Today’s the day: I finally launched maiko.cafe on February 9, 2026!
This started back in November as a personal project with a simple goal: I wanted to build something for myself. It felt like a good idea at the time because of everything that has happened in 2025, I figured it would at least keep me busy and productive.
As someone that has only worked in start-up companies their entire career, this was so different to me – no boss, no client, no deadline, no stakeholders. It was really just me messing around with things, failing constantly, and then eventually learning. Now repeat that over and over again. I initially just wanted to create a simple WordPress blog so I could post things in a longer, better format while being able to use tags to organize and I had that completed pretty early.
Then for some reason I just kept going.
I was having too much fun as I was reminded of my origins with computers, the Internet, and coding that I share in common with many around my age: Neopets (though for some maybe it was GaiaOnline, or MySpace).
If you know, you know. Your first user lookup layout. Your first time copying HTML from someone else’s petpage and changing the colors until it looked “yours.” Your first encounter with CSS and not knowing what the heck any of it meant but feeling like a hacker when the background changed. It was SO cool. Neopets was a lot of people’s first introduction to code, and it was mine too.
So when I was basically done, I thought why not make something that feels like that but hidden away like a little easter egg. A theme toggle in the menu that you might not even notice at first, but if you find it, suddenly it looks like you time traveled back to the early or mid 2000’s.
I figured it would be a fun extra little feature.
But then I had the fun idea of adding music all music box covers of songs that I personally love (check FAQ for the links). If you recognized any of them or if they made you feel something, please tell me because that would make my day! I then added a hit counter, a text banner marquee, trailing stars, a guestbook, and even a userbar generator after realizing I still had the muscle memory from nearly 20 years ago.
At some point I also realized I liked the nostalgia version much more than the original.
It brought back everything. The forums. Spending my entire day in Photoshop as a teenager making signatures and banners for people and sites. Also while probably listening to those same exact songs.
I hope it brings back something similar for you, or at the very least makes you smile. I think I put about as much of myself into it as I possibly could.
Also a little shoutout to the guild I joined on Neopets when I was somewhat active again, so to the three A’s (four if you count the guild name too): thank you for accepting me, not kicking me despite my horrible sprees of inactivity, for always having the most amazing layouts, and for just being awesome always!!!
The Tools
I’m someone who will happily spend hours or even days to create something that saves me a few seconds. To automate the installation of an app on hundreds of Android tablets because I really didn’t want to do it manually, I researched and eventually created a script using Android Debug Bridge and begged my manager through a written proposal and step-by-step guide until it was adopted and implemented. So I’m aware it’s a problem but at this point, probably also a passion or part of my personality now.
The Collab Planner came out of that. I spend most of my day on Discord coordinating across time zones, and I thought surely there has to be a better way, after all I had used something similar for university group projects before? You can input everybody’s time zone and availability window(s) and it will provide overlapping “available” starting times as well as Discord timestamps for you to use! (The Discord timestamps will show the user’s local time, for that specific time and date)
→ Try it here
The Invoice Generator is a thing because I sometimes need a simple invoice. That’s it. I set some rate limits (I hope they work..) for 3 downloads per person, every 24 hours but I’m open to changing that if absolutely needed. None of your information will ever be stored so with that same logic, please note that I cannot retrieve anything at all for you. Use at your own discretion and please refer to the disclaimer notes (as with any of these honestly).
→ Try it here
The Creative Recommendations are there because I’m often asked if I know someone that can work on this or that for their project. So I figured why not just create a page listing some (emphasis on some, not all) of the people I’ve worked with before in the past already and would typically refer over anyways. I’ll try to keep this updated when I can.
→ Check the list here
What’s Next (kind of?)
I could (and probably will at some point) go on the biggest rant about how my worst nightmare is overpromising and underdelivering. So I’m not going to list out a roadmap or make announcements for things that don’t exist yet because who knows!
Instead I want you to just treat anything that shows up as fun surprises. Kind of like the theme toggle hopefully was. Maybe I’ll even go through all of the decision I made with the overall design and user experience, including the iterations that never made it through.
I will say: aside from my day-to-day managing and advising work, I’ve got some larger projects in the works. I’m not sure yet if I’ll post updates or spoilers here, but I may need some early-access testers for feedback at some point. If that (or any of this really) sounds interesting to you, subscribe to the newsletter so I can reach you when the time comes.
This shouldn’t be a surprise if you’re reading this far already but please do not expect proper grammar or good writing by any means. I guarantee you only disappointment with those expectations set so this is me resetting them to save you from that later on.
“One More Thing”
If anything on this site helps you (whether it’s a tool, a template, a blog post, or even just the vibes) then that’s more than enough for me. If something’s broken, tell me. If you have a topic request or an idea that would helpful, tell me. I ended up simplifying some things but I can always add options back if they’d actually be useful. And if something works and it helps, tell me that too or share it with someone who could use it!
More stuff soon (probably). Thanks for being here and existing.
maiko
P.S. Please try the theme toggle ☆ and let me know how many of the music box songs you know! and if u cried, same…
Nice :3