The Story Behind HandyPebble

A view from the 30th floor in Wuhan, China.
I took this photo looking down at the roads below — one of those ordinary city moments that makes you stop for a second and notice how much is moving at once.
HandyPebble was built in the same country, in a much quieter room, one small tool at a time.

_________________________________________________

HandyPebble began with a simple feeling: the web had become too complicated for a lot of ordinary tasks.

Too many tools ask you to create an account before you can do anything. Too many simple jobs are buried under dashboards, subscriptions, pop-ups, onboarding screens, and features you never asked for.

Sometimes you just want to solve one problem and move on with your day.

That is the kind of software I wanted to make.

I used to work as a visual designer at an internet company in China. Later, I returned to my hometown, opened a small children's art school, and became an art teacher. For many years, I stopped thinking of myself as someone who built products for the web.

Then, during a long summer in 2026, I found myself spending more time at home and feeling that I needed to make something again.

I did not begin with a startup plan.

There was no pitch deck, no growth strategy, no idea of building hundreds of pages.

I simply opened my computer and started.

The first few tools were small. Very small.

But projects have a strange way of changing once they begin. One finished tool suggested another. A small design problem became a product idea. A frustrating everyday task became something I thought could be made easier.

Soon, HandyPebble started growing faster than I had expected.

The name came from the same idea.

“Handy” because the tools should be useful and easy to reach for.

“Pebble” because not every useful thing has to be large.

A pebble is small, ordinary, and easy to overlook. But sometimes a small object is exactly what you need.

That became part of the philosophy behind the site.

I am not trying to build software that impresses people with complexity.

I am trying to build software that disappears into the task.

A good tool should not make you study it first.

You should understand what it does almost immediately. You should be able to use it without creating an account. You should not have to hand over personal information just to resize an image, calculate a cost, make a printable sign, or finish a small piece of work.

The interface can be simple.

The work behind it does not have to be.

As HandyPebble grew, I became less interested in making “tiny tools” and more interested in building small web applications that are carefully thought through.

Some of them may look light from the outside: a few fields, a preview, a button, a result.

Behind that simplicity can be a lot of code, testing, layout decisions, edge cases, mobile behavior, print handling, export logic, and repeated revision.

I like that kind of product.

Something that feels easy because somebody took the difficult parts seriously.

AI has also changed what is possible for a person like me.

I use ChatGPT and other AI tools as part of my development process. They help me write code, explore problems, test ideas, and move faster.

But I do not think of AI as the person making HandyPebble.

It is a multiplier.

The choices are still mine.

What should exist.

What should not exist.

How many steps are too many.

Whether an interface feels clear.

Whether a feature is genuinely useful or simply makes the page look more impressive.

Whether something is good enough to keep.

My background in design still matters. Teaching art still matters. Years of watching people learn, hesitate, misunderstand instructions, and gradually become comfortable with something still matters.

All of that finds its way into the way I build.

HandyPebble is still young.

Some parts are better than others. Some tools will be rebuilt. Some ideas will disappear. The structure will continue to change.

I am learning as I go.

But there are a few things I want to keep constant.

I want the site to respect people's time.

I want useful features to matter more than impressive-looking features.

I want privacy to be the default whenever a task can stay in the browser.

I want the tools to feel calm rather than demanding.

And I want HandyPebble to become the kind of website people remember because it helped them finish something without getting in the way.

There is no large company behind this site.

No department deciding what to build next.

No team of dozens of developers.

For now, it is one person in China, sitting in front of a computer, building and improving one thing at a time.

I do not know exactly what HandyPebble will become.

That uncertainty is part of what makes it interesting.

I only know that after many years away from web development, I started building again.

And once I started, I found that I did not want to stop.