How my Hobby App Inspired a Feature in my Favorite Word Game

When I began my career break last September, I made a loose “no coding” rule for the first few months. I wanted to decompress, explore some new hobbies, and come back to software only when I actually felt drawn to it, not out of obligation to stay up-to-date on tech. This turned out to be a great call, and I spent several months investing in areas of my life totally unrelated to software engineering, including adopting a dog with my partner, getting back into playing music, and working my way through my ever-growing book and games backlog.

When the new year rolled around, though, I’d spent enough time kicking around ideas for a new project that I actually felt inspired to get back into building again. After cutting my teeth on the 2025 Advent of Code, I was excited to make something on my own.

The end result was a side project I made just for fun, but that ended up resonating with a particular online community and even inspiring a feature in a word game I play every day. Here’s what happened.

Picking a Project

I set a few ground rules before choosing an idea to work on:

Make something you’ll want to use. I wanted whatever I built to actually be useful to me day to day. I’ve had a few side project attempts in the past that were novel, but not ultimately very useful. The goal here was to actually use what I built.

Keep it simple, write it mostly by hand. Whatever I built, I actually wanted to ship it. And, after so many years as an engineering leader and manager, I actually wanted to get into the weeds and write the code myself. Vibe Coding is awesome (you’re reading a vibe-coded blog right now), but that wasn’t my goal this time around.

Ship it and share it for free. I knew I’d be more excited to build something if I could share it with a community that would enjoy it. But, I also didn’t want to turn my hobby project into a business or side hustle during my intentional career break. That meant the app shouldn’t cost much or anything to host or run.

These criteria narrowed the field of possibilities significantly. And while working on one of my favorite daily word games a perfect candidate for an app came to me.

Like all great hobby projects, the domain is a bit niche, so let me take a step back to explain some of the background.

Background: Cryptic Crosswords

If you’ve never heard of cryptic crosswords, you’re in good company! They’re not too popular in the US, having originated in the UK, and I was only familiar due to a passing reference from a friend in college many years ago. I got back into cryptics when I came across Minute Cryptic a few years ago, a bite-sized way to enjoy cryptic crosswords in a one-clue-per-day format.

Cryptics turn ordinary-sounding crossword clues into self-referential enigmas using wordplay, letter-manipulation, and a variety of other techniques. Each clue contains a straightforward “definition” for its answer, as well as a hidden “recipe” that instructs you how to get there via the rest of the clue.

If this all sounds a bit … well, cryptic, it’s because it is! I won’t explain all the ins-and-outs of cryptic clues, as that might take a whole post on its own, but there is one piece you’ll need to understand: anagrams.

An anagram is a word that shares the same letters as another word. Like SILENT and LISTEN, or ANAGRAM and “NAG A RAM”. Often cryptics require you to find an anagram in order to finish the solve.

It’s easier to explain with an example clue, like this one:

Abstract art genius makes reproducible scribble [9 letters]

[clue credit: Minute Cryptic and author Lowdown]

This clue consists of two main parts: a definition and wordplay. Normally, figuring out which is which is an exercise for the solver, but I’ll spoil it here. The definition is “reproducible scribble”, we’ll be looking for a word that means some sort of scribble that can be reproduced.

That means the wordplay is “abstract art genius.” What on earth does this mean? This is the fun of solving cryptics! In the wordplay section of the clue, you need to heed the indicators in the clue to manipulate certain words and letters to arrive at a synonym for the definition.

In this clue, “abstract” is an anagram indicator. It tells us we need to make the letters of “art genius” more abstract by re-arranging them into another form. In doing so, we’ll find a 9-letter word that fits our definition. (Other anagram indicators include words like ruined, discombobulated, and chaotic).

If you’re thinking, “How the heck could anyone figure that out?”, well, that’s just the joy of solving cryptics. Even though this explanation may seem like gibberish, believe it or not anyone can learn to parse these clues with enough time and a little determination.

Here’s the rub, though: even if we’ve figured out how this clue works (i.e. that we need to anagram the nine letters of “ARTGENIUS” in order to find a nine-letter word for “reproducible scribble”), actually solving it is a whole different thing.

Really, try it yourself now. Can you shuffle the letters of “ARTGENIUS” in your head and find another, valid, nine-letter word? Let alone one that can mean “reproducible scribble”?

If you’re having trouble, you’ve arrived at exactly the point I was when I finally felt I had a decent problem to solve for my hobby project.

(The answer, by the way, is SIGNATURE, which I think you’ll agree is a type of scribble that one can reproduce).

A workspace for anagrams

One simple way to solve an anagram like this is to use an anagram finder. There are dozens online, and if you plop the letters “ARTGENIUS” into one it’ll spit out “SIGNATURE” in an instant.

But, putting the letters into a tool that just gives you the answer felt against the spirit of the puzzle. I didn’t want to cheat at my daily word game, I wanted to solve it! Could I build a middle ground between staring dumbly at the letters and having a tool solve it for you? A helpful utility that didn’t feel like cheating?

Based on some comments I’d seen online, I wasn’t the only one lamenting this dilemma. Like clockwork, every daily clue that involved a tricky anagram would receive comments from unhappy solvers facing the same problem.

Analog inspiration

To solve such tricky anagrams like these, I’d been keeping a set of letter tiles on my desk, borrowed from the game Bananagrams. I found that being able to see all the letters in front of me, drag them around, and arrange them however I liked usually allowed me to find the anagram relatively quickly.

