Cempres (short for Covid Employer Response) is an aggregation of the responses that several employers made to the COVID-19 pandemic starting in March of 2020. Though other sites like Did They Help existed to showcase similar information, the idea was to build an open-source aggregation of this information (like Wikipedia), so people could audit the paper trail and contribute their own experiences and sources via GitHub.
Back in the day, I used to record videos for YouTube, and while doing so, having a large clock up on one of my monitors was essential. So, one day, I built a website that was just that: a clock.
In the YouTube Premium series Mind Field, Michael of Vsauce fame spent an episode (season 3, episode 1) diving into the cognitive tradeoff hypothesis. As part of this episode, he spoke with researchers who had trained a monkey named Ayumu in a number of memory tasks—and suggesting that the monkey would outperform humans. I wanted to give these tasks a try myself.
Talk about a small-scope but high-impact project! This one is a bit less on the serious side, though. A family member of mine was big into the game Clash of Clans in 2017, and had built a half-dozen sheets in Excel to help him track his progress and optimize his unit production in the game. When we looked at it together, the process of doing it with a spreadsheet was cumbersome and difficult, so we thought, "Hey, why not turn this into a specialized calculator?"
As part of a group university project, we decided to build a library (or bookstore) management system. The goal was to be able to design an end-to-end experience (both a server and web UI) for librarians or bookstore owners to be able to manage their inventory (including loans or sales).