Founder · T-Menu
Jason Pan
Building T-Menu — a digital menu & QR-ordering platform for restaurants. Most days I'm somewhere between menu schemas, kitchen-side latency, payments edge cases, and convincing an LLM to write better dish descriptions than I can.
Stack
- Languages
- TypeScript · JavaScript · Python · PHP · Go & Rust to read, not to write
- Frameworks & infra
- Next.js · Laravel · Node · Docker · Postgres · SQLite
- Network sovereignty
- WireGuard · Tailscale · eBPF · OpenWrt — weekend habit, decade-deep
- AI workbench
- Claude Code · MCP · agent skills · MLX · Replicate
- Models on the bench
- GPT Image 2 · Qwen TTS · seed-vc · flux-kontext — try first, read the announcement later
What I reach for
- Local-first, self-host until it hurts — own the stack, not rent it.
- Small sharp tools over god-mode autonomous agents.
- Forks over rewrites — grab something running, bend it to fit.
- Native over Electron, CLI over dashboard, monospace over everything else.
- Try the new model before reading the announcement.
- Aesthetic: quiet — restraint as a feature.
Writing
- Why Most Restaurant AI Investments Fail to Deliver ROI — QSR Magazine
- How Canadian Restaurants Are Preparing for AI-Powered Ordering — Restobiz
- The Trillion-Dollar Question: Why North American Payments Are Behind Asia — LinkedIn
- Is the “Japanese Model” the Future of Small Restaurants in North America? — tmenu.ai
Off-hours
- Retro gaming — Ultima Online, handheld emulation.
- Homelab tinkering — VPN topologies, dashboards no one reads but me.
- New models the day they drop — image, voice, multimodal.
- Food, both ends — restaurant software by day, recipe rabbit holes by night.
- Bilingual reading — English tech writing + Chinese indie-dev communities.