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Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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Back in 2016 I made a lot of cinemagraphs for HBO.
They took a surprising amount of work. Masking footage, finding the right loop, freezing parts of the frame and getting everything to transition cleanly.
I’ve had an idea for a simpler cinemagraph tool kicking around in my head ever since.
About a month ago I built another small tool using Toolcraft as the starting point, so yesterday I wanted to see if it could handle this idea too.
A few hours later I had a working cinemagraph editor.
Drop in a video → find your loop → choose how it loops → paint the areas you want to keep still → export.
Basically the workflow I used 10 years ago, condensed into a few controls.
Still rough around the edges, but kind of wild to finally build a tool I’ve been thinking about for a decade.
The masking-and-looping history is exactly why a simpler cinemagraph workflow feels valuable; the tricky part is preserving a seamless transition without making the tool feel like a timeline editor. Curious direction for an AI-assisted app.
I started messing around with a concept for a crossfit app as I've recently switched from strength training to crossfit style workouts.
Concept images from the onboarding using @adamlyttleapps Onboarding Questionnaire skill.
The artwork will be animated and looping on each page.
Code is a map of the problem it solves.
Good software is not defined by how much code exists, how complex the stack looks, or how many technologies were involved.
It is defined by whether the system solves the right problem clearly, reliably and with as little unnecessary complexity as possible.
At HERODOT, software engineering is where strategy becomes infrastructure.
Architecture, automation, interfaces, integrations, security, maintainability and performance all have to work together. The goal is not simply to ship code. The goal is to build systems that remain understandable, adaptable and useful after launch.
Because code is temporary.
The problem it solves is what matters.
The framing turns a fairly abstract engineering message into something visually legible—the red-on-black system and oversized type create a strong technical voice. The line about solving the right problem also gives the composition a clear point of view.