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// journeys
How the apps actually got built
Not case studies — the real path. The problem that started it, what I tried first, what broke, and what I changed to get it working. Longer-form write-ups than work/, one project at a time.
The journeys
journeys/
Solo build — a pumpkins.dev product
Building a Password Vault I Can't Open
The first version looked the part — a secret key, a recovery kit, an unlocking sequence — while cards sat in MongoDB as plain text. The real version derives keys and encrypts every card in the browser, so vault.pumpkins.dev couldn't read your data even if it wanted to.
Next.jsWeb Crypto APIMongoDBMongoose+3
8 min readread the journey
Solo build — for my sister
Watching NHS Jobs So My Sister Doesn't Have To
She needed to refresh the NHS Scotland jobs page every minute to catch new postings before they closed. I built a free crawler-and-notifier pipeline so she doesn't have to.
Next.jsCheerioExpress.jsMongoDB+3
7 min readread the journey
Solo build — for Webnevisan
When the OS Can't Tell You What Ports a Laptop Has
Testing every port on a laptop first meant knowing exactly which ports it had and where. System APIs couldn't answer that reliably, so I scraped the web for it, got blocked, and ended up training a vision model to read ports straight from photos.
PythonFastAPIRoboflowUltralytics YOLO+3
9 min readread the journey
Solo build — started as my own pipeline, now a pumpkins.dev product
When 2,000 Free CI Minutes Weren't Enough, I Built My Own
Between Electron builds and everything else across my projects, GitHub Actions' generous 2,000 free minutes still ran out. CID is the self-hosted, Electron-based CI/CD tool I built instead — now one of pumpkins.dev's own products.
ElectronReactssh2 (SSH/SFTP)node-cron+3
9 min readread the journey
Solo build — a tool for my own machine, now open source
Making MySQL Easy to Turn Off, So Windows Starts Faster
MySQL auto-starts as a Windows service whether or not I'm about to use it, and turning it off meant digging through services.msc every time. A native tray icon fixed both — for less overhead than the process it's replacing the hassle of stopping.
Rusttray-iconwindows-servicewindows-sys+1
6 min readread the journey
Front-end & DevOps-assistant — employee at Webnevisan, on the Aram Space platform (aramspace.com)
Forced Onto Azure, I Finally Learned Docker
Building the Aram Space frontend at Webnevisan was the fun part. Getting it running reliably on Azure — which the client required — is what actually taught me Docker, after Azure's own forced Node version kept quietly breaking the app.
Next.jsBootstrapDockerAzure Container Registry+1
8 min readread the journey
Solo build — employee at Webnevisan, on the same laptop-testing app as the port-detection work
Testing a Microphone and Two Speakers With One Spoken Phrase
Verifying a laptop's mic and speakers with no human listening or talking meant designing one test that proves both at once — a serial-number-derived phrase, spoken through one speaker channel at a time, checked by an offline, grammar-constrained speech recognizer.
ElectronWeb Audio APIsay / espeak-ngFlask+2
8 min readread the journey
Have a project in mind?
Tell me what you're building and where you're stuck. I typically reply within a day.