Practice compounds

We ran Designers Building Cool Shit III this week, the first time with people both online and in person, and the range of projects was as usual very wild.

Demos included:

• A vocabulary app that saves words in context from the articles you're reading
• An AI journal inspired by Voldemort's diary, with serious mental-health guardrails and no toxic positivity
• A Bible reader that sends chapters to your email at random times, everything happening in the email
• A WhatsApp agent that replies on your behalf using a local LLM, so nothing leaves your machine
• A gallery wall planner with whimsical hand-drawn UI, a total 180 from the designer's healthtech day job
• A tamagotchi-style voice agent built with ElevenLabs, a little devil whose needs you have to manage
• A 3D holographic study buddy that clones your voice and quizzes you on your subjects
• A 3D object that follows your hand with MediaPipe, so you interact with the screen through your fingers
• An image model fine-tuned on personal doodles, keeping the artist's style alive after their tablet broke
• A bridesmaid proposal website built with Claude Code
• A design-to-action workflow that turns meeting transcripts into prototypes and stakeholder presentations

I love that everyone is solving their own problems first and getting the best ideas. If you're building outside your day job, keep going.

Couldn't ask for a better partner to run these, Sakky B. Practice compounds. Till next time.