CounterSlayer [1] is very polished. Just to get it straight, did you design the whole thing for people 3D printing game inserts? It looks like it would be highly applicable for other use cases? Or am I missing something?
I have been building a fun project for a niche (of which I am a member) [2] and have found the process very relaxing. I have found it helps me ship more, because it narrows down the features you consider and the vocabulary you use. I have to think less about big picture stuff to some degree.
It's also very useful being a member of the target niche as you come up with new ideas for features going about your daily life. I'm building a browser based Markdown renderer for developers who use CLI-based agents and today at work had a great experience with a mermaid diagram [3] to explain some architecture. I didn't think the renderer I had to paste my diagram code in was that great (tried to upsell me), so this evening I worked on an (unreleased) feature to render mermaid diagrams beautifully + embedded in a Markdown file.
Counter Slayer uses the same UI library I hand built for Table Slayer[0], so it was a little easier for me to get that one going. I used to run design for Elastic, and built their React design library (with some great coworkers) so I'm used to heavy visualization work (having redesigned Kibana years ago). It's just fun for me to take all that experience and build weird little projects as far as I can take them!
I built Counter Slayer specifically for 3D board game inserts, and that's really all I use it for. It sits on the shoulder of Svelte and Threlte (Three.js) for most of the hard stuff.
Being a user of your own product is everything. Every designer I've ever hired were good, not so much because they were a great designer, but because they understood the product and could sit in the user's seat.
Yeah, I don't know, I build stuff for a niche, but then it turns out I can't really reach any other person in that niche, so it's just me using my tools (which, personally, I think are fairly well made).
I have been building a fun project for a niche (of which I am a member) [2] and have found the process very relaxing. I have found it helps me ship more, because it narrows down the features you consider and the vocabulary you use. I have to think less about big picture stuff to some degree.
It's also very useful being a member of the target niche as you come up with new ideas for features going about your daily life. I'm building a browser based Markdown renderer for developers who use CLI-based agents and today at work had a great experience with a mermaid diagram [3] to explain some architecture. I didn't think the renderer I had to paste my diagram code in was that great (tried to upsell me), so this evening I worked on an (unreleased) feature to render mermaid diagrams beautifully + embedded in a Markdown file.
[1] https://counterslayer.com/
[2] https://sdocs.dev, Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633
[3] https://mermaid.live/
I built Counter Slayer specifically for 3D board game inserts, and that's really all I use it for. It sits on the shoulder of Svelte and Threlte (Three.js) for most of the hard stuff.
Being a user of your own product is everything. Every designer I've ever hired were good, not so much because they were a great designer, but because they understood the product and could sit in the user's seat.
[0]: https://tableslayer.com
How do you solve that?