Building vaultctl: the password vault where my own server can't read your passwords
A self-hosted, zero-knowledge password vault. One Go binary, three clients, one constraint that quietly shaped every other decision in the codebase.
The Shopware plugin that grew into a library
Started as a small Shopware 6 plugin for Germany's XRechnung 3.0 e-invoice format. Ended as a PHP monorepo with a framework-agnostic core, four adapters, and four CMS plugins. Nobody asked. I built it anyway.
The 20,000-line PR that was actually 47 lines: building ClearPR
How one 20,000-line Prettier PR pushed me to build ClearPR, a self-hosted GitHub App that strips formatting noise, reviews against your own rules, and remembers past feedback.
The sed that didn't stick
A failing nightly backup, a sed hotfix that worked once, and the next morning's cron that failed anyway. Node's require cache had eaten my patch.
The day I realised I had never tested a production backup
I had been running test-backup drills for months and felt covered. But I had never pulled a real production snapshot into a lab and restored it. The afternoon I finally did is the story behind this post.
Building docling-server: a one-command document API for our AI pipeline
Why I wrapped docling into a full Docker Compose setup with FastAPI, Celery, and nginx — so our AI project could stop worrying about messy PDFs, Word files, and scanned junk, and just get clean markdown back.
Building mcp-pool: one week, eleven MCP servers, one shared OAuth library
How a single Stripe MCP server turned into a monorepo of eleven, and why half the engineering effort went into not writing the same OAuth flow six times.
A short history of the CLI I built to stop curling IP APIs
It was supposed to be a weekend CLI. Then the name got stolen, the providers started disagreeing with each other, the rate limits hit back, and somewhere along the way the simple tool grew its own self-hosted backend.
My family thinks WhatsApp can send anything. So I wrote a Python CLI.
A 2005 wedding video, an 8 GB .VOB file, a family WhatsApp group with unreasonable faith, a small privacy grudge against Google, and the weekend Python CLI that came out of it.
jquery.verticalScroll.js: a love letter to jQuery, written ten years later
I saw Apple's iPhone page in 2016, thought 'I can build that in jQuery,' and somehow I'm still maintaining it in 2026. Zero stars. Zero regrets.
dfree: stop digging with your hands, you've got an axe now
A short story about running out of server space because of academy videos, and the shell tool I wrote so I'd never hear 'Vineeth, we can't upload anymore' again.
Building agent-sessions: a universal session manager for the AI CLI era
Five AI coding agents, five incompatible session formats, one terminal UI to browse them all — and the reverse-engineering it took to get there.
diskdoc and dockit: same problem, two languages, different answers
I built two disk cleanup CLIs — one in Rust with a TUI, one in Go with risk scoring. Here's what each language and design taught me that the other couldn't.
Building backupctl: what it took to replace a cron job with a backup service
How a cron-and-restic setup outgrew itself, and the NestJS backup service I built to replace it — with two war stories I didn't see coming.