Things I've built
A candid inventory. Six live apps, and more in progress. Every project starts somewhere.
Live
Read to Earn
Started February 2026
A family reading platform where kids earn points by reading articles and answering quizzes. Parents submit articles; Claude AI automatically generates age-appropriate questions. Kids compete on a leaderboard and the whole family can track reading progress over time.
Daily Diary
Started April 2026
A note-taking and publishing tool. Capture notes throughout the day by typing or speaking, then use Claude AI to generate a polished diary entry and a LinkedIn post from the raw material. Entries publish directly to this site's diary section.
MAS Monetary Policy Insights
Started April 2026
A tool to track MAS monetary policy decisions and approximate where the S$ Nominal Effective Exchange Rate sits relative to the policy band — pieced together from public data sources. Covers all 62 historical policy statements with extracted parameters, historical S$NEER data, and an estimated policy band chart.
Private access — open to a close circle. Request access via the app.
alvinbuilds.com
Started April 2026
This site itself. A personal portfolio and build log documenting the hobby of building software as a non-developer. The meta-experience of building a site about building sites is not lost on me.
Bookshelf
Started April 2026
An AI-powered personal reading companion. Add books to your shelf, have persistent conversations about each one — summaries, themes, quotes, author background — and discover new reads through three recommendation modes that draw on your existing shelf.
Financial News Monitor
Started May 2026
A personal financial news monitor that watches 15 RSS feeds every 20 minutes — central banks, regulators, and financial press — and sends a Telegram alert when something significant breaks. Claude Haiku scores each article for relevance; anything above the threshold triggers an immediate alert with a summary and link. Built in n8n after an earlier attempt at a full AI knowledge-graph agent didn't pan out.
In progress
Practical Chef
Started April 2026
A family meal planning app. Scrapes recipes from URLs into a shared catalog, lets you plan the week's meals day-by-day, and generates a shopping list from the plan. Includes pantry tracking, staple management, ingredient substitutions, and an admin portal for reviewing submitted recipes before they hit the catalog.
Shelved
Minecraft / Luanti Modding
May 2026
Scripts to generate structures inside Minecraft Education Edition (MakeCode) and Luanti/VoxeLibre. Built working house-building commands in both. A roller coaster generator ran into the limits of 3D spatial reasoning — route planning with slopes and loop closure needs visual debugging tools that aren't available in a standard coding session.
More to come
The backlog of ideas is longer than the time to build them. I add a project here when it's real enough to show — not just an idea. If you've got suggestions or want to follow along, drop me a note.