[CPU] Your PC is nothing without software that you created for it.
Greetings, Programs!
I’ve been on a tear. And since the FontCrafter deep-dive seemed to resonate with a lot of you, I want to pull back the curtain on what this sprint looked like, what I learned, and what you can take from it even if you never build an app in your life.
The FontCrafter Family: From One App to Thirteen
FontCrafter (turn your handwriting into a real font, in the browser, for free) was one app. Now it’s thirteen. The whole suite works like Voltron: each piece is useful alone, but together they form something bigger than any of them.
The idea was simple. If someone makes a handwriting font with FontCrafter, what do they want to do with it? Print business cards. Write a letter. Make a certificate. Design a quote graphic for social media. Send a greeting card. Address envelopes. Print labels. Every one of those became its own app.
CardCrafter: Business cards with vCard QR codes, 16+ fonts, print-ready 10-up PDF sheets
LetterCrafter: Professional letterheads with logo support and print-ready PDFs
CertificateCrafter: Certificates, diplomas, awards with ornate borders and gold seals
QuoteCrafter: Quote images for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook
GreetingCrafter: Fold-and-print greeting cards with occasion presets
WeddingCrafter: Wedding invitation suites with RSVP QR code
LabelCrafter: Labels for 18 Avery sheet sizes
EnvelopeCrafter: Envelope printer with 20 sizes, batch printing, address book
HandPrint: 3D-printable nameplates, keychains, coasters from your handwriting font
Font Hatch: Hatch fill for laser engraving and CNC routing
Font to SVG: Convert any font to SVG paths for Cricut and laser cutting
Single Line Font Maker: Single-stroke conversion for pen plotters
Handwriting Fontalizer: Photograph your handwriting on plain paper, get a FontCrafter template
That last one exists because my mom has a visual impairment and couldn’t use the standard printed template grid. I needed a way for her to write her characters freehand on blank paper, photograph it, and have the app figure out which letter is which. So I built it. The detection pipeline (finding individual characters in a photo of messy handwriting, where the gaps between strokes inside a letter are the same size as gaps between letters) turned out to be a hard problem. Auto-merge kept cascading and fusing the whole image into one blob. The fix: skip auto-merge entirely, let users shift-click to combine strokes manually, and add Ctrl+Z undo. Sometimes the best algorithm is the human.
What I learned building thirteen apps in a family:
Start from the user’s next question. After someone makes a font, what do they want to do with it? That question generated all thirteen apps. You can apply this to anything. After someone finishes your onboarding, what do they try next? After someone reads your report, what do they want to do? The next question is your next product.
Consistency compounds. Every app in the family uses the same teal accent color, the same DM Sans typography, the same help modal structure, the same FAQ format, the same five branded links. I built a scaffold (a template file) and reused it for each new app. Changing one thing in the scaffold updates the starting point for everything after. If you’re building anything in a series (reports, templates, presentations, email campaigns), make the scaffold first. Your future self will thank you.
Name things for what they make, not what they are. “CardCrafter” tells you what you’ll walk away with. “Certificate Design Tool v2.1” does not. Every one of these tools is named [Thing You Get] + Crafter. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to land on this pattern. QuoteCrafter used to be called QuoteCard. LetterCrafter was LetterCraft. CertificateCrafter was CertCraft. The rename cost nothing and made every app more obvious at a glance.
The Other Seventeen Apps
Because the FontCrafter family wasn’t enough for two weeks, apparently.
SignOff is an email signature generator. Ten layouts, seventeen social platforms, logo placement, JSON export/import. No watermark, no signup. I built it because HubSpot’s free version watermarks your signature and WiseStamp’s upsell flow is aggressive. Mine does the whole job with zero catches. It had a fun bug early on where adding a social link wiped all your other social URLs because the form rebuilt itself without saving state. Classic “works until you use it” problem. Fixed now.
Meme-O-Matic is a meme maker. Canvas rendering, draggable text, custom font upload (with a cross-sell nudge to FontCrafter, naturally), clean PNG export. Every free meme tool on the internet is either covered in ads, gated behind a login, or slaps a watermark on your output. Mine does none of those things. Building the mobile version was a saga: the text kept jumping when you tried to edit it because the overlay input field and the canvas had different coordinate systems. The fix was to ditch the overlay entirely and use a fixed edit bar pinned below the canvas. Sometimes you solve a positioning bug by removing the thing that needs positioning.
Audio Trimmer runs FFmpeg in the browser. Trim, fade, speed-shift, normalize volume, batch process, export as MP3/WAV/OGG. No upload to a server. If you’ve ever paid money to cut three seconds off a podcast clip, I made this so you never have to again. There was a silent failure bug where speeds outside a certain range caused the FFmpeg filter chain to produce empty output with no error message. The kind of bug that makes you question your sanity because everything looks correct and nothing works.
NFC Maestro writes, scans, clones, and locks NFC tags from Chrome on Android. Nine record types: URL, text, Wi-Fi, phone, email, SMS, location, contact card, and app launch. I fixed a bug where locking a tag after writing would freeze Chrome and force a phone reboot. The write and lock operations were firing back-to-back on the same NFC contact, and the tag would lose connection between them. The fix was a 500ms delay and a re-scan. Glamorous work.
