https://www.harlan.harris.name/tags/side-projects/ Recent content in side projects on Harlan D. Harris Hugo -- gohugo.io en harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.harlan.harris.name/2026/03/nine-things-learned-building-scrabble-app/ Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) https://www.harlan.harris.name/2026/03/nine-things-learned-building-scrabble-app/ I grew up playing Scrabble -- my grandma was cuthroat. I've played occasionally through the years, and more recently I've been playing Scrabble Go, the official, licensed Scrabble app, with friends. It's fine, but it's full of ads (unless you pay them), it has annoying side games (gems? why am I earning gems?), and I wished it had features like word definitions and better game history. So, starting last year, I built my own web app. https://www.harlan.harris.name/2026/01/ai-assisted-coding-side-projects-and-donationware/ Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) https://www.harlan.harris.name/2026/01/ai-assisted-coding-side-projects-and-donationware/ The rise of AI-assisted coding tools has made it dramatically easier and faster to build small side projects than ever before. What used to take weeks of evenings and weekends can now be done in a few focused sessions, with an AI pair programmer handling much of the boilerplate, debugging, and implementation details. This has opened up new possibilities for building tools that solve personal problems or scratch specific itches, without the overhead of building a full commercial product.