Lab Notes · Issue #013 in your inbox soon
An email that doesn't waste your time.
Occasional notes from Max on tools I build, experiments I run, and useful things I find. No fluff, no funnels. Read in 3 minutes.
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What you'll get
Four kinds of actually-useful emails.
01
Build logs
Tools I built this month, with sources, postmortems, and the dumb mistakes I made.
02
Curated finds
Libraries, services, and odd corners of the web I think other builders should see.
03
Essays
Occasional longer pieces — money, travel, debt, the weird middle of building solo.
04
First access
New tools and side-projects land in your inbox before they hit the public lab.
Past issues · 9 sent
The archive.
#009AboutI'm Max - an independent developer. I build small SaaS products, automation, and AI tools, mostly my own. This is where I write about the work: build notes, postmortems, no hustle porn.Jun 14, 2026→#008How NotebookLM Quietly Became My Default Way to Learn StuffI've tried a lot of AI tools. Most of them are noise. NotebookLM is one of the few that actually changed how I read books, build routines, and process information — without pretending to replace my brain.May 8, 2026→#007From raw draft to a tweet in seconds: Vibe2TweetVibe2Tweet is an open-source Telegram bot that uses OpenAI to generate 3 post variants and publish your drafts to X with multi-persona prompts.Jan 22, 2026→#006I Built a Free IMDB Poster Grabber Because “View Source” Finally Broke MeI was writing a movie list post, needed lots of posters from IMDB, got tired of opening “View Source” over and over, built a tiny local tool… then turned it into a simple online utility when I found it again during a “clean my Mac” phase.Jan 11, 2026→#005Building Offgrid Diary in One Turbo-Charged Weekend48 hours from idea to live App Store build: a fully offline, AES-256-encrypted diary with an on-device LLaMA model. One weekend, one rejection, two hot-fixes, and a running Twitter play-by-play.Jul 25, 2025→#004I Made a Tiny App Because My Brain Wouldn't Shut UpA tiny app I built to stop doomscrolling and start doing... something. No tracking, no accounts — just one button and your own list of things worth doing (or pretending to).Apr 24, 2025→#003I Made a Chrome Extension That Rewards You for Doing Literally AnythingI built a Chrome extension that gives you emotional validation for doing the bare minimum. One button, one compliment, zero pressure. It won’t fix your life, but it’ll clap when you exist.Apr 16, 2025→#002From Chaos to Control: The Journey of Creating ExtenSwitch for ChromeJuggling around 30 Chrome extensions just for crypto wallets was pure chaos. To bring some order to this madness, I dove into some vibe-coding and came up with ExtenSwitch. Apr 6, 2025→#001How I Updated 2,000+ Elementor Buttons in WordPressA step-by-step guide on efficiently updating links across thousands of Elementor-built pages using the Better Search Replace plugin.Jan 26, 2025→
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