Riley Gramlich

Case study · live product

AI receptionist for small businesses

What it does

Answers a small business's phone and texts around the clock. It picks up on the first ring, asks the intake questions that trade actually needs, checks live calendar availability before offering a time so it cannot double-book, books the appointment mid-call, and texts a confirmation to the caller plus a summary to the owner.

Why it was built

A missed call is usually a missed customer, and a human receptionist in Calgary runs $2,800–$4,500 a month. This answers every call for a fraction of that, including evenings and weekends.

Tech stack

Node.js, Twilio ConversationRelay, WebSockets, Google Calendar API, Docker Compose, Caddy, SMS + WhatsApp

Technical decisions

Multi-tenant from the start, so onboarding a client is a config file and a restart rather than a rebuild. The site and the voice server are separate compose projects, so deploying the marketing site can never interrupt a live call.

What I learned

How much of a reliable phone agent is operational rather than conversational — deployment, tenancy, and never dropping a call matter more than the model.

Open source · merged upstream

God's Eye View — Open Calgary camera pack

What it does

Adds Calgary's public traffic cameras — roughly 214 of them — as a live layer on God's Eye View, an open-source 3D globe that plots real open-data feeds onto a photorealistic Earth.

Why it was built

The project already carried camera packs for other cities. Calgary publishes its catalogue through Socrata with no API key, so the layer could be added without asking every user of a global project to register for a key.

Tech stack

JavaScript, Vite, Socrata open-data API, Node server providers

Technical decisions

Keyless data sources only, so the feature costs downstream users nothing. The catalogue fetch is bounded and pinned, the response released on every refusal path, and cameras are labelled by intersection rather than by opaque ID.

What I learned

How to contribute to a genuinely fast-moving upstream. 214 commits landed in a single working day, including a restructure that moved the entire dev server out of the Vite config — so the branch had to be re-ported onto a new architecture, not simply rebased.

Submitted as #438, which the maintainer superseded with #514 — rebased onto the current component layout with review fixes, merged with co-author credit.

Case study

InternshipRadar

What it does

An AI-assisted internship discovery and application tracker with relevance scoring, alerts, and a status dashboard.

Why it was built

Built to centralize scattered internship postings and reduce the manual effort of tracking applications.

Tech stack

Next.js, Node.js, Supabase (PostgreSQL), n8n, Discord Webhooks

Technical decisions

Used a layered MVC approach with event-driven workflows to keep scraping, scoring, and notifications asynchronous.

What I learned

How to balance real-time discovery with a clean UI and keep job data deduplicated and searchable.

Team project · Atari ST

Geometry Dash for the Atari ST

What it does

A side-scrolling Geometry Dash clone that runs on Atari ST hardware: a square called Geo auto-scrolls through a course of spikes, blocks and lava, and the player controls nothing but the jump.

Why it was built

The term project for COMP 2659 at Mount Royal University — systems-level graphics and audio with no operating system, no engine, and no libraries underneath you.

Tech stack

C, Motorola 68000 assembly, Make, YM2149 PSG audio, STEEM emulator

My contributions

A four-person team; my eight commits covered the raster library cleanup and its tests, triangle rasterisation in all directions, the block sprite styling, the PSG music engine and three songs written for it, and replacing physbase/setscreen with direct control of the video base.

What I learned

What it feels like to write pixels straight into a framebuffer and compose music for a three-channel square-wave chip, with no abstraction to hide behind.

Case study

BlockTime

What it does

A scheduling and workload planner that turns scattered school tasks into a single weekly planning flow.

Why it was built

Built to make assignment planning less chaotic and keep deadlines visible at a glance.

Tech stack

React, JavaScript, GitHub Pages

Technical decisions

Kept the data model small and focused the UI on weekly planning over feature depth.

What I learned

How small UI changes improve planning behavior and how to keep state updates fast.

Case study

Scribist

What it does

A MERN writing platform with a distraction-free editor, live collaborative documents, and a "Berserk mode" that starts deleting your words if you stop typing.

Why it was built

Built to support focused writing sessions while still enabling collaboration.

Tech stack

React, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, Socket.IO

Technical decisions

Kept the editor surface central and separated content state from layout state.

What I learned

Tradeoffs between collaboration features and keeping performance predictable.

Case study

Glossa Galore

What it does

A language-learning web app that builds vocabulary through flashcards, with a feed where learners post using the words they just picked up.

Why it was built

Built to make consistent practice easier by giving learners a lightweight community layer.

Tech stack

Node.js, Express, EJS, MongoDB, DeepL API

Technical decisions

Used a simple content structure so the social layer stayed clear instead of noisy.

What I learned

How to balance social features with a focused learning path.

Case study

Tommy Games — ten games in a browser

What it does

A shelf of ten classic card and board games — Wizard, Quiddler, Euchre, Cribbage, Sequence, Backgammon, Coup, Mastermind, Reversi and Yahtzee — each playable solo against bots, pass-and-play on one device, or online with friends.

Why it was built

The games people actually play around a table are mostly missing from the browser, or buried under accounts and adverts.

Tech stack

Svelte, JavaScript, WebSockets, Node.js

Technical decisions

Phone-first throughout: no horizontal scrolling at 360px, boards sized in viewport units, 40px tap targets, and overlays that behave like native sheets. Rules engines, a solver and a full online game are covered by tests, because ten rule sets are ten chances to be subtly wrong.

What I learned

Encoding ten different rule sets cleanly enough that one shared engine can drive bots, local play and networked play without forking per game.

Case study · developer tool

Vault Gate — Obsidian plugin for AI assistants

What it does

Lets an AI assistant read, search and write notes in an Obsidian vault without anything leaving the machine. Ask it what you wrote last week, search every note for a topic, or have it save something back.

Why it was built

Connecting an assistant to a vault previously meant a terminal, a Node install and a vault path in a config file — enough friction that most people never did it.

Tech stack

TypeScript, Obsidian Plugin API, Model Context Protocol

Technical decisions

The server runs inside Obsidian itself, so setup is enabling a plugin and clicking Connect. Reading and search are on by default and writing is off, so the cautious setting is the one you get without choosing it.

What I learned

Designing permissions people will actually leave switched on — the default has to be the safe one, not the convenient one.

Case study

Contraction Counter

What it does

Times contractions during labour, recording each one's length and the gap since the last so the pattern is readable at a glance.

Why it was built

The moment you need this is the worst possible moment to be fighting an interface.

Tech stack

React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Firebase

Technical decisions

Mobile-first and backed by Firebase, so a session survives a closed tab or a swap to a partner's phone rather than living only in local state.

What I learned

Designing for one-handed use under stress, where every extra tap is a real cost.