Turning my personal blog into a digital playground

I’ve been sitting on this thought for over a year: turning my personal blog into a little lab for ideas, tools, games, and experiments.

Random ideas would come to me. Sometimes by seeing someone else build something interesting and thinking, “I’d love to build that.” Sometimes just a random whim or a wave of inspiration. Like the time I really wanted to experiment with building a local, browser-only speech-to-text dictation app.

Before AI-assisted coding, those ideas would be neatly stashed away into the “maybe someday” pile, a pile that only keeps growing with age 😂

Well, not anymore!

Now you can just do stuff and put it out there on the open internet. More easily than ever before.

The cost of turning your idea into reality has never been lower. You only need an idea, and the patience to iterate on it through conversation.

To help with that process, I use interview-me, a skill I wrote to refine ideas and work through load-bearing decisions. It helps me lock down what an idea is about, what I want it to become, and what I don’t want it to become.

And optionally, you can refine it further by infusing your product, UX, and visual tastes and unique quirkiness into whatever you build, making it truly your own.

So, where do I begin?

… What a daunting thought.

I almost went into a thought loop of perfectionism and procrastination there. Whew!

My wife occasionally needs to watermark PDFs for work. The website she likes using recently introduced a paywall and restricted usage.

So I asked her, “How urgent is it?”

She said, “It can wait a week. I don’t use it that much. Should I pay?”

And my immediate reaction was: “Hold on. Let me talk to Claude Code about this.”

The starting point could be anywhere, so why not build a tool that my wife would use in her work.

And that’s how it was decided: I’m starting with a simple PDF watermarking tool.

I’m hugely inspired by people building fun little corners of the internet like Simon Willison and Neal Agarwal.

How cool is it that you can now just make things because you feel like making them?

And with that, I’d like to introduce a new part of my website.

Introducing 🥁🥁🥁

Lab - My digital playground

It’s my little corner of the internet for tools, experiments, games, and ideas that would otherwise have only lived in my head, or in a spreadsheet called “Ideas”.

It feels good to just build things and put them out into the world.

Visit: preetamnath.com/lab

What's with the name?

Naming things is always fun. Sometimes frustrating too, haha.

I considered a few options:

• /tools felt too utilitarian.
• /playground captured the fun and experimentation perfectly.

A lab feels like a place where ideas are tested, explored, refined, and sometimes abandoned halfway through because a newer, more exciting idea showed up. It felt right.

So that's how I landed on /lab.

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