I built a free online tool for calculating how many 2x4's you need for a project
The last couple weeks I have been building a chicken run & coop after work for my wife who has recently entered her gardening arc. I totally freestyled it with my notes app and despite spending a lot of time looking into the distance, rubbing my beard and doing mental math I still found I kept having to come back to home depot because I was running out of 2x4s. I tried to use some websites that exist for calculating 2x4 lengths, but found they were super overkill or just very clunky, so decided to spin up my own with no frills at all: 2x4calculator.com
For the length calculator I had to call on some old leetcode ability to do some backtracking to find optimal cuts when stock is limited, but mainly focussed on just getting the happy path working with unlimited stock. Might add a setting to price out the stock and find optimal cuts/stock usage via $ value, but just wanted to get this out since I just needed to solve it for basic 8' 2x4s for my own use-case.
On a less 2x4, more r/sideproject related note, for years I've kept a log of project ideas in my notes app, and found the barrier to creation was always mainly in the actual scaffolding. I've made a few templates to quickly spin up projects and even bought some, but they still feel like a ton of overhead. Typically in the past, I would've built this with a whole MERN stack setup, but decided to just do this project in a single html file with vanilla html and js, and just upload the html file to netlify, and it actually felt really nice to just make things super easy. With modern tooling (claude & netlify), but archaeic execution (html/vanilla js), I think this is the fastest 0-1 project I've ever made in 15-ish years of web development, even moreso than some of my dumb joke projects in the past that were just a funny domain w/ some memes that for some reason I still insisted on doing w/ MERN.
Definitely going to try and get some more single page, html projects out in the future. I have a few larger more complex projects that single-handedly get a lot of traffic, but I've always loved the idea of having a portfolio of just a ton of little one off tools.
Would love to get some eyes on this project from folks who would use something like this or folks who can find some edge cases with non-optimal cuts, but Im also curious to see some other 1-page, html/js only projects to give me some inspiration for the next few.