Side projects · 2026

Things I built
because I wanted to use them.

My name is Stephan Wolschon and I am a software product manager. I build these apps using my experience with user needs, UI/UX and AI prototyping.

Each app is live, not a demo. Most started as a problem I actually had. They say where their numbers come from, and admit when they do not know. The others I built for fun.

Tools for my own trade

Product Role Navigator

Two jobs with the same product title can need completely different things. This shows what one needs, and how you measure up.

  • Describes what product roles in software involve, across eight areas of skill and twelve reference roles.
  • AI: Rate a role you are hiring for, or paste an advert and an AI reads it against your own profile to show exactly where the two diverge.
  • Every number states its source (quoted, reference, derived, or edited by you) and says plainly when something was never stated at all.
Live
since 12 Aug 2026
Built with
One standalone HTML file · no backend · UK GDS capability framework

Seven axes quote GDS; the eighth is authored and marked as such

Open the Navigator
  • The opening screen, offering to rate a role you are hiring for or to analyse a job advert.

    Two ways in: hiring for a role, or sizing one up

Product Org Navigator

In most companies nobody quite agrees who decides what in product. Answer a few questions and this lays out who owns each task, and who has a say in it.

  • A RACI matrix across 36 product tasks and the teams around you, already filled in from the product roles you have, who else is at the table, how you plan and how you sell.
  • Every value says where it came from: suggested from the template, worked out from one of your answers, or set by you. Nothing is quietly promoted to something you agreed with.
  • It then argues with its own draft, asking about the cells it is least certain of, and draws the teams around one product person by who decides, who builds with them and who can block them.
Live
since 22 Sep 2026
Built with
Two standalone HTML files · no backend · English and German

Nothing you enter leaves your browser

Open the Org Navigator
  • A RACI matrix: product tasks down the left, seven teams across the top, and an A, R, C or I in every cell, with a hand-written comment pinned under one of the tasks.

    Every task filled in, with one person accountable for each

Built for friends, and for me

Holy Moly

A group of friends plans a trip together, then splits what it cost.

  • Five tabs on one page cover everything a trip needs settling: who is coming, when, what to do, what is finally agreed and who paid what. The group fills them in whatever order it gets to them.
  • One link is the whole invitation. Whoever opens it types a name and answers; nobody installs anything or makes an account, and the talking stays in the group chat where it already was.
  • It finds the date everyone can actually do, keeps the plan readable on the mountain with no signal, and at the end names the shortest way to square up — who pays whom, in as few transfers as the arithmetic allows.
Live
since 3 Sep 2026
Built with
Next.js 16 · Clerk · Drizzle + Neon · next-intl · web push · Vitest + Playwright
Open Holy Moly
  • The landing page in dark mode: the wordmark over a contour-line background, the promise

    The front door, for somebody who arrives without a link

Commensa

Talking about investing with friends means naming amounts, which nobody wants to do. This app compares everyone as percentages, so nobody learns what anybody has.

  • A private circle shows everyone's progress on one scale, so a first savings plan sits beside a twenty-year portfolio without either being embarrassing.
  • Nobody ever learns what anybody holds, paid, or is worth. That is enforced by what the app stores, not by everyone being polite.
  • Follows shares, ETFs and crypto. Imports a CSV straight from Trade Republic or finanzen.net ZERO, resolves each ISIN to a live price, and fills in dividends on its own.
Live
since 18 Aug 2026
Built with
Next.js 16 · Clerk · Drizzle + Neon · next-intl · Vitest + Playwright
Open Commensa
  • A circle chart in dark mode showing four members' returns as percentage lines over a year, with a feed of buys and sells beneath it.

    An example circle: invented friends, real prices

Fairground

Most stock valuation tools hand you one number and hide how they got it. This runs four methods on assumptions you set yourself, and shows where they disagree.

  • Four valuation models run side by side and are never averaged into one number.
  • Growth, margins, cost of capital and holding period are all yours to change, and every figure moves as you type.
  • A model that cannot price a company is greyed out with the reason. Nothing is guessed to fill a gap.
Live
since 13 Aug 2026
Built with
Next.js · Drizzle + Neon · SEC EDGAR filings · end-of-day prices

Personal learning project — not investment advice

Open Fairground
  • A stock page for Apple: the verdict and where today's price sits among the models, five model tiles with each one's return, and the start of the price chart beside the assumptions.

    The verdict on top, every model beside it

Kochbuch

A family's recipes pile up as screenshots, photos and links nobody can find again. This keeps them in one cookbook that reads like a printed one, on whatever is at hand: the phone in the supermarket, the tablet in the kitchen, the PC at home.

