23 projects and notes, 2012–2026, framed as a guide for the next PostAP group. Newest first.
2026
The true artifact is jram4.com, along with all of my projects. This page is the Leave a Legacy part: the brain knowledge behind the projects, what I wish I had known, and what I would tell the next group of PostAP students before they start.
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Shipped
I wanted a private audio channel, not another speaker. The bet was simple enough to test: send Gemini Live through a cheap amplifier, drive a coil of magnet wire, place a tiny neodymium magnet near the ear, and let the changing magnetic field do the rest.
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Archived
I wanted a computer that did not go to sleep when I closed the laptop. Something reachable from school, home, or my phone. Something free. Oracle's Always Free tier had the shape I wanted if I could get one: ARM cores, real RAM, real storage, and no monthly bill. The visible payload was a Minecraft server my friends could join whenever; the real payload was learning what it takes to keep something running somewhere.
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Shipped
2025
Open House Day is a logistics problem disguised as a welcome event. Visiting families come up the chapel walk holding a phone and need one answer: where am I supposed to be now? I built an iOS guide around that question: a home screen with the current event, a schedule, and a campus guide that could turn the next stop into navigation.
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Shipped
QR attendance platform with Google auth, live leaderboard, admin dashboard, and a paid SOL contract.
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Shipped
Schoology is where school information goes to become homework. Grades live in one place, assignments in another, course materials behind folders, and the feed buries anything useful under announcements. I wanted the opposite workflow: ask ChatGPT what matters, get the assignments and links back as a real tool result, and only open Schoology when I actually had to submit something.
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Shipped
Stock macOS is good at being neutral. I wanted the opposite: a desktop that knew my routes. The whole setup settled into three apps — Hammerspoon for the things the OS should do automatically, Raycast for the actions I want to search, and Leader Key for the commands my hands should remember.
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Shipped
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.
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Shipped
MyFitnessPal is for a database average. Strong is for people willing to tap through somebody else's workout model. I wanted the smaller, more useful thing: an app shaped around how I actually lift and eat. Three numbers for a set, four macro bars for the day, and a camera path for meals because typing food is where every nutrition tracker starts dying.
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Shipped
Solana token launches move fast enough that the interface can feel like a video game. 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 people started attaching real token activity to the SolSim name.
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Archived
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.
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Shipped
School restricted phones and my hand kept reaching for an empty pocket. What I actually missed was not messages; it was the quick video loop. The Apple Watch was the one screen still allowed, so Aura became the experiment: quick accessible video content on the wrist, one clip at a time, no recommender, no profile, no back button. Tap to skip, or use the watch gesture and roll to the next clip.
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Archived
My calendar was only as good as the number of emails I remembered to translate into events. School sends deadlines, retakes, meetings, reminders, and schedule changes through Gmail first, and I was the unreliable middleware between inbox and calendar. Email2Calendar was the replacement: watch Gmail every 15 minutes, decide whether an email contains a real future event, extract the details with Gemini, and create the Google Calendar event before I forget.
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Shipped
APUSH notes were useful only while I remembered which packet they were in. The pile had handwritten pages, DBQs, SAQs, quizzes, Woodward notes, and review sheets, but no search box. The expedition was to turn the physical class archive into a website: photograph every page, clean the scans, ask Gemini for OCR and APUSH metadata, then make the whole thing filterable by period, theme, type, and keyword.
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Shipped
2024
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.
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Archived
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.
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Archived
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.
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Shipped
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.'
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Archived
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.
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Archived
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.
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Archived
2023
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.
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Archived
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.
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Shipped
2012