The Legacy Collection

Hi, I'm Nabs.

I've been around on the Internet for quite a while and have made a lot of side projects over the years.

Most of them are publicly available on GitHub, either at My personal account, or at my organization, Freeman Industries.

But as with all things, stuff slips through the cracks. I recently rediscovered a bunch of old projects that I had forgotten about, and I thought it would be fun to share them with the world.

Going through these again brought back some nice memories for me - and some of them are deeply personal.

I was 21, just coming out of a startup failure, and 50/50 on if I would ever try again. I was also in a long-distance relationship with my girlfriend, who luckily stuck around and married me. I was also just starting to get into the world of remote work and digital nomadism.

What followed was a burst of creativity and experimentation, which you can probably see in the chaos below.

I did find my feet eventually, founding LeSalon which I went on to sell in 2024 after 7 years of hard work.

In the interest of transparency I'm putting these out there for the world to see - rough edges and all. Some of them are actually totally broken, but feel free to dig through the code. You might find a neat idea.

So without further ado, I present to you the Legacy Collection, a collection of my work from 2012-2015.

- Nabs

Business ideas

• Famous Workouts - My first ever attempt at creating a content website that I could easily build out and monetize. I was 18 at the time. (2012)
• Voternator - Buzzfeed used to have this emoji voting thing at the bottom of every post. I thought it would be a neat widget to make for other websites to easily add. I built the whole thing and never got a single signup, let alone made any money. (2015)
• Deck of Cards Workout - Works in browser. One of my biggest successes out of all these projects. This was actually a moderately popular native app on iOS and Android until my dev account expired. It gave me a lot of experience creating a simple, useful product. (2015)
• Zip Code Lottery - Funny looking back but I really felt good about this idea! Thought I could get loads of traffic by offering people free money. I abandoned the idea after a few hours of hacking (2015)
• Reddit Player - Enter a subreddit, this pulls out all the YouTube and Soundcloud links and autoplays them. Cool playlisting tool that actually got used quite a lot in some niche subreddits. Unsurprisingly no longer works. (2015)

Personal Projects

• How long until China? - Countdown I made to my girlfriend (now wife) counting down my move out to China. (2015)
• I love you - Art project I made. When you click the heart, it sends out a heartbeat. Anybody else on the page at the same time receives a pulse. It was a minor success with many thousand people visiting the site over the span of a few weeks to "talk" to each other. It's now broken, but can be fixed easily by setting up a Faye back-end somewhere. (2015)
• Mao - Birthday card for the girlfriend. Won't say any more on this one because it's embarrassing. (2014)
• Valentines - I made a Valentine's Day card for my girlfriend. Pretty sure this is the moment she fell for me! (2015)
• Xinnian - Same year, another card for Chinese New Year. The key is persistence, people! (2015)
• Parallel Universe - "If anything and everything exists in parallel universes, then it proves that you are just as capable of being a billionaire in this universe, as the other ones." - quote from me, obviously processing my recent failure... (2015)

Commercial Projects

• Moltin Widgets - The first contract I took on after the failure of Now Native. I was in the running to get a job at Moltin, but I messed it up when I decided to become a digital nomad without telling them. (2015)
• Canvas Ad - At my failed advertising startup we almost went into the world of display ads. I made this as a proof of concept. This was me trying to salvage anything I could out of the failure that might land me a job afterwards. (2014)

VR Experiments

At one point I was convinced VR would be the future by the 2020s. I tried learning WebGL and working my way towards creating a browser competitor to VRChat. Had a pretty long way to go when I lost faith that VR would be world-changing and this is all that's left.

• VR Experiment #1 - Click and drag around a camera point, x axis only (2015)
• VR Experiment #2 - Multi axis click and drag around a camera point (2015)
• VR Experiment #3 - Scroll to zoom (2015)
• VR Experiment #4 - I think this is where I added support for the VR headset, but can't test it any more (2015)
• VR Experiment #5 - Really proud of this one. Orbit system, realistic lighting, you can super jump through the particles and it looked amazing in VR. (2015)
• VR Experiment #6 - First try at a skybox (2015)
• VR Experiment #7 - Skybox and a crude attempt at jumping (2015)
• VR Experiment #8 - Collision, slightly more realistic jump, one of my best results I think (2015)
• VR Experiment #9 - Main experiment here was supporting different POV modes - sitting in a chair, and lying down (2015)