A Crochet Pattern Translator for My Wife
My wife Karly crochets. Crochet patterns, if you've never looked at one, read like assembly language: dense abbreviations, counts, and conventions that vary between pattern sources — close enough to look the same, different enough to ruin a project three hours in.
[One or two sentences on the moment that sparked it — the pattern that didn't make sense, the notebook full of conversions, whatever actually happened.]
So I built her a translator: paste in a pattern, get back a version in the conventions she actually works in. [Correct/expand: exactly what it converts and what else it does — row tracking? stitch glossary?]
Small software, seriously deployed
It's a progressive web app, so it lives on her phone's home screen like a real app. It runs in Docker on our home server, and it auto-deploys: I push to the main branch on GitHub, and a job on the server picks up the change and redeploys within the hour. Continuous deployment for a user base of one is objectively ridiculous, and I recommend it highly — every improvement she asks for just appears.
Why I like projects like this
An audience of one is the best product feedback loop that exists. There's no guessing what users want: she tells me at dinner. Requirements arrive as "it would be nice if—" and ship the same week. Every developer should build software for someone they live with at least once; it will humble you faster than any code review.