About

A note from the maker

I'm Michael Shear. By day, I'm the Chief U.K. Correspondent for The New York Times, based in London. Building apps isn't part of that day job — it's something I do on the side, usually because I've run into a small annoyance and decided to fix it myself.

RTL: Research Sync was my first app, born from constantly losing track of articles I meant to get back to. Contact Snap came next, after I got tired of losing business cards before I could enter them into my contacts. WSOP 2026 came third — a poker tournament calendar I built before heading to Las Vegas for the summer series.

I'm not a professional developer — I build these with the help of Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. They're free, built mostly for myself, and I hope they're useful to a few other people too. If you spot a bug or have a small idea, my email is at the bottom of the page.