Hi. You’re in the right spot.

I’m always hunting for interesting people to work with on fun side projects. Here are a few that I’m currently chewing on. Any of them sound like something you’d like to kick around? Or come across any interesting readings on the topics below? Shoot me some thoughts — or even better a prototype or design — I’d love to hear from you.

PROJECTS

Best books. Surfacing the very best book“I'd go further. Life is too short to not be reading the very best book you're aware of at every given moment.”
      — Patrick Collison @patrickc (for you) would be a delight machine. Someone should build a real personalized recommendation system. And marketplaces where we could buy summaries, annotations, and takeaways. Or other companion elements for reading“Yes, Kindle changed the way we read books and then… stopped there. I want social highlights, notes, flash cards, and fractal reading (each chapter summarized in 1 paragraph, expandable on several levels if you want to dig deeper)”
      — Florent Crivello @Altimor alongside people we respect.

Explainer videos. Particularly for books. Pithy and quick. Take summaries like this or thisFrom this treasure trove. and make videos like this. These would be great onramps to read more. And better reviews to pound lessons home. If our YouTube recommended list put us on a treadmill full of these summaries, we'd pick up things with each autoplay. Side goal here ought to be to sell more books, not less.

Instant editors. Think Google Maps, but for basketball video.“Read Google Maps's Moat for a directional idea of what's possible. Searchable at any scale. Tags from various data sources as APIs in, all mapping to specific frames in the video. Example: auto-query every dunk from every game on YouTube played yesterday in 2.5-second clips ordered by loudest ovation to quietest. That's a start.

Slider bars for auto compression. Drag    to choose your time allocation, then fill in the most important content within that constraint. It would be choppy and imperfect. And full of signal.
  — NBA game | 1 minute to 150 minutes“See Eugene Wei's incredible blog Remains of the Day for more on this topic. Specifically Beware the lessons of growing up Galapagos and Compress to Impress.
  — book | 1 page to 1,000 pages
  — article | 1 paragraph to 100 paragraphs

Faster video on mobile phones. This Chrome extension for YouTube Playback Speed Control is a life changer if you watch lots of video. Phones need similar variable speed fast-forward for all YouTube videos, at least. Gesture based, ideally.

Pagination. Flipboard style, well designed, responsively rendered phone pagination for text (at least) of most any type. Email. PDFs. Anything else you read on mobile. We feel progress as we read down a page, flip a page, and know how many pages remain. All our product friends think infinite scroll is optimal. I miss Oyster Books.

Email. Smart algorithmic ordering of emails in order of importance. At all times. You'll know you have it right when there is no list view to scan. Only opened emails in a stack, one after another, sorting every piece of “paper” except the one you're looking at. Outside of our broken email, there's plenty of surface area to apply good ML recommendation engines. Anything in a list. What should be at the top? LIFO ain't cutting it.

Lend a legend a hand. Build companion pieces for people to explore Robert Caro's writing in different ways. Like this visualization of Hamilton lyrics. Or a wiki-style set of source materials. Or digitize some of his papers for future scholars (if he thinks worthwhile). Or build tools to crowdsource research for him for his next book. Or upload excerpts from each book to Genius.com for everyone to annotate and unpack and comment. Mostly just use our collective abundance to help a genius do worthy work — and help the rest of us learn from it.

Learning APIs. Our digital products ought to help us learn way faster.Michael Nielsen lives out fractal writing for our benefit. Read his 17,000-word writeup, or his excellent tweetstorm , or just "Learning APIs." Choose your own adventure. Surely we can share decks of Anki flashcards a little more. Or remove friction by tying them to Readwise.io or something. Or an AI that quizzes you about whatever you read. Iterating on speed to mastery seems worth a ton of effort. ⦿

Personal assistant style things. Always have plenty of administrative stuff that folks can help with, especially if you can code. But also lots of researching. Some editing. Creating templates. Connecting new workflows with off-the-shelf tools, etc.

CONTACT

Ping me (us) at an.email.for.side.projects@gmail.com. Can't guarantee a response due to volume, but someone will surely read it. Feel free to include a paragraph or two about why you’d be interested in one project or another.