Projects for January 2026

An infinite collaborative word search where anyone can find and submit words. No account required. Words can go in any direction and snake around.

From Luke: This was a really quick project compared to some of my other ideas - completed in just about two weeks! It borrows a lot of tech decisions from monkeys.zip, which drastically sped up development. So far I’ve been very pleased with the reception - collectively some 1000+ players have now found over 300,000 words!

The basic tech outline is that I store words in Firestore (so you can easily get realtime updates) - but rather than document-per-word (which would get very expensive) each document stores ~2000 words based on chunks. As you navigate the world, we subscribe and unsubscribe from chunks within the view, caching them locally. For rendering this data I have a sloppily vibecoded tilemap renderer, where tiles are rendered in a Web Worker and stored into memory. I probably should’ve just used a library for this, but it’s performant enough for now.

One thing that is new for me is having a Discord for the game - thanks to Neal for encouraging this approach - I’ve been liking it a lot! Not a ton of people in there, but more than I expected. It’s both practical and motivating to be able to chat with people who like it, and get some instant feedback - plus for my next launch I now have a small group of fans that can help with that initial push for virality.

Popularity contest for out of context quotes I overheard in 2025.

From Alex: A decent amount of my humor is just repeating back things that I hear other people say. I’ve always loved absurd, out of context quotes and for 2025, I just actually wrote them down!

Then, after a quick back and forth with Google Gemini, I had a basic website that I styled and connected to Google Firebase.

At quoteoff.com, you’re presented with two random quotes and just have to pick your favorite of the two. Behind the scenes, it’s using ELO ranking to adjust point values for each quote. Then, on the leaderboard you can see the current top 10!

Voting has been open for about a month now… and the rankings have changed drastically. Not sure ELO is the best for this situation but… it’s definitely been interesting!

Had a great time seeing people explore the year’s quotes, and I already have a good start on the 2026 quotes 🌞

Two old timey phones in Brooklyn that connect random people.

From Laurence: This was a project made in the summer, my first time learning to code! I had this idea of having two phones that can call each other from either side of a park and spark random connection between two strangers. I designed the enclosures to fit a Raspberry Pi, battery bank, hang/pick up mechanism, and a big button to call. I shared the project online nearly two weeks ago and people loved it, it was so amazing to see people interact with the phones irl, so I'm gonna continue putting the phones up and possibly do one across states or even the world. I built a site to show where the phones are and have been: callastranger.site

A lightweight accountability community for your side projects
From Connie: inprogress.works is a weekly lightweight accountability community for your side projects. It’s still in the early stages but the core mechanic is you cannot see anyone else’s post until you post yourself and to post once a week. I wanted to discourage one-way social feeds that are optimized towards appealing towards the algorithm, but rather allow people to relate to each other through a shared joy of making. Creating and making things is important because I believe it’s the surest path to self actualization and engaging with the world.

PoQR Cards is a full deck with a scannable QR code on each card linking to art, cultural artifacts, obscure knowledge, and more.

From Justin and Brian: Have you ever played cards and thought “I wish I could scan these with my phone somehow”? No? Well, now you can anyway!

Transform phrases through wordplay to solve cryptic crossword puzzles. By Josh, Matt, and Chris.