The journal
25 expeditions, 2012–2026, into the systems I use every day. Newest first.
2026
Apr 2026 – May 2026
Leave a Legacy
the Post-AP system · Web app
The meta-project: a portfolio and Post-AP field guide for documenting what I built and how the next students can start.
In the field
Mar 2026 – Apr 2026
Voice-by-Induction
audio over induction · Hardware
Induction earpieces have existed for decades but stayed niche. Real-time AI with always-on voice mode is new. Combine them and you get a voice only you can hear that knows everything — at least in theory. The terrain to cross was Ampere's Law at room scale, with whatever amplifier I could find online.
Archived
Jan 2026 – Feb 2026
Something Running Somewhere
Oracle Free Tier · Infrastructure
I wanted a computer that didn't go to sleep when I closed the laptop — always on, reachable from school, home, or my phone, and free. Oracle's Always Free tier hands out a 4-OCPU ARM box with 24GB of RAM and 200GB of NVMe if you can wrestle one out of capacity, so I went hunting for one. On top of it I stacked the things I'd been hearing about for years and never had a reason to learn: Tailscale, SSH keys, tmux, Vim. The visible payload was a Minecraft server my friends could join 24/7. The real payload was finally living inside a stack instead of reading about one.
Shipped
2025
Dec 2025
Open House App
ESD Open House · iOS app
Open House Day. Visiting families come up the chapel walk holding a phone and want one answer: where am I supposed to be in the next ten minutes? I built a React Native app around three screens — a Home with a HAPPENING NOW card, a vertical itinerary, and a campus map with red pin drops and a Guide Me There flow. The whole thing keys off the wall clock, which means the only way to test it on a Tuesday is to lie to the app about what day it is.
Shipped
Fall 2025
HordeAttendance
school clubs · Web app
QR attendance platform with Google auth, live leaderboard, admin dashboard, and a paid SOL contract.
Shipped
Fall 2025
Schoology-Pro-MCP
Schoology · AI agent
Schoology is a firehose. Grades live in one tab, assignments in another, course materials in a third, and the main feed buries anything I cared about within a day. The workflow is reactive — open the site, dig through six filters per course, hope I didn't miss something due tonight. Everything is pull, nothing is pushed. The end state I wanted was simple: never open Schoology unless I'm submitting.
Shipped
Fall 2025
Schoology Prefetch
Schoology · Browser extension
Hover-prefetch Chrome extension that makes Schoology navigation feel faster by loading pages before the click.
Shipped
Summer 2025
macOS Customization
my desktop · Infrastructure
Stock macOS hands you Spotlight, a fixed menu bar, and a dock. I wanted a launcher for everything I do, a menu bar that surfaced what I actually look at, and one keycap that was the front door to all of it.
Shipped
Summer 2025
iOS Music App
the iPhone, offline · iOS app
Davis Mountains, McDonald Observatory, no bars. Spotify opens to a sad face and asks if I'd like to log in. I have a free account, the MP3s are sitting in my Files app from years of scraping, and the iPhone has known how to decode audio since 2007 — somewhere in this stack the music should already be playing. So I opened Xcode in the camper and started a Swift app whose only job was to point AVAudioPlayer at a local file and press play.
Shipped
Summer 2025
Health App
my body · iOS app
MyFitnessPal is for someone else's body — a fitness influencer's, a generic adult's, a database average. I wanted Josh-shaped: my lifts, my macros, my cadence, with no nag screens or paywalls between me and the numbers I just generated. Max personalization isn't a feature — it's what's left when you delete every assumption a generic app has to make about who you are.
Shipped
Spring 2025
SolSim
Solana memecoins · Browser extension
Pump.fun launches a token a minute. Most go to zero before lunch — real wallets, real losses, learn-by-rugging. SolSim was the paper-trading sandbox: a Chrome extension that overlaid a fake wallet on top of Axiom.trade so I could practice the motions without spending SOL. That was the project. Then somebody put real money in.
Archived
Spring 2025
Gemi
my room · AI agent
Google Home Mini used to flip the lights when I asked. Then the family stopped paying for the subscription and the bridge to our Universal Devices ISY went silent — the lights remembered who used to ask but couldn't hear me anymore. I wanted the room back, but on better terms: no wake word, always listening, picking up commands the way a person in the room would. Lights, music, a clean iPad on the wall acting like a mirror. Build the assistant I wished Google had become.
Shipped
Spring 2025
Aura
the wrist · WatchOS app
School banned phones and my hand kept reaching for an empty pocket. What I actually missed wasn't messages — it was the dopamine scroll. The Apple Watch was the only screen they couldn't take, so I built TikTok for my wrist: one short clip at a time, no recommender, no back button. Tap to skip, or double-pinch the fingers and roll the dice again.
