Buried in a JIRA backlog, I found a request from one of our PMs asking for a tool that would allow someone to type in their password and find out if it was any good or not. I decided to take it on as a little side project and developed it in a single evening.

I wanted to make this really simple with no instructions needed. You should be able to land on the page and immediately understand what you need to do and what the information returned is telling you. With this in mind, I went very minimal with the design and let the circle graph and results do the talking.

I knew I didn't have the time, or likely the engineering expertise, to write the backend logic to power this tool. There's some complex math involved in how long it would take a computer to crack a password. I was resourceful and found an open source project that does this and dropped my design on top of that. In addition, it includes a database of the 10,000 most common passwords, gathered from recent data breaches.

I presented this back to the PM who was beyond impressed and, with this prototype in hand, had more buy-in to build a version two into our password manager tool that lives in the Sontiq IIS platform. One of the improvements I wanted to make to my tool was a password generator, so we built that in as well.