  • AI: Paste a link, or pick a photo, screenshot, PDF, Word file or saved web page. An AI reads the recipe, translates it into German when it needs to, and fills in title, ingredients, steps and step photos. Nothing is saved until you have checked it.
  • Amounts rescale for people, pieces or a baking tin, so a 26 cm springform becomes a 22 cm one. Cook mode puts each step's ingredients next to it, the shopping list merges several recipes, and the whole book downloads as PDF or Word.
  • Marks for gluten, lactose, sugar and nuts come from the ingredient list. An ingredient nobody has classified makes the answer “unknown”, never “free”.
  • AI: Scan a product's barcode to fill in its ingredients. When the barcode finds nothing, an AI reads a photo of the label instead, and you check what it found.
Live
since 13 Oct 2026
Built with
Next.js 16 · Clerk · Drizzle + Neon · next-intl · Google Gemini · Open Food Facts · Vitest + Playwright
Open Kochbuch
  • The start page of Stephans Kochbuch: a search field above 627 recipes, then a row of Hauptgerichte and one of Beilagen, each card with a photo, a title, a heart and, where rated, five stars.

    Recipes in rows by category, with a photo where there is one

And just for fun

Afterglow

A wall of lights in the browser that you play instead of watch.

  • Two animated patterns blend on a grid of 48 to 256 lights across, in nine palettes and six kinds of hardware: plain LEDs, RGB stadium pixels, flip-dots, a vacuum fluorescent display, bare LED tape and neon flex.
  • It listens and looks. The microphone turns a meter pattern into a 64-band equalizer and sends ripples on every beat, and a camera or any video file becomes a picture made of lights.
  • Autopilot fades from look to look on its own. On a phone it installs to the home screen and runs full screen, where holding a finger on the lights picks something new. There is an Android app to download as well, which keeps the display awake and lets the lights listen while your Bluetooth music keeps playing.
Live
since 11 Sep 2026
Built with
The panel is one HTML file · WebGL 2 shaders · Web Audio · accounts on Next.js 16, Clerk and Neon

Sound and video are analysed on the device and never uploaded

Open Afterglow
  • The Afterglow panel showing an amber look, rays bursting from a bright centre, beside the sidebar where each layer picks its pattern under Flowing, Geometric and Depth tabs.

    Two patterns blended, with every control beside the panel

Girih

Islamic tile patterns, laid piece by piece in the browser.

  • Three families of tile, five-, eight- and twelve-point, each a handful of shapes whose edges are all one length. Pick one and click a gold edge and it lands in turned copies and their mirrors at once, or press Grow and let the wall choose the tiles for its next ring.
  • Press Autoplay and the wall grows itself, a ring at a time, each at an angle it picks, and stops when there is no room left. Surprise leaves the tiles where they are and gives the whole wall new lines, new colours and a new turn on every ring, with one Undo if the old look was better.
  • Palettes taken from crafts that exist, Iznik and Delft and Puebla and Kintsugi among them, each with a page saying where it comes from and what it does with colour. Mix your own if none of them fit. The ground can be the material the tiles are bedded in: lime plaster, terracotta, rammed earth, or a glaze with its own crazing.
  • Save the whole wall as a picture, a vector file or a DXF for a cutter; save just the repeating tile; or record it changing as an animation. Or copy a link that carries the whole thing: every tile, every ring, the angle each one was laid at and the look you gave it.
Live
since 15 Sep 2026
Built with
One standalone HTML file · canvas · the tiling in a worker · no backend
Open Girih
  • A ten-fold girih pattern in gold, blue and rust grown four rings out from the centre decagon, beside the Build tab listing the five-, eight- and twelve-point families.

    Four rings grown from one tile, every control beside the wall

Liquid Light

The 1960s liquid light show, on a screen and playing along with the music.

  • Seventeen scenes, each one a real analog effect: dyed water and oil pressed between glass as at the Fillmore light shows, an oil wheel, a lava lamp, ferrofluid, sand drawing Chladni figures on a humming plate, standing waves in a dish of water, film between polarizing filters and crystals growing on a slide.
  • It listens. Bass, mid and treble each move the picture in their own way: a beat presses the glass and drops in colour, and the sand and the water draw a figure for the note they hear. Autopilot can change the look every so many beats.
  • Pour with a finger, mirror it all in a kaleidoscope, keep looks as favourites or send them as links, and go full screen for a projector or a TV. The Android app follows the music the phone itself plays, Bluetooth included.
Live
since 24 Sep 2026
Built with
One HTML file · a WebGL 2 fluid simulation and shaders · Web Audio · an Android WebView app

Sound is analysed on the device and never uploaded

Open Liquid Light
  • Marbled paint in blue, cream and orange swirling across the screen, beside a see-through settings panel with Autopilot, Sound and Reaction controls.

    Marbled paint, with the settings panel beside it