current design → work in progress

playing with a new design for my personal website (as always)

Action Button shortcut to either save to my to-do list or Notion instantly

this copy-pastable snippet in Notion Calendar is worded so elegantly with the meeting link. literally one of my favorite features of the app

got a poster

made a poster

I forked my photo of the day website (photos.ben.page) for my mom and now she’s memorized the git commands necessary to push new photos to her site

woke up to a $135 Cloudflare bill for github.com/benborgers/... — now at ~500,000,000 requests/month 🫠 spun up a D1 database to count requests per Google Sheet ID per hour, so I can figure out who the biggest users are

ever since Redis rebranded I can only see it as a gentrified food brand

animation when you try to download the lower quality optimized image (right-click/drag)

recently, it feels like LLMs either one-shot the code I want (saving me 5x the time!) or *almost* one-shot what I want, leading me to burn 5x the time trying to get it right before giving up and writing it myself

I built a pipeline for making exam prep questions: 1️⃣ take a long PDF 2️⃣ feed it into the Anthropic API (which can “see” PDFs) to summarize each slide in detail 3️⃣ turn each slide’s description into a dozen questions 4️⃣ use a smaller Anthropic model to score the student’s answer

built a little app to help my girlfriend study for a dental school exam

Anki (the flashcards app) is proof that, if your product is useful enough, you can ship it in a garbage package of terminal-based launchers and inscrutable UI and still be wildly successful

now a proud owner of the 1984 Macintosh Manual

dumped a sketchy pre-paid mastercard from my wifi provider into ampcode.com because they blocked Venmo and Amazon

you graduate college and 3 months later they’re calling you “Mr. Borgers” 👴

print your Linear tickets for the vibes

Stickies, a spacial note-taking app I prototyped a few years ago:

I built a bot that emails past years’ journal entries to me every morning

After 4 years (!!) of using a hand-rolled DIY password manager, @jeromepaulos.com has convinced me to switch to 1Password

If you write down cafe bathroom codes in @notion.com, you can use Notion AI to recall them next time

“new deck” pop-up

Been using @uselumen.com (by @colebemis.com) which is a nifty note-taking app that saves to a GitHub repo. Since my notes are just in a git repo, I created a small CLI so that Claude Code can read and write my notes too:

Airtagging my car is maybe the smartest thing I’ve done to compensate for having bad memory

Analyzing data for a 1-week-long dating app I built for Tufts • When you “like” someone, what % of the time do you match? • What times of day are more active?

the new ChatGPT background effect: a big exported image (called “burrito-nux” for some reason) with 50% opacity and blur-2xl

flashcard flipping animation:

another game I built for my club this past semester was “tuftsguessr”: a team-based geoguessr with photos I took around tufts university

me hiding the wifi-sniffing raspberry pi’s to make this work

“is tufts busy?” used hidden raspberry pi’s to intercept wifi probe requests and estimate how busy university buildings were built with @bighead.bsky.social, dan, and alex @ jumbohack in february

to my great surprise, one of my first full-stack web apps ever is still going strong after 5 years it was built for an online school in my hometown. my terrible code has processed probably high 6-figures in total payments

best things about @notionhq’s office last summer that I would steal: • soft jazz playing 24/7 — so you can talk without feeling like you’re interrupting the silence • dedicated lunch area with benches — everyone eats together, not at their desks, and chats

I suspect that google translate is now powered by an LLM — LLMs *hate* curly quotes

AI-powered monitoring for government incentives:

a friend and I built this leaderboard for a class we TA’d in the spring — for an assignment that centers on optimizing your program as much as possible: (my favorite part is the randomized list of anonymous names, for teams that didn't want to reveal themselves)

For 19 months now, I’ve been posting a daily photo to my website:

Sometimes iOS has a random corner where the design goes so unbelievably hard

working on a new version of war.elk.sh

new blog post: “Automatically graphing how busy office hours are”

Wanted to play Family Feud with my club — but I had to overengineer it for no good reason. Built a custom realtime scoreboard with full sound effects, all controlled from my phone.

progress on this chatgpt/claude clone thing! x.com/benborgers/...

started hacking on a personal chatgpt/claude replacement last night for fun, powered by Claude 3.7 Sonnet

For the past month, I’ve been auto-tracking office hour traffic for the class I TA

chatgpt voice mode widget looks great here!

New blog post about redesigning my personal website, in which I realize that I’ve redesigned my website every one of the past four Decembers (and more) benborgers.com/redesign-de...

new winter break, new personal website

new blog post: projects for winter break 2024 ben.page/winter24

1300 students at Tufts (~1 in 4 students with a meal plan) have now used @jeromepaulos and I’s “spotify wrapped for your meal plan”

new blog post about “FileCopy,” a class assignment I recently did and liked https://ben.page/filecopy