meet tofu 🐶 - a pixel corgi that lives on my shipped work, dies on my laziness, and can haunt me forever (probably). built under 48 hours. go visit while he's alive: https://tofu-hark.zocomputer.io/

tofu is a personal website with consequences.

pixel-art corgi. health bar wired to github and linear. every hour of silence drains him, live, in front of anyone watching. as health drops the scene shifts cooler and dimmer.

below 20%, any visitor clicks "generate shame." zo's llm writes a meme using my exact idle hours and last commit. memegen renders it. posts to discord. my phone buzzes.

when he hits zero: eulogy, tombstone on /graveyard. 50 flowers from strangers and he comes back from an egg.

tofu talks to visitors continuously - zo llm reads his health, idle time, the hour, whether you've been before. at 3am: "it's 3am and we're both still here."

zo-native: zo llm (minimax 2.7) · zo native database · zo sms connected: github · linear · letterboxd + tmdb · memegen api 48 hours. 14 animation states. 3 live environments.

the creative vision:

most personal websites are finished before you visit. i wanted one that changes based on whether i'm working.

two worlds on purpose: the main site is a game hud - 8-bit pixel art, press start 2p, 14 animation states. the graveyard is victorian - playfair epitaphs, collective resurrection. deliberately different planets.

the shame mechanic works because it's specific, not clever. zo llm knows my exact idle hours and last ticket. generic shame bounces off. specific shame doesn't.

zo native throughout - llm, database, sms. this is what personal computing looks like when the infrastructure gets out of the way. :: :: ::

This is the first personal website I've actually bookmarked to check on!

Problem Statement SaaS applications need real-time notification systems, but building one correctly is deceptively complex. Polling is unreliable, SSE is one-directional, and most teams bolt on a third-party widget rather than engineering the connection lifecycle, auth, preferences, and delivery guarantees properly from scratch.

Solution & Approach Built a production-grade WebSocket notification system using Socket.io with per-user rooms authenticated at the handshake level via JWT. The backend is a Node.js + Express + Prisma monorepo connected to NeonDB (serverless Postgres). Notifications are grouped by date, filterable by type (Mentions, Comments, Team Activity, System Alerts, Assignments), and preferences are persisted per-user per-category. A built-in simulator fires live demo events so reviewers can experience real-time delivery without any setup. Deployed on Google Cloud Run (backend) and Vercel (frontend).

Key Highlights WebSocket rooms authenticated at handshake via JWT — no unauthenticated connections possible 7-filter notification center: All, Unread, Mention, Comment, Team, System, Assignment Per-user per-category preferences with live inApp and email toggles Built-in notification simulator for live demo without reviewer setup Auto-reconnect with exponential backoff on network drop

Try the live app : https://stackly-real-time-notification-syst.vercel.app/