kitsune Tools started as a small Angular project with one calculator. This is the story of why I'm starting over, what I'm building, and why I'm writing every step of it down.
Two years ago, I quietly pushed a small Angular project to GitHub and deployed it to Vercel. It had one tool — an Ohm's Law calculator — and an overview page that listed it. No README worth reading. No real design. Just something I made for myself and left running.
I never told anyone about it.
This weekend I opened it again. And instead of just adding a new tool, I spent four hours reading through the code, thinking about what I actually wanted this to become, and talking through ideas. By the end of it I had made a decision: I'm rebuilding it from scratch, doing it properly, and I'm going to write about every step of it.
This is day zero.
What Kitsune Tools is
The idea is simple: a collection of interactive STEM tools. Not static calculators. Not walls of text. Actual simulations — the kind where you drag a slider and watch physics happen in real time.
The reference point I keep coming back to is PhET Interactive Simulations from the University of Colorado. If you've been in school in the last 15 years, you've probably used it. It's genuinely useful. But it looks like it was built in 2009 because most of it was. The UI is heavy, it barely works on mobile, and it has that Flash-game energy that makes students tune out before they've even read the instructions.
I think there's a real gap for something that does what PhET does but feels like a modern web product. Clean design. Smooth animations. Works on your phone. It's completely free and open source.
That's the goal.
Why I'm starting over
The original project was built with Angular. I know Angular reasonably well — it's what I reached for at the time, and it got the job done. But after thinking it through seriously, Angular is the wrong tool for what I want to build now.
The ecosystem problem is real. When you're building physics simulations, interactive 3D scenes, and animation-heavy UIs, you want libraries like React Three Fiber, Framer Motion, and GSAP. These exist for React first. Angular ports exist sometimes.
Maintained by someone, maybe, if you're lucky. I don't want to spend my weekends fighting library compatibility. I want to build tools.
So the new stack is:
- Turborepo monorepo — one repo, everything lives together
- Next.js 14 as the shell — handles routing, SEO, and the blog
- React for the tools themselves — pure components with zero Next.js dependency
- Tailwind CSS for styling
- Framer Motion + GSAP for animations
- MDX for the blog
The key architectural decision is that the tools package has no idea Next.js exists. I write a tool as a plain React component, test it in isolation, and Next.js just imports and renders it. The shell and the tools are completely separate. If I ever want to change the shell later, the tools stay untouched.
The blog part
Here's the other thing I'm committing to: I'm going to write about this every weekend I work on it.
Not polished thought-leadership articles. Just honest accounts of what I built, what broke, what decision I made, and why. The kind of writing I wish existed when I was trying to figure out how to structure a growing frontend project.
A few reasons I think this is worth doing:
The writing forces better decisions. When you know you're going to explain why you chose something, you think it through more carefully instead of just vibing your way into a choice you'll regret in six months.
It creates a paper trail for the project. If this becomes a proper open source project with contributors, that history matters. People want to know why the codebase looks the way it does.
And honestly, PhET has no story. It's just a tool. I want Kitsune Tools to be a tool and a journey people can follow.
What's already there
The existing project has:
- An Ohm's Law calculator (works, needs a redesign)
- A pendulum simulator (in the code, not fully deployed)
- An overview page listing the tools
- 13 commits and a very empty README
That's what I'm starting with.
What's coming next
Next weekend, the goal is to have the new monorepo scaffolded and running locally. Next.js shell, React tools package, shared UI package, the works. No tools rebuilt yet — just the structure in place so every tool I add after that has a clean home to live in.
The weekend after that, I'll port the Ohm's Law calculator to the new stack, redesign it properly, and write about the difference.
If you want to follow along
The repo is at github.com/Thiya11/kitsune-chaos-tools. It's public. The current code is the old Angular version — the new branch will appear next weekend.
I'll be posting these articles every weekend I work on it. No fixed schedule beyond that. Real life happens.
If you're building something similar, or you've been through a "rebuild it properly" moment with a side project, I'd genuinely like to hear about it in the comments.
Here goes.
Kitsunechaos Tools is an open-source STEM simulation project. The goal is to build the best free interactive science tools on the web — with better design, a better mobile experience, and full openness for anyone to contribute to.
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