Wouldn’t it be great if I could take these tiles with me anywhere? Plus, if the tiles were digital, you could add fun ways to visualize and play with them.

It seemed I’d found my app idea. An anagram workspace checked all my boxes: it solved a problem I actually had in my life, it would be simple and cheap to build and host (no need for user accounts or data storage), and there was a genuine need to be filled in the cryptic crossword community (albeit, a niche one!)

Anagramic is born

So, I set off making Anagramic. I’m planning a follow-up post or posts on some of the fun challenges I encountered when making it, but I’ll save the details for now.

The app (website, really, but it’s intended to be used on mobile and resizes nicely to any screen) is pretty simple. You enter the letters you want to visualize, and it offers four tools that may help you spot the anagram:

• Freeform - most similar to just tiles on a table, letting you drag them around however you want with no limits.
• Line - restricts the letters to a straight line, allowing you to drag to change the order. If you like Scrabble, this may be the most familiar way for you to manipulate letters.
• Wheel - One tip to solving anagrams is to write the letters in a circle on a piece of paper. The Wheel tool lets you do just that. If you like the New York Times game Spelling Bee, you may favor this tool.
• Floating - This tool simply puts the letters in a box and has them float around randomly, bouncing off the walls. No user input here, just watch for a while and see if the answer pops out to you.

Before too long, I was using it to help find anagrams while solving cryptics in my day to day. And after a few weeks of playing around, polishing, and getting feedback from friends, I decided that the app was useful enough to launch.

Next question: How do you launch an extremely niche crossword puzzle utility app?

I’m doing marketing now?

When most of your career is in corporate life, you don’t need to worry about how your work gets into the hands of users. You build it, and then it’s someone else’s problem. No such luck, however, when you’re building on your own!

I first tried posting about it to some crossword communities online, to a positive but relatively small reception – not enough to feel like I’d really gotten the word out to the people who I wanted to.

I also shared within Minute Cryptic’s internal member forum, and sent them a note directly too.

Go where the community already is

Where I ultimately found some true traction was where Minute Cryptic itself all began: on TikTok! You see, one of Minute Cryptic’s main draws is a daily clue explainer video. Each day, their founder breaks down the daily clue in an easy-to-understand format. These videos were how I stumbled on the game myself.

So, I did something I’d never done before: I made a TikTok with my face in it! I’ll admit, I felt more than a bit hokey at the time. And I learned firsthand how utterly inscrutable the TikTok video editor is to anyone over the age of 25. But, after several takes, edits, and voice overs, I had myself a quick video explaining the problem, my solution, and where to find it.

The reaction blew my previous marketing attempts out of the water. Say what you will about algorithmic video platforms, but they are certainly good at putting your video in front of the right people. Within a few hours, I had thousands of views and dozens of comments from people who’d had exactly the same problem, and were more than a little excited someone had gone out of their way to solve it.

So, mission accomplished! I made a thing, shared it with the world, and got some positive feedback and real users. Not a bad run for a simple hobby project I made in a few weeks!

But, the most fun part of the saga was actually still to come…

A surprising development

A week or so after I’d posted my TikTok and more or less called my app finished, I got an intriguing email from the team at Minute Cryptic themselves.

They’d checked out Anagramic after I shared it with them, and let me know that they’d been toying around with the idea of a “scratch pad” space within Minute Cryptic for a long time. Anagramic had helped spark some ideas internally, and they had now built a prototype of the feature, which they called the “Scribble Space” within the app. They even sent me a link to a pre-alpha version of the app where I could play with it myself, inviting me to be a very early tester.

How cool! My little app, which I honestly barely expected anyone besides me to use, had inspired a whole feature in the daily game that I built it for. I was keen to check out their prototype, which shared a bit of DNA with Anagramic (namely, draggable letter tiles), while still feeling like a distinct tool on its own. It has a few nice features like the ability to add letters to the space directly from the clue itself, and a “staging area” where you can drag tiles if you want to lock them into the answer.

And a few weeks later, as I was watching the daily clue explanation, I found a pleasant surprise waiting for me.

Feel free to watch for yourself, but in summary: the Scribble Space launched and I got a very kind shout-out for helping inspire the feature. I have to say, it was quite a surreal moment to watch someone who you’ve been watching daily for over a year mention you and your app by name! The founder, Angas, and I had some additional correspondence, and there may be some merch coming my way as a token of appreciation for helping inspire the idea. A pretty good result if you ask me!

(And by the way, the “abstract art genius” clue I used as an example is the same one they used to launch the Scribble Space).

Ending thoughts

When I’ve told friends and family about this whole experience, some have given a reaction along the lines of: “Wait, you’re letting them use your idea for free?”. I understand the sentiment and know it comes from a good place, but really look at this situation from a different perspective.

The goal of this project was always simply to something fun and useful, share it with the right people, and make the world a tiny bit better in the process. I never really wanted to make any money off of this project, I just wanted to do something fun for the sake of building, and the good of the community.

And it turns out, when you do that, good things follow. In the end, I built and shared an app I genuinely wanted to exist, my favorite word game got a huge upgrade inspired by my personal workflow, and I got a cool connection, a public shout-out, and some free merch to boot!

To me, that all feels more valuable than whatever I may have gained if I’d tried to monetize my hobby project. Puzzles and games should be fun, after all.

You can find Anagramic for free at https://anagramic.net. If you want to look at how it was made, it’s open source on Github.