I build small, complete systems end to end — data pipelines, automation, and single-file web apps that run for months with nothing to maintain. Most of what's here started as a tool I needed myself; the public repos are the ones that turned out to be worth showing.
Portfolio: Nick-Lian-Portfolio.pdf · Email: nicklian0315@gmail.com · Website: nickkk.com
A few things that show up in what I ship:
- Zero-cost, zero-ops by default — public data, static hosting, standard libraries, and a scheduled script instead of a server.
- Guards for the failures that actually happened — most projects here carry a fix with the incident that caused it written next to it.
- Measured, not assumed — thresholds come from data, hypotheses get tested against the full sample, and a negative result is recorded rather than deleted.
| What it is | Built with | |
|---|---|---|
| Scholar Outflow Lab · live | Where researchers from 13 countries ended up — every rate shown with its sample size. | Python stdlib, OpenAlex (CC0), one static HTML file, launchd |
| Bill Bench · demo | Clean, categorise and reconcile a year of bills in the browser — every row stays traceable. | Python stdlib, seeded synthetic data, GitHub Actions on Windows/macOS/Linux |
| Callback Desk · simulator | Turn missed calls into bookings — staff approve every message and every calendar write. | n8n JSON, Node stdlib simulator, no external services |
| CallDelta · dashboard | Call tone vs. analyst pushback — not a trading signal. | Python, LLM-scored transcripts, residual-return target |
| ApplyLedger · demo | A job-application tracker for people applying in several countries at once. | React 18 in one HTML file, GitHub Contents API as the backend |
| Clipbind · demo | What you saved on Xiaohongshu and Bilibili, bound into one piece you can read. | Vanilla JS, IndexedDB, private-repo sync with tombstone merge, Claude structured outputs |
| Vacancy Signal · results | Ghost job postings as an equity signal — the course report's figures, not recomputed here: the data is licensed. (UBC Sauder, team project) | Python, scikit-learn, XGBoost |
| Letterkeep · tour | Students check whether they qualify for a reference letter before they ask — the roster, the grades and the files never leave the professor's own machine. | Flask, SQLite |
| Query Mirror · demo | Every click becomes the SQL behind it — practice is graded on results, not wording. | Vanilla JS, sql.js (SQLite in WebAssembly) vendored in the repo, no build step or server |
| Headersort · demo | Gmail triage that reads only sender and subject — and only adds labels. | GitHub Actions cron, IMAP + app password, Claude Haiku, two JSON files as the database |
- Python and JavaScript, mostly without frameworks; SQL; the GitHub API as a free database more often than I'd admit.
- Comfortable driving Claude end to end — prompts with structured outputs, vision, and agents that do real work under documented, human-approved rules.
- English and Chinese, both native-level working languages; everything I publish is bilingual or English-first.
Based in Canada, working with North American hours.