Zaotai is a POS system I made for a Sichuan restaurant. From August to early October, 8 or 9 hired staff used it regularly.
On October 20, someone planning to open an ice cream shop paid me for a custom version. They are not related to me.
For about 10 months, up to September, I worked at that restaurant. My parents own it with some partners. I carried dishes and cleaned tables. I first used Claude Code on June 23, 2026. Coding agents write the code. I decide what to build and what not to add.
In March, I mixed up 2 tables’ fish roe on a busy night. At peak hours, staff kept shouting which dish went where. Why couldn’t the system remember it?
Zaotai came from the first real problem I found. It won’t be the last.
I asked the restaurant’s 8 or 9 hired front-of-house staff, not family, and they said I can share these quotes.
“Serving dishes is easier. I can mark dishes as served on my phone.”
「我现在传菜更方便，手机上就可以划菜了」
“What Taotao made is so useful! We don’t have to shout to the kitchen when guests change tables!” (Taotao was my nickname.)
「涛涛写的这个好用哇！再也不用天天费劲叫传菜口注意转台了！」
“Taking orders is easier too. It has its own pinyin keyboard so I can add dishes fast.”
「点菜更方便了，用自带的键盘和拼音就可以很快点上」
“The queue is easier to manage too!”
「排队的效率也更高了！」
“When the kitchen runs out of something, we can mark it right away. We don’t have to tell everyone one by one.”
「后厨一反馈暂时没货就可以立刻更新菜品状态，不需要一个一个提醒没菜了」
stove prints kitchen tickets and manages a numbered order queue. I took this code from Zaotai.
Dayside is a world clock for the Mac menu bar. Each city gets its own row, colored to match the sky there at that moment. Version 1.0.1 is notarized, supports 16 languages, and has no network-access entitlement in its release build.
When I was a kid, I took piano and singing lessons for 5 years. In 2016, I passed Grade 6 piano exam and Grade 7 juvenile singing exam. Both were from the China Conservatory of Music, and Grade 10 is the highest for both.
I stopped playing piano and singing when I started middle school. But I still like listening to piano and ambient electronic music. I also really like Ryuichi Sakamoto. One of my favourite pieces is “Tong Poo”, especially the piano version in Opus. It’s a film of his last piano performance.
Around 2024, I made some songs with Suno. I also used to write stories and poems in Chinese, but I’ve lost most of them.
When I decided to make Zaotai, I had just started reading a beginner’s book about Qian Xuesen’s ideas on systems engineering. It gave me some good ideas.
I chose the name Ninon because it sounds French and soft to me.