Blog

Notes from the side projects: charts, chat assistants, and the lessons in between.

2026

  1. Sep 063 min read

    One cobalt line on the roof

    A design brief in one photograph, applied to an admin as a system: the roofline, one black primary per view, and screenshots as the only verification that counts.

  2. Sep 064 min read

    Three small things that make a cafe bot feel finished

    Tappable contact details, a glossary under the analytics bars, and staff logins that see only their own tenant.

  3. Sep 063 min read

    Ten minutes a week

    The owner's loop: the Unanswered report, the answer-cache inspector, Slack pings and retention, as a habit rather than a feature list.

  4. Sep 063 min read

    A second kind of tenant

    Why a chess coach could not run on a platform that refuses everything but the business, and the one-column change that was the right size.

  5. Sep 064 min read

    The baiting weekend

    What strangers tried on a cafe bot, the two places it bent, and why the real fix was making refusals visible.

  6. Sep 022 min read

    Teach the bot from a PDF, without burning tokens

    michi-chat can now turn a PDF into knowledge-base facts. The analysis is free, the mechanical junk is stripped deterministically, and you see what the AI clean-up would cost before a single token is spent.

  7. Aug 315 min read

    How michi-chat works

    The journey of one question through michi-chat: guardrails, the semantic cache, the tool loop, and why a LiteLLM proxy makes the AI model a config edit instead of a rewrite.

  8. Aug 304 min read

    Introducing michi-chat

    A small self-hostable chat assistant platform for small businesses: multi-tenant, grounded in tools and RAG, and built to never invent a fact. The first tenant is Mugshot Artisan Cafe of mugshotmnl.com.

  9. Aug 263 min read

    michi-vz chart by chart: sankey and the fountain

    Part 9 of 9 in the chart-by-chart series. The finale: flows whose thickness is the accounting, and the Jet d'Eau signature chart. All 22 charts, toured.

  10. Aug 264 min read

    michi-vz chart by chart: the maps

    Part 8 of 9 in the chart-by-chart series. Choropleth and symbol map: bring your own GeoJSON, shade by threshold scale or plot de-overlapped circles at real coordinates.

  11. Aug 263 min read

    michi-vz chart by chart: tornado and bar-bell

    Part 7 of 9 in the chart-by-chart series. Two bar specialties: opposing values on a shared centre line, and cumulative segments with end-caps.

  12. Aug 264 min read

    michi-vz chart by chart: gap and comparable bars

    Part 6 of 9 in the chart-by-chart series. Before-and-after three ways: endpoint gaps, overlaid horizontal bars, and diverging columns with change arrows.

  13. Aug 264 min read

    michi-vz chart by chart: gauge, radar and radial tree

    Part 5 of 9 in the chart-by-chart series. The round ones: progress rings, criteria polygons, and a radial dendrogram with adaptive labels.

  14. Aug 263 min read

    michi-vz chart by chart: scatter and bubble

    Part 4 of 9 in the chart-by-chart series. Correlation clouds with a third variable as size, and gravity-packed bubbles when size is the whole story.

  15. Aug 263 min read

    michi-vz chart by chart: pie, donut and treemap

    Part 3 of 9 in the chart-by-chart series. Part-of-whole snapshots: wedges for a handful of categories, tiles for many, and a realized-vs-untapped split.

  16. Aug 264 min read

    michi-vz chart by chart: area, stack bar and ribbon

    Part 2 of 9 in the chart-by-chart series. Composition over time three ways: smooth stacks, discrete bars, and ribbons that follow a category as it trades places.

  17. Aug 265 min read

    michi-vz chart by chart: line, range and fan

    Part 1 of 9 in the chart-by-chart series. Time series with honest uncertainty: solid history, shaded spreads, and forecasts that admit they are forecasts. Live examples included.

  18. Aug 263 min read

    Introducing @michi-vz: charts that survive a stack change

    One TypeScript engine, 22 chart types, and the same charts in React, Vue, Svelte, Angular or plain web components. Why I built michi-vz and how to get your first chart on screen.