Tab Manager: Grouping Chrome Tabs by Topic, Not Domain

A small Manifest V3 Chrome extension that groups open tabs by topic, with manual overrides, search, and a floating window. Building it exposed an invalid permission, a CSP failure, broken icons, and a troublesome background worker.

July 8, 2026 · 4 min · Matt Parker

Health Coach: A Personal Fitness App Powered by Wearable Data and Claude

Apple Watch and Fitbit data feed a home-server app that writes daily briefings, adjusts kettlebell workouts to recovery, and answers questions from my actual training history.

June 21, 2026 · 5 min · Matt Parker

Introducing Hikae: Notes Kept for Later

Why I built a cross-platform bookmark manager backed by GitHub, and what it means to have a single capture-to-recall system that works everywhere without iCloud.

June 16, 2026 · 2 min · Matt Parker

Command Center: One Dashboard for an IT Engineering Manager's Entire Workday

A local dashboard brings Linear, Freshservice, Gmail, Google Calendar, CrowdStrike, and Claude into the same card-based interface.

June 12, 2026 · 5 min · Matt Parker

MDMenuBar Is Now Beacon

What happened when a Markdown file previewer became my daily ops dashboard, and everything that changed along the way: a new name, a proper app bundle, URL source mode, alert integrations, and a bridge into a local web dashboard.

June 10, 2026 · 7 min · Matt Parker

Pod Somm: Tracking Specialty Coffee with a Bookmarklet and a Lot of DOM Wrangling

Pod Somm is a personal xbloom coffee tracker. The difficult part was getting product data past Cloudflare with a browser bookmarklet instead of a server-side scraper.

May 29, 2026 · 5 min · Matt Parker

Prompted Pours: A Cocktail Catalog Built with AI

Prompted Pours is a Hugo catalog of AI-generated cocktail recipes. The useful work is the schema, prompt system, and linter that keep the collection consistent.

May 11, 2026 · 6 min · Matt Parker

SIFS: Building a Custom Website for a 14-Year Film Club

Fourteen years of film club emails became a Hugo site with structured watch history, member statistics, and a GitHub workflow for adding films from a phone.

April 9, 2026 · 9 min · Matt Parker

MDMenuBar: A Native macOS Markdown Previewer That Lives in Your Menu Bar

Why I built a lightweight native Swift app to preview Markdown and HTML files from the menu bar, and what I learned writing a custom Markdown renderer without any dependencies.

April 7, 2026 · 2 min · Matt Parker

Building a Personal Ops System on Top of the Claude CLI

Linear, Freshservice, my calendar, git history, and session diaries feed a local system that produces morning plans, end-of-day summaries, and weekly retrospectives with Claude.

March 20, 2026 · 9 min · Matt Parker