Issue No. 01 Alicante, Spain

The Studio Times

AI, Software and WebMade with love by Malcolm Daleus

AI, Software and Web

Malcolm Daleus Real-life solutions built with software

If you need it, I build it. In an ever-changing world, I build the software that helps you stay ahead. I believe that solutions should be handmade for the situations we live in.

Malcolm Daleus standing against a dark grey wall in a patterned shirt, smiling
The guy behind the screen
Toolbox
  • PHP
  • Laravel
  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • React
  • SQL
  • WordPress
  • n8n
  • Playwright
  • Pinecone
  • Automation
  • Multi-agent systems
  • PHP
  • Laravel
  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • React
  • SQL
  • WordPress
  • n8n
  • Playwright
  • Pinecone
  • Automation
  • Multi-agent systems

No. 01Personal finance

Balancer

Keep track of your spending

Balancer on a desktop: statistics, budget, balance sheet, past months, ledger, and standing in one bento grid
Fig. 1a Desktop

Watching your spending and keeping track of monthly expenses is a chore all by itself. Trying to navigate complicated budgeting apps is even worse. Balancer becomes the glue holding your financial life together. Record the repeating amounts once, add your daily expenses in a few taps, and Balancer does the hard math for you, then lets you see everything in a clean UI.

Role
Full-stack web development, software, design
When
2025 — Present
Built with
Laravel 12, PHP, React, TypeScript, Inertia, Tailwind, MySQL

Five domains, one rollover

Income, debt, purchases, recurring charges, and savings add up to a single number for the month. That number is the whole point of opening the app.

A simple ledger

After each purchase, all you do is write what it was, how much it cost, and how you'd categorize it. Your morning coffee, this week's groceries, and that new t-shirt get filed away and wrapped into this month's story.

Non-opinionated budgeting

Balancer doesn't judge you for how much you spend or why. It lets you see for yourself and make decisions based on what YOU want to do.

Honesty is the best policy

Balancer works on a monthly cycle, locking in the final totals. Each month builds your long-running statistics and history. Within the same month you see your real-time changes, and over time you see the general habits.

Keeping track of your finances doesn't have to involve spreadsheets or wondering where all the money went.

Balancer balance sheet: income, debt, purchases, recurring charges, and savings for October, with the month's rollover at the bottom
Fig. 1b Balance sheet

No. 02News reader

Briefly

News from anywhere or everywhere, just for you

Briefly feed: one news story on screen with photo, source, excerpt, and a link to the original
Fig. 2a Feed

Staying up to date with even the local news can be a hassle. Choosing the sources, finding out they have paywalls, or wondering who is reporting what: it sucks the motivation to stay informed right out of you. Briefly compiles several sources in one app and puts them in a more familiar, feed-like format. Scroll as much as you like, and see what everyone is reporting, everywhere. Briefly lets you browse at your leisure, save especially exciting articles, pre-check websites for pesky paywalls, and add your own favorite news sources so they can be part of the mix. Once you click, it takes you straight to the article, as if you had found it yourself.

Role
Full-stack web development, software, design
When
2026 — Present
Built with
PHP, SQLite, RSS / Atom

Staying up to date doesn't have to be a chore. Briefly makes it easy to see what's happening, and to save and read the articles that interest you.

One article at a time

Overwhelmed by billions of headlines all at once? Your feed shows you one article at a time, like some of our favorite social apps. Doomscrolling can finally be productive.

Content diversity right out of the box

The algorithm makes sure you don't see everyone reporting the exact same thing over and over. Mixing filters lets you see articles that match what you're looking for in the moment, while still keeping a diverse set of sources.

Saving and personalizing your feed

Save articles with notes so you can read them later. Maybe something catches your eye and you don't have a chance to look at it right then. You can always go back. You can also keep a list of the articles that appeared in your feed, in case you swiped past an interesting one and changed your mind.

Add your own sources

Admittedly, this project came out of a need I saw in my own life. I left it open so you can add your own sources and publishers, and not just rely on the ones I like. You can enable and disable sources as you see fit.

No. 03Daily value creation

My contributions to the tech world

Outside of my projects, a lot of my work is providing value to clients and optimizing systems so they work for us, instead of us for them. That includes classic web development, automation, agent-leveraged workflows, and anything else I can get my hands on.

  1. 5 min

    Down from five or six hours

    An audit with a crew of agents

    Separate passes over technical health, visual design, SEO, content, and conversion, then one report a business can act on. Playwright takes a bird's-eye view of the website and passes the data along to my agents. n8n moves that data so every agent gets what it needs to write its report.

  2. 90 min

    Down from forty-plus hours

    Leads that arrive already scored

    Research, enrichment, and a score against the business's own criteria. One run lands about two hundred leads in a shape you can export.

  3. RAG

    Questions in, records out

    An assistant on top of the ERP

    A plain-language question is routed to a safe query or a function the ERP already exposes. Pinecone handles retrieval. The agent stays inside the allowed bounds, with hard fences around sensitive data. The result is countless hours of searching and compiling, no longer done by hand.

  4. 14k

    Products from a screen with no export

    A catalog walked, click by click

    Playwright stepping through dynamic product selections and writing them down: about sixteen hours instead of an estimated hundred and twenty.

  5. ½

    The time to a first layout

    A mockup that becomes blocks

    A WordPress plugin that reads a design and lays down a Kadence foundation, so the first pass is a structure a person can edit and build off of.

No. 04About

American-made, globally oriented

Headshot of Malcolm Daleus, smiling, against a dark grey wall

My story is simple or complicated, depending on how you look at it. I was born in NYC and grew up there and in New Jersey. I grew up with countless interests: science, music, coding, sports, you name it. Programming caught my attention as early as 14, and from there a beautiful bond formed. I spent my free time playing around with websites, making simple JavaScript games in the browser, and learning about the huge world of tech in front of me. In 2022, I moved to Alicante with my parents, hoping for a new start in a new place. I got a more formal background in web development through an FP in web development at I.G. Formación, and some courses in software design at UCAM. From there, I began building and building. With the arrival of AI, I maximized my output as much as I could and learned how to really use this new superpower we have today. I don't know what the tech world will offer tomorrow, but I know I'll be first in line to see it.

No. 05Letters to the editor

Let's talk business

Tell me about your projects, new opportunities to build, or if you're interested in my work.

mdaleus21@gmail.com

Location
Alicante, Spain
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/malcolm-daleus
GitHub
github.com/MalcolmDaleus