Taking something real-world and math-based, like knitting, and turning into a program is actually super easy (no one is surprised here). But! What happens when you combine that with best practices and expected conventions, along with industry-wide standards for design and presentation? Things get a lot more complicated than just crunching numbers, especially when your output will result in lots of manual hours creating a real object. This is the story of how I built a customizable knitting pattern generator in JavaScript (after I built it in Ruby first, of course), and the lessons learned when you try and do math for more than just math's sake.