Photo Fixer fixes muddy phone photos in one click. I built it because my OnePlus camera produces washed-out photos with muted colors, and I got tired of pulling them into a desktop editor. Drop a photo, get a better photo. That’s it.
More things I made because they should exist:
Air Hockey: 3D physics air hockey table with a neon-lit arcade aesthetic
CRT TV: Flip through 80s TV channels on a hyperrealistic CRT with real static, clicky knobs, and rabbit ear antenna
Turntable Zikka: DJ turntable simulator that you can scratch
GridRunner: Infinite synthwave wireframe terrain through a CRT monitor
Tone Shelf: Brown, white, and pink noise generator with rain, ocean, wind, fire, and six other channels you can mix
Fall Leaves: Procedural autumn forest with falling leaves and a day-night cycle. Put it on your TV.
Lavender Meadow: Raymarched lavender field. Drift through Provence. Save 4K wallpapers.
Breathing Room: Box breathing timer with generative nature landscapes (because after building all of this I needed to remember how to breathe)
Thoughts Ripple: Calm writing journal with a procedural 3D creek and blooming flowers
Pixel Melt: Bulk PNG/JPG/GIF to WebP converter
Party Platter: Group food order voting and portion calculator
280+ apps and counting at arcade.pirillo.com. Every one runs in your browser. No install. No account. No data leaving your machine.
How I’m Doing This (Since You Keep Asking)
I can’t write code. I do all of this through Claude’s web interface. No Claude Code, no VS Code, no terminal. I open a browser tab, type what I want, and iterate. If you can write an email, you have the technical skill required.
The thing that changed my output this month was building a system of “skills,” plain-English instruction documents that load into the AI’s context for specific types of work. A debugging skill that says “measure before you guess.” A build skill that says “answer three questions before delivering.” A guardian skill for FontCrafter that says “do not touch the pipeline unless I tell you to touch the pipeline.”
I wrote the full breakdown as an editorial for the ctrl+alt+create live newsletter. It covers the five patterns that were eating my time, how I fixed each one, and how you can apply the same approach to whatever you do with AI. It works whether you’re building apps, writing reports, managing projects, or trying to get AI to remember that you hate bullet lists.
Stuff I Found That’s Worth Your Time
OpenOats: Open-source meeting copilot for Mac. Transcribes both sides of your call on-device, then searches your own notes to surface talking points while you’re still talking. No audio leaves your machine. For anyone who’s ever blanked on a key number while someone waited on Zoom.
TaxHacker: Self-hosted AI receipt scanner. Photograph any receipt in any language, get structured data. 170+ currencies including crypto. A freelancer in Berlin built it because his tax consultant started crying when asked about crypto exchange rates. April is coming.
Skales: Desktop AI agent. Email, calendar, browser, file management. No Docker. No terminal. A guy in Vienna built it because he spent two hours setting up a CLI agent and realized his wife and kid would never survive the same setup. If you’ve ever been “the IT person” for your family, you understand this man’s pain.
Dreamer: From the former CTO of Stripe. Build AI agents through conversation. Their own SDK, database, serverless functions, deployment pipeline. You can pull code out and edit it locally if you want. $10K prizes for builders. Worth watching even if you don’t build on it yet.
Come Build Something (March 28th)
ctrl+alt+create live. Hybrid workshop, in Seattle and online. Free.
Presented by Every. Sponsored by TurboTax.
Fireside chat first with Jon Levesque (former Microsoft evangelist, founder of Seeq) on building apps with Claude
Two-hour build sprint. Keyword prompt optional. Bring your own idea.
Group check-ins every ~20 minutes. Nobody stays stuck.
Showcases at the end. Show what you built.
Food and beverages provided.
Bring someone. Friend, family, coworker.
When: Saturday, March 28th, Noon PT
Streaming: youtube.com/chrispirillo/live and twitch.tv/ChrisPirillo
Prize: $100 Amazon gift card for one registered participant
Be sure to Register now!
Chew On This
Things rattling around in my head from the past couple weeks:
Every single “Crafter” app started with me asking the same question: “Okay, they made the font. Now what?” Business cards. Letterheads. Labels. Envelopes. Wedding invitations. If you’re stuck on what to build next, ask what your user wants to do five minutes after they finish using what you already made. The answer is your roadmap.
That question works in reverse too. I built Handwriting Fontalizer because my mom couldn’t use FontCrafter’s printed template. The “what happens before they get here?” question is as generative as the “what happens after?” question. Both directions are products.
The NFC Maestro Chrome freeze came down to a 500ms delay. Half a second between a working app and a phone reboot. I think about that every time someone tells me their software problem is complicated. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s half a second and you haven’t found it yet. And I built it because all the Android NFC apps were designed by people who weren’t designers.
I shipped six apps in two days, then built a breathing app (Breathing Room) because I realized I’d been holding my breath while testing the audio trimmer. The cobbler’s kids and all that.
Yours Digitally,