Wheel of Project Ideas

A spinning wheel to help people come up with project ideas at CodeDay! Powered by ChatGPT and 16 hours of spite

I am a professional software engineer, so you could say I am pretty experienced.
I forked an existing repository for the spinning wheel (https://github.com/codeday/wheel-of-fun) but everything else I made myself.

I did not expect to encounter many challenges working on this project, however unexpectedly ran into a large number of issues creating the background graphic. To support system color mode, I wanted the animation to be transparent, something which _should have_ been easy but ended up taking about 6 hours of fiddling with After Effects and ffmpeg settings to resolve. Ultimately, my issues were not with After Effects or ffmpeg, it was with VLC, which does not support playback of transparent video. Thankfully, the issue with VLC does not provide any barrier for the website functionality, I was only using it to (at least I thought at the time) speed up development.