About

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William Forty
William Forty

I'm Will. I've spent the better part of twenty years building software for a living — production systems, integrations into legacy enterprises, and more recently a portfolio of products I run on my own. The Random Coder is the personal end of all of that: this site, the YouTube channel, and the writing here.

Work with me

Through FortyTech — my consultancy — I run AI Acceleration Sprints: short, fixed-scope engagements where I drop into a company and integrate AI into a specific bottleneck in around thirty days. If you've got a process you suspect AI could compress and you don't fancy spending six months figuring out where to start, that's the shape of work I do. The "Work with me" link in the nav goes there.

The portfolio

The list below is ordered roughly by engineering scope rather than by my personal attachment to any of them. Smaller products aren't less interesting — they're just smaller. A few I'm still actively shipping; a couple are running themselves passively.

Substantial backends and AI orchestration

  • Vidifai — an AI video generation platform. Feed it text, an audio file, or a transcript and it returns a finished video — script broken into fragments, images generated per fragment, narration synthesised, audio mixed, the lot composited into the final cut. Multi-stage job orchestration sitting behind it: Redis-backed queues, transactional state for concurrent jobs, fallback synthesis when the primary model dies. This is the most substantial engineering in the portfolio — closer to a small video-production studio in software than to a "wrap an API" project.

  • EulogySong — text-to-memorial-song. Mourners submit a written eulogy; GPT extracts themes; a music model writes lyrics and synthesises an original song from them. Real database, real auth, Stripe billing, fallback music model when the primary one rate-limits. Emotionally niche, technically respectable — the eulogy-to-audio pipeline is doing something most generative-music products aren't.

Real backend, multi-step workflows

  • Gap-Form — lead-qualification scored assessments for consultants, coaches, and SaaS founders. Build a questionnaire, send it to inbound leads, get them ranked and scored before you ever take the call. Multi-org auth, real database, scoring logic that's not just "sum the points."

  • QuoteMyRoom — a two-sided marketplace for garden-room buyers and suppliers, MyBuilder-style. Homeowners submit a questionnaire describing what they want; verified suppliers bid on the qualified lead. Multi-entity data model (buyers, suppliers, projects, bids), email verification, intentional questionnaire-first UX to filter for serious buyers before signup.

Polished daily products

  • Chessku — a daily chess puzzle in the shape of Wordle. You see only the mobility numbers — how many squares each unseen piece can reach — and you place pieces back on the board to recreate the hidden configuration. Streak tracking, daily seed, multiple board sizes, share-grid in classic Wordle style. Migrated from a single static HTML file (preserved in legacy/ as the behavioural source of truth, regenerated post-migration) with a Vitest test suite covering mobility, generation determinism, and streak logic.

  • Noughtle — a daily puzzle game whose direct ancestor is a puzzle I built on a PlayStation 2 in Yabasic when I was fourteen. I had a PDF of CRT-monitor screenshots of the original source code — Claude OCR'd it back into a working version in 2026. Daily seed, scoring, solver. The full story is over here.

  • TinFade — a tinnitus-focused sound tool. Web Audio API generates white noise, lets you shape the frequency band that matches your specific tinnitus signature, and fades automatically over a configurable duration so you can fall asleep with it on without it running all night. Niche-domain (tinnitus sufferers are a small but underserved audience) and entirely client-side.

Long-tail and single-purpose

  • Fix or Buy New — a decision calculator that takes the cost of a repair, the age of the item, and its condition, and tells you whether it's actually worth fixing or whether you'd be better off replacing it. Sustainability framing — the maths discourages the disposable answer more often than people expect.

  • Slogans AI — what it says on the tin. AI-generated slogans for brands, with a haiku-intro flourish at the top because nothing about the rest of the internet is whimsical anymore.

  • SlimCalories — a long-tail SEO databank of calorie and "sins" values for foods. Worth telling the backstory: the original site was slimmingworldsyns.com (Slimming World's lawyers killed it), then synvalues.com (Slimming World's lawyers killed that too), and the current incarnation uses the homophone "sins" — distinct enough trademark-wise to have survived. Around a thousand monthly active users, run essentially passively.

  • RegexWars — a Codewars for regex challenges, currently a waiting-list landing page. The full game mechanics are still in build. There's a video of me spinning up the first version live if you're curious how a modern stack collapses the boring middle of "I just registered a domain" → "the domain serves a working signup."

Adjacent

  • FortyTech — my consultancy.
  • HowToAutoCAD — my original blog, ~127 AutoCAD tutorials accreted over the better part of fifteen years. Dormant in active terms but still pulls daily organic traffic via long-tail search — a quiet reminder of how long a static blog can keep working for you after you've stopped touching it.
  • Swindon.tech — a local tech-community site I run for the area I live in.

How I work

I came up before AI-assisted coding was a thing, and I've ended up running several agentic systems in parallel as my day-to-day. A lot of what shows up here orbits the tension between caring about code quality and shipping at a pace that wouldn't have been possible five years ago. The YouTube channel is where I most visibly experiment — usually some unhinged regex one-liner, an AI-coding pattern I've stress-tested in production, or a build-in-public moment from whichever product is on the bench that week.

Get in touch

Will