of an 'ear-worm' track and you play it in your head.
2009BCCDIY A community-generated version of the Birmingham City Council website, developed in two weeks flat using Ruby on Rails, tea and biscuits.
2009Debillitated A quick mashup to illustrate the progress of the Digital Economy Bill through the process of 'washup' in parliament.
2009Help Me Investigate A website to help those who want to investigate questions in the public interest
2009Modern Love Mashed up Twitter and Soundcloud to make a neat label site: a new home online for Boomkat's labels.
2008I So Wish A site all about users sharing 'wishes' and helping others to make them actually happen.
2008Odadeo A social site for dads, launched in a very early beta for Father's Day 2008.
2008The Big Picture A web-art experiment to win the world record for the largest ever photo-montage - in fact it was the size of a football pitch.
2008Tweetlet A pregnancy twitter service that would direct-message you child development information in the first person
2007Emily Quinton Photography Wedding and portrait photography website.
2007First Light Movies Website rebuild for a UK-wide fund for inspiring young film
2007Jamie At Home Tips sharing platform for Channel 4's Jamie Oliver series.
2006Created in Birmingham Blog about the creative and cultural city of Birmingham.
2005V&A Arts and Crafts The V&A's International Arts and Crafts exhibition microsite: a virtual tour in QuickTime VR, a zooming object viewer, and a tile designer that drew over 14,000 visitors' designs.
≤ 2004LINE / ACG Snowballing A flash game for the LINE / Nike ACG UK ski team
2004BBC Midlands Today A touchscreen game for the Public Space at the BBC's new Birmingham home
≤ 2004Doctor Freeze A six level platform game developed for Jersey Insight.
2004Khonnor - I See Stars A Flash game to promote the new Khonnor album "Handwriting"
≤ 2003Mansion Impossible An addictive, free property trading game: buy and sell houses on your way up the property ladder, making enough cash to get the $10 Million mansion.
≤ 20023edit A website updating system that let site owners keep their own website up-to-date quickly and easily.
≤ 2002Default A 'warm electronica' night in Birmingham with various electronica musicians performing.
2002VivienneWestwood.com A content-managed website for this international fashion house
2001Sprite Freestyle Arena Promotional site for a £500,000 extreme snow sports arena at the Sheffield Ski Village.
≤ 2001Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery website A showcase for Birmingham's world class collections of Art, History and Science.
2001Type Records website and graphics A new website and graphic package for a fresh new UK electronica label
2000White Noise Central Art and literary site focussing on the travels of two music writers.
1996Robots in Disguise VJ crew with Toby Harris — seven years of live visuals at some pretty great shows around the country