Projects & lab
The first version of this site had two project cards marked “WIP” with a link that led nowhere. That bothered me for years. Both of them run now — here, right in the browser, no server, no sign-up.
Lab · 01
At some point my children started talking in a secret language — specifically the Robbers' Language (Räubersprache) from Astrid Lindgren's Bill Bergson books, a staple of Swedish and German childhoods. The rule is delightfully simple: every consonant is doubled with an “o” in between. Vowels are left alone.
So Kalle becomes Kokalollole. Sounds trivial — until somebody fires a whole sentence at you and waits, grinning. The reverse direction is the more interesting part: the decoder has to work out which “o” belongs to the rule and which is simply an “o”.
Runs entirely in your browser. No text leaves this device.
Lab · 02
“The area measures 1,284,000 square metres.” That number tells nobody anything. “Half a Saarland”, on the other hand, lands instantly. Saarland is Germany's smallest non-city state, and German media have used it as the national unit of area for decades — much as the British press reaches for Wales. The internet, meanwhile, famously measures length in bananas.
So: type in a number, pick a unit, and the figure is translated into the only units that actually produce a picture in your head. Technically it's nonsense. Pedagogically it's unbeatable.
Reference values: Saarland 2,569.69 km² · football pitch 105 × 68 m · banana 18 cm.
What I build professionally belongs to the clients I build it for. I can't and won't show internals, data models or source code publicly — that isn't coyness, it's the precondition for being given access to such systems in the first place.
So what you'll find here are learning projects and playthings: made during my retraining, in the evenings, out of curiosity. They show how I think and how I write code when nobody is watching. I'm glad to talk about the professional work in conversation — there I can be specific without being indiscreet.
GitHub
An honest warning: some of this is beginner code from 2022 and 2023. I leave it up for exactly that reason — you can see where I started.
An attempt to build a role-playing game for the command line. Unfinished, and the title says so. Still my favourite project from the learning years, because it was the first time I had to think about structure rather than just syntax.
RPG One on GitHubThe extended version of the classic. Sounds silly, but it's an excellent exercise: five rules, ten pairings, and suddenly a nested chain of conditionals stops being a good idea.
View repositoryWithout looking it up, using only what I knew at the time. Not the world's fastest sorting algorithm — but the moment you understand why the inner loop is allowed to get shorter is priceless.
View repositoryA free assignment, tackled blind: validating input, randomness, scoring, game rounds. The first project where I noticed that the rules of the game are harder than the code.
View repositoryAlso without a template. Three rows, three columns, two diagonals — and the realisation that a board is better thought of as a data structure than as nine variables.
View repositoryWritten by hand: HTML, one stylesheet, two small scripts. No framework, no build step, no dependencies on anybody else's servers. Loads fast, works without JavaScript, and will still open in ten years' time.
So that there are no more cards here marked “WIP” that never get finished: these ideas are sitting in a drawer, with no promises and no dates attached.
Playthings show the style, not the serious case. I'm happy to discuss that directly — including the projects I'm not allowed to show here.