Blog
Build logs, tutorials, and lessons learned.
I'm Only Building Dead Simple Apps From Now On
I opened Bloons TD to play a quick round and closed it without playing. Four modals appeared before I could see the homescreen. From now on, my apps do one thing.
How to Book Connecting Flights Without Ruining Your Trip
A practical guide to picking layovers that actually work, from minimum connection times to carry-on traps that can wreck your plans at the gate.
15 Countries Where Your US Plug Fits but the Voltage Doesn't
Your US-shaped plug fits the wall in 15 countries that run on 230V. Your hair dryer expects 110V. The plug fits. The voltage cooks the device.
I Checked 21 Airline Pet Fees. The Spread Is $74 to $300.
Round-trip in-cabin pet fees range from $74 on WestJet to $300 on United and American. Same pet, same cabin, 4x price difference depending on the airline.
Building a Travel Power Adapter Tool with Claude in a Weekend
How I turned leftover destination data into a 221-country power adapter finder with plug types and voltage comparison. The first version was unusable.
I tested the 'avoid August' rule against 67 destinations
22 of 23 European cities hit peak crowd in August. But 16 destinations globally sit at low crowd. The dataset, the chart, and the cities that break the rule.
I checked carry-on rules at 75 airlines. The carry-on wasn't the trap.
Across 75 airlines, 24 don't publish personal item dimensions and the 51 that do range threefold in size. The bag you tuck under the seat is where the rules go quiet and the gate agents get strict.
Building a Layover Calculator That Knows Every Terminal at JFK
How I built a connection time calculator covering 70 airports with pairwise terminal transfers, customs buffers, and a five-factor assessment algorithm, then spent half the day fixing dark mode.
Forbes Featured the Vientapps Carry-On Tools
Forbes travel columnist Christopher Elliott featured the Vientapps carry-on size and bag fit checker tools in his Summer 2026 Digital Survival Kit. A short note on what got cited and how we source airline policy data.
I Let Claude Design My Homepage Hero and Shipped What It Built
I gave Claude Design six 'decide for me' answers and it came back with a three-layer canvas flight animation. Two concepts, one conversation, and the whole thing is live on my homepage now.
Building a Checked Bag Fee Calculator Widget That Actually Computes
How I built a framework-free fee calculator widget that computes overweight surcharges, estimates third bags, and sorts 75 airlines by total cost, all inside an iframe.
I Built a Free Embeddable Carry-On Size Widget for Travel Blogs
A free, zero-tracking carry-on size checker widget that any travel blog can embed in two lines of code. 75 airlines, auto-updating data, and full theme customization.
I Replaced /usage and /context in Claude Code With a Single Statusline
You already run /usage and /context all day. This bash statusline puts both, plus your 5h reset time and working directory, at the bottom of every Claude Code prompt as colored progress bars. Exact script inside.
I Built a Dead Simple App Because Claude Code Couldn't Hear Me
Claude Code on Bedrock doesn't expose a microphone. I type slowly. So I built an iOS app that transcribes speech and drops it straight to the clipboard.
Building the Carry-On and Personal Item Size Checkers
Two free tools that tell you whether your bag fits a given airline, built on a cited dataset of 50 carriers sourced from official policy pages, orientation-agnostic math, and a single JSON file.
I Built a Media Kit Generator Because a Creator Asked Me To
A content creator needed a media kit PDF. Every tool I found wanted a monthly subscription. So I built one that's free, no signup, and generates a polished one-pager in under 60 seconds.
I Built an API Cost Tracker and Then Couldn't Ship It
BurnRate was supposed to be a unified dashboard for Anthropic and OpenAI spend. It worked great, until I realized the keys it needed could do a lot more than just read.
I Built an SEO Scanner That Actually Checks if AI Can Find You
Lighthouse doesn't check if ChatGPT can crawl your site. So I built ShipReady, an SEO and AEO scanner that audits your site for the age of answer engines.
I Built an AI Trading Bot That Watches Trump's Truth Social Posts
Paper trading worked great. Real markets taught me that latency kills everything.
Building PackSmart: An AI Packing List Generator That Actually Checks the Weather
How I built a free AI-powered packing list tool as part of the Vientapps travel ecosystem, and what I learned about wrangling LLM output into reliable JSON.
Building SumTrails: A Daily Puzzle Game Where the Generator Was the Real Puzzle
I built a daily number-path puzzle game because I wanted one to play. Turns out, generating good puzzles is exponentially harder than solving them.
Why I Moved a Client Site Off an AI Builder and Rebuilt It From Scratch
LandingSite AI got Griffin Renovation online fast, but SEO limits and vendor lock-in pushed me to rebuild the whole thing in plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Building a Website for a 40-Year-Old Hair Salon With Zero Online Presence
A local salon in Smithfield, Utah had been cutting hair for four decades without a website. Here's how I built one from scratch with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS.
Building Roamly: AI-Powered Group Travel Planning
How I turned the frustration of planning a trip with friends into a full-stack app that uses Claude AI to find destinations everyone can actually agree on.
I Built a Pipeline to Generate YouTube Shorts Programmatically
A TypeScript CLI that takes a script and spits out a finished YouTube Short using Claude, Fal.ai, ElevenLabs, and FFmpeg — no video editor required.
I Built a WoW Addon to Automate My Portal Business
How selling mage portals for gold in WoW Classic led to writing Lua, fighting the minimap API, and learning why Trade chat is a disaster for pattern matching.
I Built a Chrome Extension That Tells Jokes (4,600 People Use It)
How a simple joke extension became a TypeScript learning project, a monetization experiment, and somehow one of the more successful things I've shipped.
I Shipped a Client Site in an Afternoon Using an AI Builder
A renovation company needed a website fast. I used LandingSite.ai to go from nothing to live in a few hours, and here's what actually worked.
I Built Smoke or Fire: A React Native Card Game (That Apple Won't Let You Have)
How a party card game became a React Native + Firebase multiplayer app, the Firebase array normalization problem that almost broke multiplayer, and why the App Store kept saying no.
Frequently Asked Questions
What topics does the Vientapps blog cover?
The blog covers build logs from shipping indie software, technical tutorials on web and mobile development, lessons learned from launching real products, and deep dives into tools and workflows for solo developers and small teams.
How often is the blog updated?
New posts are published regularly as we ship features, launch products, or discover techniques worth sharing. You can subscribe via RSS to get notified of every new post.