Matty Makes.

A marketer who got into code by accident. Every couple of weeks I ship something small for my wife, my kids, my climbing mates, sometimes a paying client. The good ones live here. So do the failures.

/ now The quiet summer thing turned out to be Ireland. Two weeks, seven stops, one map.

for me & mine

The general store, the bakery, the alpaca farm. Real places with real regulars, and websites that were last touched when I was still working the meat counter at the market up the street. Most of them don’t work on a phone, and Google can’t read the hours.

So I built a pipeline: research what people actually love about each business (old Gazette articles, decades of reviews, the owner’s own words), then rebuild the site around that instead of a template. Each owner gets a working preview before anyone talks about money. The price is small-town on purpose: $200 to build, $30 a month to keep it useful.

The first one, the Williamsburg General Store, is in final review with the owner. There’s a fairy door in the wall of that store. That part wasn’t necessary either. They did it anyway.

See the work →

Fourteen days, seven stops, one very full car. Instead of a fifteen-tab spreadsheet we got a private little site: an interactive map of the whole route, the day-by-day plan, where to eat (my wife’s picks get a heart), and a live weather strip for every stop.

Also created to solve the issue of my 12-year-old asking every fucking day what we’re doing.

It knows what day it is. Before we leave it counts down. On the road it shows where we are, what today looks like, and which road to take: the fast one or the pretty one, drawn as real roads you can flick between. Photos and notes sync, so both phones tell the same story.

There is confetti when you tick off a booking. That part wasn’t necessary. I did it anyway.

The real thing is password-locked, because it’s ours.

All day I bounce between Slack, Notion, my editor and a pile of browser tabs. So I built one window that holds all of them, with ⌘1 / 2 / 3 to flick between them. Rambox, basically, but mine and free.

Each app keeps its own login, so I can run two accounts side by side. Tabs I'm not using fall asleep to keep the memory down, unread counts pile up on the icon, and the VS Code tab is the real thing, terminal and all. Apps with no web version, like Signal, just open the desktop app.

It's a Mac app with a little skull on it. That part wasn't necessary. I did it anyway.

See the code →

Chef Claude is a replacement for what my wife and I loved about HelloFresh, which left Spain. Opinionated weekly menus, a shopping list you don't have to think about, recipes you can actually finish on a weeknight. No cardboard box.

It'll also pull recipes out of reels and TikToks. Paste a URL, get a recipe.

On the to do: hook it into my macros tracking so I can cover that base too.

See the demo →

I wanted a lightweight way to record my screen without paying for a company that rhymes with Moom. It saves WebM and uses Firefox sound controls to remove background noises. That's it. That's the product.

Open Moom →

It stopped being cool to brag about my sends to friends in the US who had no idea about our grading. So I made a tiny converter. They still don't care, but at least now it's their fault.

Convert grades →

A visual timer for my three-year-old who never understands when I say "in five minutes." A blob shrinks. He gets it. We don't have to negotiate.

Open Blob Timer →

A simple, distraction-free breathing tool for anxiety and sleep. Based on the 4–7–8 method. No account, no streaks, no notifications. Open it, breathe, close it.

Visit site →

paid

I got tired of looking up competitor changes and checking Reddit, Product Hunt and other sites to see if new competitors showed up. I wanted to have all the control and insights in Slack to make it easy to action.

It started as a tool for me. It turned into the thing I get paid for.

Visit ScopeHound →

graveyard

I struggled reading long Notion documentation and wanted to try using rapid serial visual presentation methods to read through it. Instead I accidentally invented a torture device that instantly gives you a headache by blinking one word on either side of the screen.

Proceed with caution. Buried here for the headaches it caused.

See the corpse →

KnotMaster was a spaced repetition app for teaching knot-tying to kids and young adults. The concept was solid: learn knots through interactive, spaced practice the same way you'd learn chess openings or a new language. My son and I were building it together as a father-son dev project, and the idea had real legs.

What killed it? The knot diagrams. Getting clear, step-by-step visuals for tying knots turned out to be a massive hurdle. I tried generating 3D models with WebGL, but that fell flat. AI-generated step-by-step instructions weren't reliable either. Without good visuals, a knot-tying app is just… a list of knot names.

It was a great learning experience, though. My son might pick it back up someday and finish what we started, which would be pretty cool.

One genuinely good thing came out of this project: I discovered Animated Knots. If you have any interest in knots at all, go check it out.

Thanks for the memories, KnotMaster. You tied yourself in knots so we didn't have to.

See the corpse →

Want to make something?

Or just say hi. I read everything that lands here.