Development
Journal

Launched Shuffle Chess 960 — Chess960 for iPhone, live now on iOS.

Built a pixel character generator for consistent character animations and game-art assets.

Started a personal knowledge agent — Pydantic AI, Postgres vector search, and Dagster for the data pipeline.

Turned to Machine Learning with PyTorch — regression, neural nets, and transformers.

Entered Meta’s Horizon Competition and built Season Dash — an endless runner through summer San Francisco and winter Tahoe.

Entered Google’s Chrome Built-in AI Challenge and built Plop — a Chrome extension that previews online furniture in your own living space before you buy.

Built RSFScribe — answers questions about RealitySF sermons using vector search and SQL queries. Live at rsfscribe.victorlau.dev.

Launched bread — a daily scripture reader that follows RealitySF, with C.S. Lewis text-to-speech and a chat to ask questions about the reading. Live at bread.victorlau.dev.

Finished courses on React & Redux, Testing Library & Jest, and React Query.

Started Master TypeScript & Design Patterns.

Started learning VIM — slow at first, then the keys disappear.

A brilliant lecture series on building a transpiler from scratch.

A wonderful talk by SQLite’s creator, Richard Hipp, on its design and unusual architecture.

Began a meal-planning app — a week of meals at a glance, shopping list auto-generated.

Started Angela Yu’s Complete Web Development Bootcamp — the first commit.