As I prepare to go on vacation, was thinking about where I am with my side-projects. I know I have a predisposition to yak shaving, but just now realized I’m in six levels deep. My current stack is:

Make a color picker that supports gradients, therefore

Make a library of UI widgets to allow you, among other things, to make these kinds of controls (X/Y pad, sliders with many handles, etc.), but then

Make a color-handling library because with the existing libraries I can’t process user input the way I need. Oh, this turns out to be a nice library which needs equally nice documentation, so

Build a static website generator because clearly none exist at the moment. It’s going to use Nunjucks templates because I have used, and like, Twig. But Nunjucks does not support the really good parts of Twig, therefore

Write a templating language in the vein of Jinja/Liquid/Twig; but a full blown parser seems… excessive, so I wonder whether I could use a JavaScript parser instead, therefore:

Extend the Acorn JS parser to support evaluating expressions you’d find in a template language.

So, get ready for the best color picker 2025 has ever seen? But, seriously, I wonder: fellow lobsters who are prone to yak shaving, how many levels deep are you, and what’s your current stack?