Why Every Town Centre Looks Empty Now
"How do we bring the town centre back?" I think that's the wrong question.
What I build when I'm bored and need something to do.
Where The Government Thinks You Shouldn't Go
Somewhere in Whitehall, someone updates a spreadsheet of places you probably shouldn't holiday, and most of us never see it. So I turned it into a map. Click a country, get the official verdict, the population, the languages, everything except a reason to trust your own judgement over theirs.
The Insult Engine
Someone at work said "we need an insult engine" one of those throwaway lines that should die in a Slack thread. Instead I built it. Now there's a button. Press it, get insulted, go back to your day mildly worse off. No API, no AI, no reason. Just a button that was funnier to build than to ignore.
https://matthew-davis.github.io/insults/
Typing In Bliss
The type specimen was fine for looking at Blissymbolics, but looking isn't the same as using. So this is a keyboard, an actual on-screen one, where you can browse, search, and type in symbols instead of letters. It won't replace English any time soon, but it's the closest I've got to writing a sentence nobody can read yet.
https://matthew-davis.github.io/bliss-keyboard/
Six Thousand Little Meanings
Blissymbolics is a language made entirely of symbols instead of words, no spelling, no grammar, just pictures that mean things. I turned the whole authorised vocabulary into an icon font so you can browse all six thousand of them as one long, slightly overwhelming type specimen. Not a language you'll ever speak, but a good one to stare at.
https://matthew-davis.github.io/bliss-font/
A Christmas Chess AI
Made this over Christmas 2020, when there wasn't much else to do and a chessboard felt like a reasonable way to lose a week. It's a chess AI, nothing that's going to trouble a grandmaster, but enough to think a few moves ahead and occasionally surprise me. Turns out building the opponent is more fun than beating it.
https://matthew-davis.github.io/chessai/
The Snacks Rota
Nobody wants to be the one who decides who brings snacks, and nobody wants to be the one who never does. So I built a wheel. Spin it, it picks someone, argument over. It's not fair, exactly, it's just fairer than whoever shouts loudest, which is how it used to work.
https://matthew-davis.github.io/snacks-rota/
Untangling The Marvel Universe
Every character and crew in the Marvel universe, plotted as a great tangled web of who's worked with who, teamed up with who, and owes who a favour. I wanted to see the whole thing at once instead of trusting Wikipedia's version of events. Turns out it's less a universe and more a very committed friend group with too many alliances to track.
https://matthew-davis.github.io/marvel/
Get A Proper Nickname
Built this at 5am at a hackathon, running on caffeine and the sunk-cost fallacy. The idea was simple: everyone deserves a nickname better than the one they got stuck with. So you put your name in, and it hands you back something you didn't ask for and probably didn't need. No sleep at a hackathon is a good decision-making environment.