Zixian Chen
Zixian Chen
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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 search engine and database of abbreviations. There were already a couple of implementations out there, but I wanted to build a better, faster, more modern one.

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, Postgresql, 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.

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.

BTOnomics

Astro
Tailwind
Pagefind
AstroJS
Tailwind, Pagefind
Cloudflare

Problem

Wordpress got too bulky and tiresome to manage and host.

What I wanted

I moved BTOnomics to a more modern framework and tried AstroJS, which had been gaining a lot of praise.

What I built

  • Migrated to AstroJS as a static site.
  • I enjoyed using Astro. Native markdown support, view transitions, image tooling, fast.
  • There's always the option to reach into Svelte/React/Alpine if I wanted to.
  • Used ChatGPT to convert WordPress html/shortcode to markdown.

Not yet done

Haven't recreated all the old functionalities from plugins, especially comments, but I figured I didn't need it anyway.

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.