Archived
Spring 2025
Email2Calendar
Gmail and Calendar · Automation
Gmail-to-Calendar automation using Gemini structured extraction to catch events before I remembered them.
Shipped
Spring 2025
APUSH Digitized Notes
handwritten notes · Web app
Handwritten APUSH packets became a searchable OCR/indexed web archive after image cleanup and Gemini metadata.
Shipped
2024
Fall 2024
Palo
YouTube · Browser extension
APUSH review videos run an hour and the one sentence I needed about the Louisiana Purchase was buried somewhere around minute 32. ClipChat — my first attempt — was a chat box stapled to YouTube with no real search and no instinct for where in the video the answer lived. Palo was the rewrite: inject a sidebar into the YouTube DOM, scrape the transcript, hand it to Gemini, and get back a three-sentence summary with a clickable [02:19] that drops the playhead exactly there.
Archived
Summer 2024
Serveable
NHS service tracking · Web app
Every NHS kid gets pushed into MobileServe, and nobody likes it — a cluttered legacy dashboard with side-nav pie charts and line graphs piled on top of each other, fronted by a marketing site whose hero is a teacher kneeling over a paper map next to a bright blue Request a Demo button. The work admins actually do is one verb (approve or reject). The work students actually do is one number (how many approved hours, how far from the NHS goal). Serveable was the kinder rebuild — student portal, admin portal, hour logs, approvals, charts, PDF exports, Supabase auth — sketched in a notebook before any code touched the editor.
Archived
Summer 2024
ESD Pavilion
ESD campus · 3D / Arch viz
I'd walked the ESD campus every day for years and never once tried to build it. I wanted the whole thing in Blender — the brick buildings with the green trim, the church with the red multi-pitched roof, the football field with EAGLES painted across the turf — and then to walk through it in Twinmotion the way you walk through a city in GTA. ESD GTA 6 before GTA 6.
Shipped
Summer 2024
Spruce Tower
a Center City apartment building · Web app
Math exam Friday morning, home by noon, Alex in the passenger seat, family CRV pointed at Philadelphia by evening. The client was Spruce Tower — a tall historic brown-brick apartment building on a Center City corner with a gold line-art logo and no real web presence. Two deliverables, one trip: a React marketing site for sprucetower.com and a set of photorealistic Blender renders of the building's gym for the amenities page. Four days on the ground, $200 on the way out.
Shipped
Spring 2024
SentenceAI
the keyboard, OS-level · AI agent
LLMs predict the next token — so why does autocomplete still stop at the next word? I wanted one that finished the sentence. The moment that worked, the experiment shifted: not 'AI helps you write,' but 'AI is writing, and the keyboard under your fingers is just playing it back.'
Archived
Spring 2024
MorseCode-Learner
the wrist, eyes-free · WatchOS app
Wanted to learn Morse for a future project, but every trainer I found was a screen with audio — useless in class, rude in a quiet room. The wrist already taps me for notifications; that channel was sitting unused as a teaching surface. Built a WatchOS app that buzzes a word into the skin and then asks me to tap it back. Eyes-free, silent, one-handed — I could practice in a lecture or on a walk without pulling out a phone or making a sound.
Archived
2024
Youth Political Times
student journalism · Web app
Reagan Graeme from St. Mark's had the idea: a publication where high schoolers analyze political and social issues from their own vantage instead of borrowing an adult one. He had the editorial instinct and the network of writers; I had the React. Most things I'd shipped to that point lived only on my own machine — this was the first time the codebase had to carry someone else's editorial vision. Reagan took Editor-in-Chief, I took CTO, and React on DreamHost was the smallest stack that would get articles online by the end of the week.
Archived
2023
Summer 2023
Deep-Fake-Detector
faceswap detection · ML model
UTD's summer research class taught machine learning the long way — model architectures, use cases, a detour through reinforcement learning — and ended on a single brief: pick a thing and train a CNN on it. Deep-fake detection picked itself. GAN portraits and InsightFace face-swaps were already trivial to generate, but no one in the room had a binary classifier that could tell a real face from a swapped one. The terrain was a straightforward Conv2D stack; the actual work was upstream — finding a real-people dataset that was actually real, and inventing a deepfake dataset that didn't exist as images.
Archived
Summer 2023
ISAAD
16 Dallas schools · Web app
Ms. Newsom and Ms. Allen, admissions directors at The Lamplighter School, ran point on ISAAD — the Independent Schools Admission Association of Dallas, sixteen accredited private and independent schools whose only public face was a tired WordPress build at isaadallas.org. Homepage was a dark-blue info box stacked over a stock photo of kids leaning over tablets in a library; School Search was a grey form with raw dropdowns hiding sixteen schools behind selectors. The ask was a full rebuild aimed at parents shopping schools, with a real map and a search that felt like a search. First real paid web contract, $1,500, summer in Dallas.
Shipped
2012