I take things apart to find out how they work.

A programming language with conversational English syntax — you write whisper "hello" and when age greater than 18: instead of symbols. It also has story objects, so you can declare a character or an item in a sentence and build interactive fiction and games out of them. I started it after finding out CPython is written in C, which raised a question I couldn't let go of: what actually happens between my source file and the output? Answering that meant writing my own lexer, parser and interpreter.

It's installable with pip install whisper-lang, has a VS Code extension for syntax highlighting, and documentation with a tutorial and examples. Python 3.7+, no dependencies, MIT licensed.

# a greeting
ask "What is your name?" into name
whisper "Hello, " + name + "!"

let age be 25
when age greater than 18:
    whisper "You are an adult!"

there is a dragon with health 150, attack 25, treasure 500

The hardest part was story objects — the feature that makes Whisper feel like Whisper. there is a dragon with health 150, attack 25 reads beautifully, but underneath, attributes kept leaking between objects: I'd ask for the player's health and get the dragon's. Every fix surfaced another one. I came close to deleting the feature entirely. What fixed it was giving each object its own namespace instead of resolving every name against one shared table — obvious in hindsight, and the reason scope stopped being a word I'd only read about.

A shared expense tracker for splitting grocery bills, built for a real problem — a friend and I kept losing track of who owed what. Both of us can add an expense and it updates on the other person's phone straight away. We still use it every week, which has been the most useful thing about it: I keep finding bugs by being a user.

The hard part wasn't the interface — it was the data. Two people adding expenses from different phones means the database is the app, and I hadn't thought about how to structure it, keep it in sync, or handle both of us writing at once. Firebase gave me the real-time part for free, but designing the shape of the data was the first problem I couldn't solve by reading documentation faster, and it's the thing I most want to learn properly.

A private journalling app with entry creation, sorting, organisation and password authentication. My first project with a real backend behind it, and the one that taught me the difference between "it works on my machine" and "it works when someone else logs in".