Building small tools in public
I'm Nan Liang. I build free browser tools — shift schedules, tournament brackets, seating charts, time card calculators — and I write here about how they're built, shipped, and run.
Latest notes
- $0.10 Bought 99 Opinions Buried in My Wiki
An LLM lifted 99 opinionated claims out of 17 pages of my personal wiki for $0.10. A human review pass accepted 95. The two-queue design and its failure modes.
- What Broke When I Gave My Agents a Shared Memory
One day with gbrain, an AI-agent memory layer: Chinese search missed, clients collided on the single-writer DB; local embeddings and one house rule fixed both.
- Moving My Cron Jobs to a New Mac
My scheduled jobs moved from an old Mac to a new one. The first-night playbook: preflight the scripts and output dirs, watch without fixing, and snapshot twice.
- The Six Emails Gmail Sent to Spam
Six near-identical confirmation emails from a web directory landed in Gmail's spam folder within minutes. What the record actually shows, and what I changed.
- The Form That Failed Me for a Mouse
A contact form rejected my automation for four days. The blockers: a consent anchor my selector missed, an isTrusted-only mousemove flag, and a dwell timer.
Tools I built
8 free tools, all running in the browser with no signup. See the full list →