Palinilap
Palinilap is a live web platform for writing palindromes, the strictest constraint in English writing, with a palindromic social network built around it. Hadrian Ra designed the product and built its custom suggestion engine on a palindromic dictionary he curated over many years, turning a near-impossible craft into something fast and playful. An original product that joins linguistic invention, product design and engineering.
Role: Sole creator: product designer, engine designer and developer
Skills shown: product design, UX design, algorithm design, full-stack development
About
Palinilap is a fruit of many, many years of effort: writing palindromes, learning how words map onto each other when reversed letter-by-letter, discovering what grammatical structures work and which do not and, perhaps most importantly, gathering over 59,000 entries in a curated palindromic dictionary which doesn't exist anywhere else.
This might not seem like it, but it's the most sophisticated geeky project I have ever worked on. Simply "prompting AI" would have never accomplished anything like it.
It's a tool that makes what is probably the harshest of English literary constraints laughably easy to execute. The process is sufficiently advanced under the hood that it becomes a seamless UX: you choose the beginning of a palindrome and the engine suggests to you all the possible extensions, which you can further filter by what kind of vocabulary you're using at the moment. It allows you to write comprehensible palindromes astonishingly quickly:
To gelato-tie: none. Sure, votes pull at illuminati-to-enemies ratios - so it arse I, me: neo-titan. I mull it all upset over. Use none I to tale got.
...As comprehensible as a palindromic sentence can get, really.
I've conceived this tool initially to write a palindromic novel named "Arts ad Astra", but somewhere along the way it grew into an idea of a social media platform where every single thing, from users' @handles to names of all the buttons, even payment plans' prices, is a palindrome. Yeah, I know.
The site is 100% functional, although I'm still polishing some rough edges (curating additional entries and creating more sophisticated ways of composing logically sounding sentences with it). The website is a fully functional social platform that can be used for free (and bot-accounts post daily challenges: palindromes to be extended by the users), but it has also more advanced features gated behind a monthly subscription for those who want to take this hobby to an entirely new level.
Give it a try though: the app itself is free and a lot of fun! Available at www.palinil.app!
Genuine warning: every palindromist eventually ends up making lewd sentences. It's just the nature of 4-letter words to be easily palindromizable.
