Late last year I started building something that had no job description attached to it, no business case ready, and no guarantee that anyone would use it.
I built Signlytic, a Chrome extension that intercepts live captions from streaming platforms and translates them into British Sign Language signing animations in real time, rendered as a floating overlay panel directly on top of the video.
Not because someone commissioned it. Not because it was the safe, hireable thing to build. Because it felt like a problem worth solving and because I wanted to know if it was even technically possible.
This is the story of what I built, how I built it, what repeatedly broke, and what the whole experience taught me about the kind of engineering that actually matters.
The problem I kept thinking about
