What I’m actually working on.

Aleph Compliance

The founder-operator work. Shipping module expansion (Certificate Vault + ENERGY STAR integration were April), ongoing security + code-quality sweeps, and onboarding the first wave of importer customers.

The Fantastic Leagues

2026 MLB season just started, so the platform is in its highest-traffic window. Active work: live-data reliability, auction-bid tracking, AI-insights cache tuning, and the weekly League Digest that ships every Monday.

Bahtzang Trader

The AI trading-decision experiment. Paper-trading sandbox only — not a real-money trading service. Actively iterating on the Claude-Sonnet decision prompts, guardrails, and the admin dashboard. Learning what “AI as collaborator” actually means when the output has concrete dollar consequences (even if only paper ones).

The Judge Tool

Shipped v1 in 20 days back in March. BBQ competition season is mostly summer, so the tool is stable and in "watch for bug reports" mode until events ramp up. Planning a Q2 pass on per-user PINs + Redis-backed rate limiting (see the roadmap).

TableDrop

Restaurant reservation marketplace for Taipei. Infrastructure is built (Next.js + Stripe + Playwright scraper); commercially paused while I figure out the right operator partnership on the ground in Taipei before relaunching.

Tastemakers

iOS restaurant-review app. Fully built cross-platform (iOS + Android + web); currently paused. Waiting for a clear answer on whether to restart, fold into something else, or wind down cleanly.

KTV Singer

YouTube-powered karaoke system — phone (Expo) + Apple TV (SwiftUI) pairing, synced lyrics, shared queue, Express + Socket.IO + Supabase. Functional across the 7-repo monorepo; on the back-burner while Aleph is the priority. Personal-use weekend project that’s held up surprisingly well.

The Thirsty Pig

The food & travel blog I've kept since 2007. After the big 2026 rebuild — 923 posts recovered from the Wayback Machine, 1,649 Instagram posts archived, 2,900+ pages live on Astro + Tina CMS — it's in the best shape it's ever been. Content-forward, low-maintenance, running itself. See the rebuild case study.

Attending: Spring Fest 2026 at the Chinese American Museum — April 25, 2026, 12–5pm · 425 N Los Angeles St, downtown LA. CAM + El Pueblo’s annual Year-of-the-Horse spring festival, opening AAPI Heritage Month with performances, folk crafts, and vendors. (As a board member I’ll be on-site helping run it.)

Confirmed: judging. All American BBQ Cook-Off — June 7, 2026 · Ruidoso Downs, NM. KCBS-sanctioned; I’ll be on a table judging the four mandatory categories (chicken, pork ribs, pork, brisket). See The Judge Tool for what that workflow looks like from the inside.

Targeting (still finalizing): a handful of additional KCBS-sanctioned competitions across the West later in the season.

• Best Dam BBQ — May 24, 2026 · Boulder City, NV
• IBEW So Cal BBQ & Chili Cook-Off — July 18, 2026 · Santa Ana, CA
• 22nd Annual Burnt Offerings BBQ Contest — September 19, 2026 · Riverside, CA
• BBQ Jackpot — November 21, 2026 · Las Vegas, NV

Currently reading:

• 100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die — Jon Weisman (World Series Edition)
• The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports — Jeff Passan

Actively posting on Instagram: @thirstypig — food, travel, and SGV dispatches. The visual companion to the blog.

Serving on the board of the Chinese American Museum in downtown Los Angeles (since Feb 2026). Eating my way through the SGV again (see Thirsty Pig for the receipts).

Rooting for the Los Angeles Dodgers — and managing my fantasy team, Los Doyers, in the OGBA League (going on 30+ years) on The Fantastic Leagues (the AI-assisted fantasy baseball platform I built — yes, I’m dogfooding it). Trojan football, Cleveland Browns, Lakers also rotate in depending on the month.