Hi! I'm Andrew
I'm a front end dev that likes to make tools 🔧
devtools.fm
I publish a podcast weekly with Justin Bennet. It's dubbed "A podcast about developer tools and the people who make them." We talk to prominent (and not so prominent) developers who make tools for developers.
This podcast was originally started as a dog fooding exercise for my job at Descript, but quickly morphed into something I really enjoy doing. It forces me to research new and interesting topics and expand my knowledge about development as a whole. If you want to be on it reach out on Twitter!
Notable Episodes
Projects
While I'd like to say that I've meade heaps of money off all my side projects, that very much isn't the case. My projects usually center around creating an experience for an existing website or source of data that fits my needs.
The following list is by no means a comprehensive list of all the side projects I've worked on. This list compromises the tools that have withstood the test of time (for me) and I use them almost daily. The coolest thing about be a programmer to me is that I can creates things like this just for me. Make the web your own!
kikbak.tv
Originally conceived as a way to create shared YouTube playlists while hanging out with my friends in college, kikbak.tv morphed into a way to discover new music videos.
I listen to a lot of new music, and I absolutely love experiencing new music through music videos. With the death of MTV finding new music videos as they come out can be daunting. Taking heavy inspriation from WeAreHunted.com I created kikbak.tv.
Kikbak.tv scans 1000s of music blogs daily to find new music videos. It tracks play and social media share to create a top 100 for the week and for the month. I like to call this website a tool to be and "automated hipster". It creates an effortless way to consume new music and discover new bands.
GitHub Activity Viewer
I really only use 2 social networks: Twitter and GitHub. I discover lots of cool things on twitter from the people I follow and wanted to have the same experience on GitHub.
While GitHub does have a home news feeds where information about what the people you follow are doing, it isn't very good. The data is there but not the insights.
Using the GitHub API I took that data and organized it in a way that's useful for me. It allows me to see at a glance what repos are being starred by large amounts of people I follow, alerting me to cool new tools and projects.
Pitchforkify
One of my favorite place to read about music news that has stayed with me through the years is Pitchfork. Pitchfork has been around for decades reviewing 2-4 albums a day. While the reviews can be quite critical, they are entertaining and offer a guide to consuming lots of music you might not have heard of otherwise. Unfortunately their websites doesn't an offer an easy way to play the music you're reading about!
Pitchforkify combines every review Pitchfork has ever published with a player connected to spotify. Listening to the day's album reviews is as easy as pressing play on the first album.
The site also allows you to filter the review by genre, score and date to help you find old gems. You can also see how your likes on spotify have scored in the reviews. My average is 7.6!
Due to this site breaking almost all of spotify's API rules, only approved accounts can use it. If you want to try it out just tweet me your email!
Open Source
I'm a big fan of open source software. I love being able to crack open a repo and decipher how a library does it's magic. I'm always amazed at how much awesome code is open source and freely available to use. While I might not be the most active maintainer (active open source maintenance is a young man's game!), I do have a few packages that I maintain.
I make lots of tiny plugins for all the tools I use. The following aren't all my packages, but the ones I'm most proud of!
intuit/autoGenerate releases based on semantic version labels on pull requests.
storybook-dark-modeA storybook addon that lets your users toggle between dark and light mode.
intuit/design-systems-cliA CLI toolbox for creating design systems.
storybook-addon-react-docgenA storybook addon to display react docgen info.
react-docgen-typescript-pluginA webpack plugin to inject react typescript docgen information
bmp-tsA pure typescript bmp encoder and decoder
rehype-shiki-reloadedA rehype plugin for syntax highlighting using shiki that supports dark mode.
react-gliderA react wrapper for glider.js