I've been putting more of what I'm working on over at Wildcat Projects. There are apps, game prototypes, the pool heater, and experiments with making game assets and cloning my own voice locally. Some have videos, some have notes, and some are still very much in progress.
That overlaps quite a bit with what I've always written about here, so I wanted to explain why I built another site and what I see each one being for.
A Home for the Whole Project
A blog post is a useful way to tell one part of a story. I run into a problem, work through it, and write about what happened. That might be getting logs into Grafana, fixing an awkward deployment, or trying a different way to extract data with a local model.
But a project usually carries on after the post ends. I change something, record a demo, decide a feature isn't worth keeping, or come back to it months later with a different idea. Those pieces can end up spread across several posts, a repository, and a video description.
I wanted somewhere to keep them together. A page I can point someone to when they ask what I'm building, where they can see what it is, why I started it, what has changed, and where it stands now.
That's the main job of Wildcat Projects. Each project gets a home that can grow with it, with updates, screenshots, videos, and links to the longer write-ups when there are any.
Room to Try Things
My interests don't fit neatly into one category. Sometimes I want to build a useful app. Sometimes it's electronics or automation. Lately I've been spending more time on game prototypes making use of all the random assets I purchased over the years and seeing how much of the art and audio I can make on my own hardware.
I wanted Wildcat Projects to have room for all of that. I also wanted somewhere I could show work before I had a finished product or enough material for a full article.
The game prototypes are a good example. Tall Tales and Duskbound are experiments in finding something fun to play. Their direction can change. A dev log gives me a way to show where they are today without pretending I've settled the whole design.
The site also gives the Wildcat Projects YouTube channel somewhere to connect back to. A video can show a build or a test much better than a paragraph sometimes can. The project page is where the background, related experiments, and useful links can stay together afterward.
The name comes from wildcatting in oil drilling: drilling an exploratory well in a new area, looking for oil or gas without knowing whether you'll find it. That felt like a good fit for these experiments, and for the line on the site: “Build it. Test it. See what happens.”
What I'll Post Where
Wildcat Projects is where I'll keep the ongoing record of a build: what I'm trying, the current state, demos, and the changes that matter as it develops. A small update can belong there without needing to become a whole blog post.
This blog is where I'll keep writing about a particular problem, decision, or experience in more detail. Homelab notes, technical walkthroughs, things I learned while building something, and the occasional post about why I changed my mind all still fit here.
SpendSeer already shows how that can work. Its project page brings together the original idea, the launch, the product tours, and my decision to keep maintaining it for myself. Here on the blog, I can spend a whole post on the paper notebook redesign or the two-pass AI extraction experiment.
Someone who wants to see what SpendSeer became can start with the project page. Someone interested in how a particular part works can follow the write-up here. I can link the two without having to tell the whole story again every time.
There will be overlap. I've always written about projects here, and I still will. I don't want a strict rule that makes me second-guess where every paragraph belongs. Having a place for the project as a whole should make the individual posts easier to write and easier to find later.
I want a record of what I actually tried and learned, even when a project stops there.
If you want to follow the builds and videos, have a look around Wildcat Projects. If you're here for the longer write-ups and the details of how I got something working, those will keep appearing here too.
Until next time, keep on building!