Zixian Chen
Zixian Chen
Home
About
Career
Projects
Contact
LinkedIn
GitHub
Blog

Projects

Things I created to solve my problems.

Projects

Abbreviatin

Golang
Htmx
Tailwind
Sqlite
Templ
Go, SQLite
HTMX, Templ, Tailwind

Problem

People forget what acronyms and abbreviations mean. They then need to ask a colleague or pray that it shows up in email archives.

What I wanted

I wanted to build a lightweight search app for abbreviations. There were already a few JS side projects by individual civil servants, but I wanted to make a faster one with Go.

What I built

  • A search engine and database of abbreviations & acronyms in Go.
  • Focused on being minimal, fast, and usable.
  • Uses full-text search and fuzzy matching (Jaro-Winkler and Metaphone [Phonetic]).
  • Experimented with other algorithms for matching — Levenshtein, Jaccard, Aho Corasick, Jaccard, Beider-Morse, Soundex. Results were meh though.
  • Implemented backend admin features for identifying duplicate entries.
  • It was interesting learning stuff on Go, Docker, Makefile, Templ and dev toolchain (Air, Tailwind, Esbuild, Prettier).

Not yet done

  • Users say a tagging feature will be useful, but is too much work for now.
  • Semantic-based search would be fun to implement (e.g., searching CEO of ministry should ideally return Minister/PS)
  • If this scales way bigger (or maybe just for fun) - trying Minhash and Bloom filters
  • Adding Valkey makes it slower than just using SQLite, but I'd love to continue trying ways to cache expensive results/queries.

Appraize
Sveltekit
Sortable JS
Drizzle
Tailwind
Coolify
Postgres
Sveltekit
Sortable, Drizzle, Tailwind, Postgres, Turso
Coolify, NodeJS, Nginx

Problem

How might we speed up ranking sessions, which need manual selection to form a numbered list "1, 2, 3..." on Excel. Every change to the list required manual reordering.

What I wanted

Speed up ranking sessions via drag & drop.

What I built

  • Drag & drop of officers and add. info
  • Sessions and mini dashboard each session
  • Backend DB (Drizzle + Postgres/Turso)
  • CSV bulk uploads
  • Filters and keyboard shortcuts
  • Form actions/validation

Not yet done

Haven't added authentication, which is probably needed for a private thing like ranking.

Apptitude Logo
Sveltekit
Tailwind
Gsap
Pagefind
Sveltekit
Gsap, Tailwind, Pagefind
Cloudflare

Problem

How might I help my non-technical teammates access to vast repositories of free-to-access knowledge to gain tech-related competencies?

What I wanted

Display lists of tech resources from Youtube, blogs, tutorials, courses, sorted by tech competency.

What I built

  • Static Website
  • Used JS objects to store/read info
  • I felt CMS, DB, markdown files were unnecessary overhead

Not yet done

Making learning plans the front and center to learning, so all the suggested resources revolve around a learning plan once committed.

BTOnomics

Astro
Tailwind
Pagefind
AstroJS
Tailwind, Pagefind
Cloudflare

Problem

  • I just lost interest in Wordpress and shared hosting.
  • PHP, plugins/themes, huge MySQL database felt too legacy.
  • Wordpress still felt bloated on a VPS, compared to what I felt was achievable with e.g. Astro, Hugo, Gatsby, Eleventy.

What I wanted

  • Rebuilt BTOnomics with AstroJS, because I saw all the praises and wanted to try it out.
  • I'm happy with Astro. It's indeed good for content-first sites. It's fast. I also like native markdown support, view transitions, shipping HTML/CSS first.

What I built

  • Migrated to AstroJS as a static site.
  • Used ChatGPT to convert WordPress html/shortcode to markdown.
  • Recently did some rewriting to convert to Astro 5's Content Layer API.
  • In the process I added QOL stuff like tag filtering

Not yet done

Didn't recreate Wordpress' social features, especially comments. But I don't want/need it, neither does the blog.

Cancel Ninj
Sveltekit
Tailwind
Pocketbase
Coolify
Sveltekit, Pocketbase
Tailwind
Coolify

Problem

How might I stop getting tricked into paying for subscriptions I don't want.

What I wanted

Subscription tracker that alerts me about known dark patterns and companies' dirty tricks.

What I built

  • CRUD webapp, with authentication, user stuff, and calendar view.

Not yet done

Probably OCR or natural language processing for greater automation.

Grumplr
Golang
Htmx
Templ
Postgres
Tailwind
Go, Postgres
Templ, HTMX, Tailwind
Coolify

Problem

I'm reinventing the wheel to learn building a bulletin board with Go, writing SQL, vanilla JS. I also wanted to try using authentication SaaS and implementing magic link logins.

What I wanted

Bulletin board stuff - posts (threaded, streaming chat, commenting, liking, upvoting, attachments, WYSIWYG editor, tagging), user actions (authentication, authorisation, settings and customizations, anonymous mode), misc (filtering, simple word matching, image optimization, thumbnail generation).

What I built

  • I built what I wrote planned, using stdlib as much as possible. Self-hosted auth.

Not yet done

  • Probably good-to-haves like polls, admin actions/panel.

The Junkyard

Projects of the past that I don't work on now.

Junkyard
Btonomics Old Logo
Wordpress
Nginx
MySQL
BunnyCDN
Wordpress
Mysql
Nginx, Apache, Bunny CDN

Problem

There was barely any info online to guide me through the renovation journey (choosing an ID/contractor, deciding on a design, buying from Taobao).

What I wanted

Started BTOnomics as pewpewpew.cc in 2018, which was a blog that documented my journey and my advice to other people in similar shoes.

What I built

  • WordPress was the obvious choice.
  • Wrote organic content that other people liked as well.
  • Tinkered with themes & plug-ins, tweaking, optimizing.
  • Finetuned content for SEO and Core Web Vitals, esp TTFB/LCP.

Not yet done

Wordpress got too bulky and tiresome to manage and host. Not least the sprawling repository of images (not least the multiple resized copies of every image). I'm still keeping this Wordpress instance out of nostalgia.

Eat Your Meds!
Django
Htmx
Nginx
Gunicorn
Bootstrap
Postgres
Django
HTMX, Bootstrap, Postgresql
Nginx, Gunicorn

Problem

How might I make it easier and shorter to plan medicine dose timings and get accurate info.

What I wanted

Make it less tedious for both of us parents to record/coord medicine stuff and sync with one another.

What I built

  • Basic CRUD webapp with user authentication.
  • Sprinkled HTMX and datepicker.js for user interactions.
  • Backend via Django

Not yet done

Honestly, ChatGPT does it better (Gemini refuses, so no luck there).

Rank-a-Mate
Django
Htmx
Sortable JS
Nginx
Gunicorn
Bootstrap
Postgres
Django
HTMX, SortableJS, Bootstrap, Postgresql
Nginx, Gunicorn

Problem

Rank-a-Mate was my first stab at making a drag & drop tool for ranking sessions in lieu of Excel.

  • Same problem statement - How might we speed up ranking sessions, which need manual selection to form a numbered list "1, 2, 3..." on Excel.
  • Every change to the list required manual reordering.

What I wanted

Speed up ranking sessions via drag & drop.

What I built

  • Basic CRUD webapp with drag & drop of officers and session-based workflow
  • Allowed addition of supplementary info (grades, dept)
  • Sliders to adjust quotas for each grade
  • Backend DB via Django

Not yet done

  • Rebuilt this as Appraize.
  • This lacked filters, dashboard, keyboard shortcuts, uploads, etc that I subsequently built in Appraize.