Abandoned Node.js projects

Quill is a browser-based markdown editor with Yjs-powered collaboration. I built it because none of the existing ones (StackEdit, Dillinger, HackMD) felt right. Quill is fast, the toolbar adapts to the cursor position, and the export to MD/HTML/PDF is clean. I got bored of the CSS. The architecture is sound. The biggest issue is no mobile support — I never figured out how to make a good mobile markdown editor.

Built Lumen over 14 months while freelancing. The idea was: drop a schema, get a production GraphQL API with auth, subscriptions, row-level security — no glue code. Got to ~600 stars, a few production users, and an OKR of "hit 1k stars then find a co-maintainer." I never hit the OKR. I took a full-time role in November, and after two months of trying to maintain it on nights and weekends, I let it go. The codebase is solid, the docs are good, the test suite is honest. Someone who wanted to go full indie on it would have a real head start.

Built Beacon to solve my own problem: I kept shipping React apps with broken keyboard nav and missing alt text. Beacon runs in CI, fails the build on real issues (not just lint), and explains why each rule matters. Two of my friends used it on their teams and got it in. I'm moving to Rust and don't want to maintain the Node internals anymore.

Pollen is the CMS I wanted to use for my own freelance work. WYSIWYG-friendly for clients, but stores structured data. Built the editor as a contenteditable wrapper that emits JSON Schema. Adopted by Pollen Labs (I'm still on the board but no longer the maintainer).

Cobalt is a Figma-lite built on Yjs. I built it to teach myself CRDTs. The interesting part was the performance budget — we hit 60fps on 5k objects per user, 8 concurrent users, on a M1. The codebase is small (~8k lines of TS) and the test suite is the best I've ever written. I'm not using it, my co-author is at a startup that acquired it, and we're looking for someone to take it from here.

Mosaic outputs semantic HTML, not a div soup. The constraint engine enforces grid + flex rules. The components are HTML-first with optional JS sprinkles. I built it for a client project and open-sourced it after. Adoption was low because the docs are bad. The core is good. Needs someone who likes writing component libraries.

Lattice generates JSON dictionaries + a strongly-typed accessor from a single source of truth. Zero runtime. Zero dependencies. Tree-shakable. Used in production at three different startups I know of. I built it for my own freelance work and the README is what I'm proudest of. The tool is small (under 1k lines) but the docs are 50 pages. I'm leaving it because I joined a company that uses a different i18n solution and I can't ethically maintain both.

Pinnacle is what I wanted Shopify to be when I was running a tiny t-shirt shop. Clean API, no theme lock-in, supports weird product types. Got to 40 paying customers, then realized I'd built myself a second job. Sold the customer list to a friend with a Shopify store (with their consent) and walked away. The code is well-organized. The docs are okay. The pricing model is wrong — I made it too cheap.