one of the reasons i impulsively left my job is wanting to finish this passion project i’ve been building on and off since last fall, which is a video sampler and songwriting app called rip chopper. it started like all the things i make: it didn’t exist and i wanted it for myself. i got a proof of concept working over thanksgiving vacation and thought i would be done by the end of the year, which was…laughable. i made a lot of progress over the next few months but, for a project of this size, a few hours on the weekend or in the evenings is not quite enough and while there were no other apps doing this when i started, some have released in the time i’ve been gestating, which is inevitable but still a bummer.

leaving my job has given me the time and energy to try to drive it toward at least a beta release and i’ve been working on it a lot the last couple months. i’m really proud of the progress i’ve made even though it still has lots of rough edges and bugs. it’s hard as the developer to use a tool that has lots of rough edges and bugs “as a user,” since my impulse is to stop the creative process and fix whatever issue, but that disrupts the flow of real usage. it’s also easy as a developer to build things out and do perfunctory “QA” to test your fixes and additions but that’s very different than the actual process of trying to make something you want to share with other people. so i’m trying to do more dogfooding of the tool, both so i can test how it feels in those conditions and also because the whole reason i was building it so i can use it to make stuff.

here’s a mashup i made with it today of the new single by katseye, “hootie frutti”, and “thootie” by ice spice.

the two songs go together so well i’m kind of suspicious that the official version is going to drop any minute (#first). the experience of making the video was often…annoying (i started out recording a “warts and all” screencast as i worked but i ran into so many warts that i gave up lol), but, despite the trouble i also feel a satisfaction that i could use this thing to take an idea that i kept hearing in my head and make it into something real.

(a funny/actually extremely annoying thing that has happened to me multiple times making these kind of video mashups is that i spend a ton of time crafting the video (see my drake parody) only to post it on Instagram and find out that their copyright protection, no matter what tricks i think i’ve done, is unfoolable, so i can’t share it the main place i want to share it. to be servicey, a useful thing i’ve learned is that Youtube Shorts copyright protection is more lax, especially if your videos are under a minute!)