i hate doing the same thing twice and build things that help me avoid it: frameworks, automations, and agentic systems, lately.
i'm a full-stack software developer and founding engineer at hotbox (a16z SR006). i've shipped and owned across the stack: frontend, backend, databases, infra, data pipelines. i've also built products zero to one for other founders, and before that was a software engineer at BoA.
i like owning and understanding the systems i depend on. if there's an OSS alternative to a closed-source tool, i'll self-host it if i can't build it better myself. my office is a few degrees warmer because of the small server room i run out of its closet.
outside of work and homelabbing, i'm an amateur photographer, musician, and occasional traveler.
email me at ken@kenmyers.io
below is a brief, non-comprehensive selection of my personal projects ranked by some combination of recency, sophistication, and fun.
note: you can click the preview images to view them in full size
A web-based solver for iMessage/GamePigeon Word Hunt. It uses OpenCV to identify the grid and letters and traverses a trie’d English dictionary to find all possible words, as well as summary stats like total available points and word count (finding these was the original motivation for this project). The app is completely client-based; all CV and solving logic happens in the browser through vanilla JS.
(I don’t even have an iPhone—I had to test with screenshots I found on Google.)
A self-improving, voice-enabled, GPT-4-based assistant with multiple interfaces, written in Python. The design is very loosely inspired by the human brain, and with decent success—the latency is not great, but the bot makes fine conversation, follows instructions, and, upon my request, gave itself the ability to search Google, scrape my screen with OCR, and control my Spotify, among other things.
A website that uses the rules of species counterpoint to compose countermelodies to user-provided melodies. Built on a RESTful API written in Python with Flask and a simple vanilla JS/HTML/CSS web frontend. The site features a demo if you don’t happen to have a suitable cantus firmus MIDI file on hand.
A web app that uses an evolutionary algorithm to generate music, with humans in the loop as a fitness test via a voting bracket. The actual algorithm for generating and combining songs is pretty naive, however, and I’ve not observed convergence on a pleasant melody in my use. I’d like to revisit this idea but try something like interpolating between songs in a latent space, which should give better results.
A tool that generates distance-optimized (as opposed to just flattened) 2D projections of the stars. Written in Python and based on the principles of self-organizing maps. Includes error indicators at both the star and map level. Generalized to I/O of any dimension, but with few use cases for anything above 3D. This is the first project I did a write-up on.
The first iteration of my custom LLM assistant. Built with Python/Flask and a Discord bot interface. This was in the early days of ChatGPT, and the goal was getting it to correctly solve problems with multiple steps and/or specific, objectively right answers. This really boiled down to using Google and being able to solve basic-ish math word problems. I had moderate success—it could accurately answer questions about things like celebrity ages, caloric content, and movie showtimes, and could correctly answer questions like “how long could I survive on 100 cans of black beans?” about 30% of the time. This was near-instantly obsoleted by the release of gpt-3.5-turbo and ChatGPT plugins.
fin.
