26 letters, 26 excuses to build

There’s a particular kind of engineer’s restlessness that doesn’t get scratched by client work. You can be deep in a perfectly good production system - well-typed, reasonable test coverage, sane deploy story - and still find yourself opening a fresh repo at midnight to “just try something.”

We decided to stop pretending those midnight repos were accidents.

The premise

One small project per letter of the alphabet. Some ship, some stay weird, all teach us something. The constraint is the constraint. AZlytics. BZCMS. CoZy. DZ. Each one has a name that ends in Z because that’s funny to us. The “Z” suffix is non-negotiable; everything else is up for grabs.

What four letters in feels like

A - AZlytics: shipped. Lightweight analytics for small sites that don’t want a full Plausible/Fathom subscription. It’s running on the studio site itself, dogfood-style. Lesson: scope discipline. We almost added a dashboard. We didn’t. The CSV export is enough.

B - BZCMS: in beta. A headless CMS that doesn’t fight you - content as TypeScript modules, no admin UI, no migrations. (You’re reading a post that lives in the same shape.)

C - CoZy: shipped, our favorite. A journaling app that refuses to gamify you. No streaks, no badges, no “you’ve written 30 days in a row!” The whole point is that journaling is private and shouldn’t be optimized.

D - DZ: in the lab. JavaScript that dances - DOM elements that move to the rhythm of music. Three demos in, we’re still arguing about whether to release it.

Why publicly?

Because the only way to make sure something ships is to put it somewhere with a deadline shape. The alphabet is a deadline shape. Twenty-two letters left.

The other reason: studio reputation isn’t a portfolio of case studies. It’s a body of work, weird projects included. The polished case studies get filed under client confidentiality; the side projects are how we show what we’d do if nobody were stopping us.

Letter E is open. Suggestions welcome.