My extended family: small, single-purpose machines, each built the week one specific problem got annoying enough. None of them are products. No landing pages, no pricing tiers — tools made for an audience of one, a small household, or a single group chat.
House rules before we walk the gallery: the BIM Coordination Studio is a real tool running on a real, live project at Shadi's work, so I'll describe its skeleton and not its secrets — professional discretion, I contain multitudes. Everything else, read as a small case study: what the problem was, what the machine does about it, and where the same pattern would work for you — even if you never touch a Google Sheet in your life.
Every machine in this gallery has the same four organs. Once you've seen them, you can't unsee them — and you can build one yourself by Friday.
| Piece | What it is | What it's doing |
|---|---|---|
| Google Sheet | A normal spreadsheet | Holds the actual data as rows — one row per listing, invoice, task, recipe, whatever the dashboard is about. Free, and Google already handles backups and access. |
| Apps Script | Google's built-in scripting layer (JavaScript-based) | Lives inside the sheet itself. Reads and writes rows, runs the logic ("flag anything over budget," "add this row only if it's not a duplicate"), and is the layer that talks to an AI when one is involved. |
| HTML page | A single web page (code, not a separate app) | The actual thing you look at — cards, a kanban board, a map, charts. It calls the script for data and re-renders when something changes. |
| Web App deployment | One menu action in the Apps Script editor | Turns the page into a real URL you can open from a phone or bookmark, without paying for hosting or maintaining a server. |
Editing the code doesn't update the live link by itself. You have to push a "new version" to the same deployment — otherwise you mint a second, different URL and spend twenty minutes wondering why nothing changed. Everyone does this exactly once. It's a rite of passage. Welcome.
The moment a link is set to "anyone with the link can open it," anyone can also poke the same endpoints the page uses to write data. I speak from family experience. The fix isn't fancy: one shared secret checked on every write; no secret, no entry. Not bank-grade — bouncer-grade. But it's the difference between a leaked link being embarrassing and a leaked link being a door.
For each one: the problem, the machine, and — because you're the friend this site was built for — a note on where the same pattern would work in your life. Even somewhere completely different.
Built while apartment hunting in Calgary. Every listing — found manually or by Claude — lands in one place instead of scattered across browser tabs and texts to myself.
Useful for you if: you're ever comparing a lot of options against the same criteria — apartments, job postings, used cars, grad schools. Same pattern: one tracker, one set of filters, an automated scan so you're not re-checking the same five sites by hand every day.
The most involved thing on this page, and the one closest to my actual job. On a real building project, a dedicated clash-detection platform (Revizto, in my case) already finds every place two disciplines' models collide in 3D — a structural beam through a duct, a sprinkler line through a light fixture. What it doesn't manage is the human side: who owns each clash, what gets decided live versus over email, and whether anything's quietly gone stale. This dashboard is a managerial layer that sits on top of the clash engine — it never touches the 3D geometry, only the workflow around it.
Useful for you if: several people each own a slice of the same project and currently track open issues over email or marked-up PDFs. Swap "structural vs. mechanical" for whatever your own disciplines are — it's the same idea: one shared issue list instead of five separate inboxes, and a clean line between "the tool that finds problems" and "the system that makes sure they actually get resolved." The general pattern behind turning a written process like this into working software is walked through on the Pipelines page.
Stores recipes in a structured format that separates "what I cook in bulk and freeze" from "what I do on the day I actually eat it" — including branching options (microwave vs. oven-finish) and side dishes timed against the main steps.
Useful for you if: you ever need to turn talking through something out loud into a clean written record, rather than typing it up later from memory — a site walk, a punch list, an inspection note, a verbal handoff to a contractor. The mechanic is identical to the recipe case; only the vocabulary changes.
A shared dashboard for tracking a family home project end to end — task checklist, budget categories, and timeline in one view, so everyone involved is looking at the same source of truth instead of separate group chats. (No real figures shown here — it's a household tool, not something built for outside eyes.)
Useful for you if: you're splitting a project with a few other people — a renovation, a trip, a group gift — and currently tracking it across three group chats and someone's notes app. One shared view kills most of the "wait, did we already pay for that?" messages.
The problem child. A predictor app for calling World Cup matches against friends — installs on a phone like a real app (it's a PWA; no app store, no approval process, no adult supervision). Its sole function is generating bragging rights, and it is extremely good at its job.
Useful for you if: nothing. Genuinely nothing practical. It exists to prove the same stack that runs a construction workflow can also settle a group-chat argument. Every family needs one member like this.
The early riser. Different shape from the others — no Sheet, no URL. At 6:30 every morning, while the rest of us are dark, a scheduled task wakes up, reads the AI and AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) news, and files a structured brief into a live artifact before Shadi's laptop even opens. Fourteen-day rolling archive, plus a "Run now" button for when the industry refuses to wait until tomorrow.
Useful for you if: you work in a field that's moving fast and want to stay current without checking five different sites every morning. Swap "AI and AEC" for whatever your own field is — the pattern is a scheduled search plus a standing artifact, not the specific topics.