Side Hustles
I wasn't really sure what to call this page. I have sites that I run and occasionally I've made mobile apps. They are projects but also, isn't music technically a project?
One of my open source projects morphed into a business at some point, and the passive income made me think I should call this page "hustles" instead.
Eventually I'm hoping to piece together some timelines for these projects, both alive and dead. There's also a lot of gaps, as I always have some half baked idea cooking. In the meantime, here's a quick brain dump of my adventures.
Holiday API
Started as an open source project to help me build a badge system on into another site I was running. The solution at the time was to maintain a list of holidays, updating them annually for the coming year.
"There has to be a better way", I thought. I was right, and after making the hard decision to reposition as a for-profit, I focused on expanding the available data.
VPS Showdown
I've hosted with Linode for a long time. But that doesn't mean I'm blind to the options out there. Back in 2013 I decided to see what DigitalOcean was all about. Because I'm always looking for new topics, I blogged about it.
Over the years, I've done more comparisons. Every few months, I'd try to automate just a small bit more of the process. This eventually led to enough automation to allow for a regular monthly cadence to keep the content fresh.
After taking a bit of a break, I decided (with the help of some friendly robots) to see if I could achieve my goal of a fully automated system VPS benchmarking system. At the time, I wasn't even sure if it was feasible to pull this off with most code generated by an LLM. But we chipped away at it, and got things to a really good place.
Joshing You
The is the premier web directory for humans named Josh.
Yet another one of my attempts to build a completely automated / agent maintained website. Sites are aggregated from various sources, and judged by the robots for "Josh-ness".
SharkTankDB
I snagged SharkTank.co at some point, but found that a typo domain doesn't really do much for you. Having always dreamed of putting together a leaderboard of Shark Tank investments, I decided to rebrand and try my hand at designing an automated system to handle the whole thing.
Little Free Card Shop
If you collect trading cards, specifically if you rip wax, you've run into the problem of having too many cards. They add up quick, especially if you're only chasing big hits, or a couple of your favorite players or teams.
I like to set build, and with getting back into the hobby, I explored a lot of different products. Instead of trying to collect pennies selling common cards on eBay, I decided to make packs and drop them in the Little Free Library locations in my neighborhood.
Hopefully the cards are being found by kids and it's sparking some joy, and not those adults I see at the Target camped out for the new card releases.
Parsley Makes It Better
This project's main purpose is proving one simple thesis: parsley makes everything look better. It also serves as a reminder that we eat with our eyes first, and should take a few moments to garnish our home-cooked delicacies.
All of the photos on this site are of real food. Not AI slop.