With my brother, we wanted to race lots of tiny, Hot Wheels-sized RC cars indoors, in living rooms, clubs and bars. Nothing out there could do it, so we built it ourselves, with NFC: today our timing system is used all over the world. My part is the 3D models: prototypes for research and playtesting, which then became products or open source parts, like the gantry I keep spotting in other people's race videos.
It started as a birthday card for my wife: the QR code leading to her present had to be uncovered by shading in the cells of four puzzles. I drew that one by hand in Inkscape; QRiddle is the web app that now builds them on its own, and my excuse to learn React and TypeScript by building with Claude Code, from the first commit all the way to launch.
Importing, exporting and converting data meant long programs that were hard to test. Taking a cue from Akeneo, I wrote JobBoy, a PHP library where a job is a state machine and the work is split into iterations of a few seconds: in between, JobBoy checks memory and time and, when needed, stops the worker and lets cron or supervisord bring it back up. Small pieces, easy to test. No longer maintained.
In tests, the arrange part tends to swell and get tangled with the act and assert parts. FixtureHandler moves it out: it is a registry of objects and values, each under a key, where every fixture loads its own and declares the ones it needs; if it reads one it did not declare, loading stops and says where. A modular setup, inspired by Symfony's container. Small and easy to understand; dormant since I stopped needing it, as today there are more complete alternatives, like Foundry.