In 2018, the Federal government shutdown in the United States, and everyone in my office essentially got sent home.
The first thing I did was shut off all my television streaming services, because I was resolved not to turn into a show-binging zombie... Well, that's not true, I also had a mini freakout about our crumbling society. But then I cancelled Netflix or whatever.
The second thing I did was brainstorm up a little hack project to make all my computer backgrounds a bit more colorful. I was heavy on D3 and Rails at the time, so that's how I first coded up beaukeh. I generated a couple hundred images, and they're still happily cycling on all my various screens.
Later that evening, I had a grand vision of a gallery with giant monitors all over the walls. The screens would show randomly-generated beaukehs and folks could point to ones they liked. I would then provide them with a high quality print, immediately cycle the beaus, and provide some cryptographic mechanism for proving the patron's image as unique. I didn't yet know it, but I was essentially thinking of a non-fungible token (NFT), which had arguably been invented about a year prior. This is something I probably could've quickly Googled and learned about, but I think I was waiting for a pizza to arrive and probably got distracted.
Fast forward to Bored Ape Yacht Club, OpenSea, and a super convenient Coinbase Wallet integration... And I decided to retool my super old Rails app into the thing I had briefly day-dreamed about before eating some delicious delicious pizza.
Fast forward to the collapse of the NFT market and Heroku's decision to start charging for hobby instances... And yet, my desire for procedurally-generated desktop wallpapers persists! So, I've refactored the whole thing into a pure JavaScript app that I can host as a static GitHub Pages website. Womp womp.