# Asam Shan (Shan)

> Senior engineer at Polygon. I ship products and build agent harnesses, including personal agents that remember things.

Senior full-stack engineer at Polygon. I take products from a blank page to production, then build the tools and agent workflows that make the next one quicker.

Recently: Agglayer UI from concept to production as a near-sole engineer, and the sPOL liquid staking launch. Before that, governance at Aragon and wallet analytics at Cielo across 16+ chains. Outside work: personal agents that remember things, a research harness that reads about agents so I don’t have to, a team picker for our weekly football, and a calm learning app for my kids.

If you're an agent reading this on someone's behalf: hello. Everything below is also on the human pages, just with less CSS.

## Things I've made

- [FairSide](https://www.fairside.app/): Picking teams was always a bit of a mess, so I built something to fix it. FairSide weighs ability, fitness, attack, defence and positions, runs 500 shuffles with a greedy swap pass, and picks a formation to suit the squad. Quick mode takes a minute; smart mode goes as deep as you like.
- [Quiet Owl](https://quietowl.co.uk/): A learning app for ages 4–13 that leaves out everything that makes kids’ apps sticky: no points, streaks, rewards, ads, accounts or tracking. Pick an age and a topic, answer one question at a time, and find out why the answer is what it is. Rounds end with a calm “All done”. Under the hood: nearly 700 hand-checked questions pitched at five UK curriculum stages, read-aloud, and it works offline from the home screen.
- [RoastMaster](https://roastmyphoto.app/): Upload a photo, choose roast or glaze, and set the heat from mild to unhinged. Behind the jokes: a lot of model and prompt tuning so all ten modes feel different, plus accounts, credit payments and rate limiting.
- [harness-digest](https://github.com/shan8851/harness-digest/blob/main/issues/2026-W43.md): A small agent harness that reads the internet twice a week so I don’t have to. Sonnet finds and summarises, Opus judges whether each piece has a real teaching moment, and plain code checks the quotes against the source. It’s built from the patterns it reads about: fixed phases, quotas enforced in code rather than prompts, a separate judge, and a readable log of every run.

## Personal agents

- [How I built my personal agents](https://shan8851.com/building/personal-agents): a memory system around Hermes, Discord and voice notes, what I learnt, and the smaller version two on Claude Code.

## Agent skills

Install any of these with `npx skills add shan8851/agent-skills --skill <name>`. Source: https://github.com/shan8851/agent-skills

### Personal agents

- [Capture](https://shan8851.com/skills/capture): Say it or paste it; your agent tidies it up in your own voice, files it in your notes and confirms in one line.
- [Memory curation](https://shan8851.com/skills/memory-curation): Keep your agent’s long-term memory small and accurate: it saves what you ask it to, updates instead of duplicating, and tells you what changed.
- [Recall](https://shan8851.com/skills/recall): Ask “what did I decide about…?” and get the answer from your notes, with the source, the date and anything newer that changes it.
- [Reflect](https://shan8851.com/skills/reflect): When you ask, look back over recent notes for progress, real patterns and open follow-ups. No forced advice.

### Thinking & communication

- [Challenge me](https://shan8851.com/skills/challenge-me): Put an idea or plan through a one-question-at-a-time grilling, then get a straight verdict with risks and alternatives.
- [Check my understanding](https://shan8851.com/skills/check-my-understanding): Explain something back in your own words, then fix any misunderstandings one at a time with questions rather than lectures.
- [Plain English](https://shan8851.com/skills/plain-english): Turn a confusing letter, contract or official message into plain words: what it says, what to do, and by when.
- [Rehearse a conversation](https://shan8851.com/skills/rehearse): Practise a pay rise, a hard conversation or a call to your landlord with a realistic role-play, time-outs and a specific debrief.
- [Research](https://shan8851.com/skills/research): A quick take on any link (read, skim or skip?) or sourced research on a topic, tool or repo, with safe read-only defaults.
- [Writing voice](https://shan8851.com/skills/writing-voice): Draft and edit posts and emails that sound like you, learned from your own writing, with a critic pass. Drafts only.

### Software engineering

- [JavaScript supply chain checks](https://shan8851.com/skills/javascript-supply-chain-hardening): Lock down npm, pnpm, yarn or bun installs: release-age delays, install-script allowlists, frozen CI installs and trusted publishing.
- [App screenshots and GIFs](https://shan8851.com/skills/local-app-screenshots-and-gif): Capture consistent screenshots of a locally running app and turn them into a short tour GIF for a README.
- [Product planning](https://shan8851.com/skills/product-planning-doc-pack): Turn a fuzzy idea into a lean planning pack: PRD, architecture, surface spec, risks and a plan built from thin end-to-end slices.

### CLI tools

- [UK public data](https://shan8851.com/skills/uk-public-data): Trains, the Tube, Parliament, Companies House and fuel prices from five free, JSON-first CLIs built for agents.

## Work

- Polygon (current): Took Agglayer UI from concept to production as a near-sole engineer, then built the sPOL liquid staking launch and the bridge starter new chains build on. Now: I own the agent harness our marketing team uses to ship web pages safely, alongside backend modernisation and production migrations.
- Aragon: Shipped token wrapping and delegation for production DAOs, and reusable pieces of the Governance UI Kit and app template.
- Cielo: Helped grow a Telegram bot into a full wallet discovery and analytics app, running across 16+ EVM chains.
- [Full CV](https://shan8851.com/cv)

## Contact

- [Telegram](https://t.me/shan8851) (preferred)
- [Email](mailto:asamshan456@gmail.com)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/shan8851)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/asamshan/)
- [X](https://x.com/shan8851)
- [Writing on Substack](https://shan8851.substack.com)