Side Projects

Stretchy pants in your room for fun

Here are some things I've built over the years.

• ACI in LCH

  LCH projection of AutoCAD pens.

  AutoCAD ships with 255 pen colors. Autodesk assigned them without much apparent concern for how they read on light backgrounds, dark backgrounds, or both, and since AutoCAD lets users pick their own background color, a CAD manager designing a layer system is essentially designing blind.

  ACI in LCH renders all 255 colors against both a light and a dark ground, and projects their RGB values into LCH space so you can see how they cluster chromatically. The result is a clearer picture of which colors are actually usable, which ones read consistently across background conditions, and which families sit close enough together to encode meaningful relationships between layers.

  Built for myself. Posted in case it’s useful to anyone else who has ever had opinions about layer standards.

• Keybud

  A tool to help identify browser keyboard shortcuts.

  The browser doesn’t care what keyboard shortcuts your old desktop app used. Neither does the OS. Everyone has opinions and none of them consulted each other.

  Keybud maps the keyboard across OS and browser combinations so you can see where the collisions are before your users find them for you. Originally built to explain this problem to a skeptical stakeholder. Turned out to be useful for engineers.