Formulata

For several years, my friend and I were using an excel spreadsheet filled with columns of random words and concepts. You would read across the row and try to create an idea by jamming together words that don't really belong together. This was a great way to make wild ideas that I never would have come up with otherwise, so I decided to make a simple web app that displayed each row of the spreadsheet on the screen with buttons to individually randomize each word. I converted each column into an array of strings, and used a simple array[Math.floor(Math.random(array.length))] to randomly select a word from the array and display it to the screen.

This was my first real "web app", and I learned a lot about JS, CSS, and the DOM. I was super proud of my creation at the time, even though it took longer than I'd like to admit lol. It was the seed for the idea that would become ideaisland several months later. In hindsight, before turning it into a larger application, I should have shared this tool with others to see if they found value in it, in which I would have discovered that making ideas without a defined problem was a lousy way to innovate. You live and you learn though right? 🤷‍♂️