/projects
Tools, experiments, and things I built because I wanted them to exist. Client work lives on /cv; this is the after-hours stuff.
Find high-upside startups before they become obvious hiring targets.
An MVP-stage data service for spotting early startup signals and turning them into a focused radar for talent, hiring, and market research.
TypeScript 
Cloudflare Real-time audience interaction for hundred-person conferences.
Solves the missing audience-to-audience and speaker-to-audience interaction at industry conferences with hundreds of attendees. Live, synced deck during the session; auto-generated summary report after.
Cloudflare 
Supabase Dutch school comparison, plotted in 2D.
Solves the pain of comparing Dutch primary and secondary schools when the official data is scattered across hundreds of separate pages.
TypeScript 
Python 
Vercel Make Dutch verb spelling less painful.
Solves the inefficient way primary-school kids and Dutch L2 learners drill werkwoordspelling rules.
TypeScript Vercel I Ching divination, traditional yarrow-stalk method.
Solves planning and decision-making under deep uncertainty.
JavaScript Vercel Screenshot every HTML element matching a CSS selector to its own PNG.
Solves generating social-media post images quickly with AI.
Rust Token-thrifty Outlook CLI for LLM agents.
An email CLI that solves the token waste when an LLM agent handles a mailbox directly.
Rust macOS Keychain wrapper for one-shot credential injection.
Solves the leak of API keys and database passwords into .env, shell history, and exported environment variables when working with cloud APIs and AI agents.
Projects I shut down. Listed here because the lessons travel further than the wins.
Mar 2026 – May 2026
MCP server for a Dutch data/AI community — agent-native, no UI.
Invite-only MCP server for 荷兰数据群 — a 700-person Chinese data/AI professional community in the Netherlands. Members connect their own agents and call structured tools for coffee chats, referrals, and resource sharing. The entry filter is the product itself: if you can configure an MCP server, you belong.
Killed by Two things. (1) Agent-native habits are still early — too few members had an MCP-capable client set up to actually use it. (2) I cooled on MCP as a delivery surface: the server stays resident in the agent context and burns tokens even when idle. Next form will be a plain REST API or a CLI.
Feb 2025 – Feb 2026
A marketplace for cold referral asks.
Employees posted open roles at their company; job seekers asked for referrals directly. The pitch: lower hiring cost for companies, referral bonuses for employees, a faster signal for candidates.
Killed by Dutch hiring runs on warm referrals — employees were reluctant to put their professional reputation behind strangers, so supply stayed thin. We were not a strong operations team; after exhausting agency contacts and our own network, traffic plateaued at 568 registered users. Ran in silent mode until the domain expired.
Lesson Marketplaces only reveal their cultural limits in the wild — and traffic operations matter more than I had credited.
ETH Hackathon 2025
RWA tokenization for real-estate rent streams.
Explored putting real-world rent flows on-chain. I designed the Ethereum smart-contract layer.
Killed by Web3 hit real-world policy and regulatory walls — non-technical.
Dewei Zhai