Solo hackathon AKA hyperfocus weekend

October 19, 2025

I got a burst of creativity or maybe it was that Dr Enuf

I didn't have any plans this weekend, so I decided to figure out how much cool stuff I can build between Friday night and Sunday night and still have time for my typical weekend activities.

something flashy

Friday night I sat down and planned out a tool I thought might be helpful to me in my day job -- an AI-powered tool that approximates user research based on different personas and goals. I spent 7.5 hours between Friday night and Saturday night working on it, and the Reader Simulator is what I ended up with. It feeds Claude persona-driven behaviors and asks it to traverse a doc set in pursuit of a defined goal. The README is hella comprehensive, so I'll leave interested readers to take a look at that, instead of explaining it all again.

It's really cool, cheap to run, and might help me dial in some of my docs at work. I plan on forking it for work and building more features that are specific to my job.

I also posted about it on Linkedin so if you want to comment, go there.

something stupid

I'm tired, a bit irritated by the weather, and feeling bored and burned out in some areas of my life lately, so I decided to make the silliest thing I could think of. A machine that turns documentation into computer-generated music. I was recently introduced to Strudel, and fresh off my crawler experiement with Reader Simulator, I figured I could turn content into music somehow through arbirary mappings.

Behold, strudoc, a web app that does just that.

It's silly, rough around the edges, and not totally mobile responsive, but it scratched an itch and had me rolling with laughter when I fed it various doc pages from aroudn the internet.

lesson?

I spent the whole weekend building stuff, some of it stupid, but I guess the lesson is that I should probably drink Dr. Enuf and have solo hackathons more often. I feel A LOT better now. I also learned a lot about Vite, and building crawlers, and I also learned that I can't run Playwright in Vercel deployments which is obvious now that I think of it. I also learned a lot about the Anthropic API, which I'd been indifferent toward for a while.