playground

I’m learning Spanish, and every app I tried spent my first week on fruit and colours. Words I could read off a menu, never the ones carrying an actual conversation.

So I built the deck I wanted: a frequency list drawn from 27 million words of film and TV subtitles, ranked by how often people actually say them, collapsed onto root words.

You sort all 1130 words by how well you know each one, and it spaces the reviews out from there. You learn both directions, Spanish to English and back. No sign-up needed: progress lives in your browser. Log in with your email if you want it on desktop and mobile.

Animation always ate my time.

First time I brought Claude into my motion work, it stayed slow, and the results let me down. Looked great in my head, clunky on screen.

So here’s me showing my work. How I started, and how it’s going.

Two things shifted at the same time. The tools got sharper (Figma, Claude Code, Remotion), and I got sharper at using them. My eye caught up. My craft caught up. Watching both lines move together is the point of this section.

I started doing disco-tile mosaics on paper as a side thing (don’t ask me why, I like shiny things and needed to spend time on something manual). Planning the patterns in Figma was slow, and the results were rough.

So I built this instead. Drop in a photo, set the final size, the tile size, and the number of colours. You get a pattern split into tiles and larger chunks, and you can mark them off as you build the real thing. (would also work with LEGO).