A Bash debugger with no ptrace. An x86-64 disassembler with no capstone. A VPN with no server — and, lately, an edge stack that runs a greenhouse or a chicken coop offline and watches it for drift. Own the layer, run it local, sign into nothing.
Real controllers on cheap ESP32s, and the hub that ties them together. The safety logic lives in firmware — a closing coop door stops on an obstacle, on overcurrent, on a move timeout — the whole thing runs with no network, and every line of logic is tested on a desktop with no hardware, then gated by CI.
| Layer | Repo | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Control | greenhouse | ESP32/MicroPython greenhouse controller — light, aeration, heat and pulse irrigation with hysteresis; offline-first; a wrap-safe uptime clock so it survives a season unattended. |
| Control | coopilot | Connected chicken-coop controller — an autonomous pop-hole door with real safety interlocks (anti-pinch, overcurrent, timeout, limit switches) as a host-tested state machine. |
| Hub | plexus | Ingests the controllers' MQTT into a Gorilla-compressed time-series, watches every stream for drift and stuck sensors, serves one dashboard — stdlib only, no database, no broker service. |
Three more repos take the industrial thesis further:
industrial-retrofit speaks real
Modbus-TCP (pure stdlib) to turn a legacy machine's registers into telemetry, anomalies
and live OEE — point it at a real PLC;
line-twin analyses a line from your measured
cycle times, validates its model against the line's real output, and quantifies the ROI
of fixing the bottleneck; and
gorilla-tsc is the time-series codec plexus
stores with.
I write tools the way I want to use them: single binary, few or zero
dependencies, local-first. No telemetry, no account, nothing that only works
while some SaaS is up. When a tool reimplements something from scratch — a
debugger without ptrace, a disassembler without a library, a mesh VPN without
a server — it's because owning the layer beats gluing over it. Most ship to
crates.io / PyPI so you can pip install a compiled binary and go.
| Repo | What it is | Lang |
|---|---|---|
| forgewatch | Local-first CI runner — DAG-scheduled YAML pipelines, content-addressed job cache, live web dashboard. pip install forgewatch-ci |
Rust |
| gravedigger | From-scratch x86-64 disassembler + ELF/PE loader + emulator + debugger. No capstone, no objdump, no ptrace. pip install gravedigger |
Rust |
| ghostwire | Userspace mesh VPN — Noise-encrypted UDP tunnels, WireGuard-compatible config, zero servers. pip install ghostwire |
Rust |
| trapdoor | Interactive step-debugger for Bash — no patched bash, no ptrace, just the DEBUG trap and /dev/tcp. pip install trapdoor-sh |
Rust |
| leakhound | Zero-dependency secret scanner — AWS/GitHub/Slack/Stripe keys, PEM, JWTs, entropy heuristics. CI-friendly. pip install leakhound |
C++ |
| terrier | Local-first memory for coding agents — one SQLite FTS5 index over sessions + notes. pip install terrier-kb |
Python |
| slopkit | Three CLIs for coding with AI — llmcost (price a prompt), ctxpack (pack a repo to context), slopcheck (catch hallucinated deps). pip install slopkit |
Python |
| dep-xray | In-browser, zero-dependency npm supply-chain scanner for package.json. Live demo → |
JS |
| cinderwave | Open-hardware acid groovebox — RP2040 firmware + a portable, host-testable C++17 DSP core. pip install cinderwave |
C++ |
| rankforge | Local-first SEO autopilot — keyword research, content briefs, on-page optimization via pluggable LLM engines. pip install rankforge |
Python |
Before the tools, I ran an end-to-end trading stack solo — pull the data, design the strategy, build the live execution, and stress-test the edge until it survives or dies. Most die; that's the job. Same engineering values, different domain.
| Repo | What it is |
|---|---|
| honest-backtest | Edge-validation harness for CME micro futures & prop firms. It debunked my own in-sample "59% pass-rate" as a mirage once tested OOS. |
| prop-ev | Monte Carlo for prop-firm challenges: P(pass) and whether the attempt is +EV after the fee (usually not). Live calculator → |
| binance-fapi-ws | Small, robust async reader for the Binance USDⓈ-M Futures WebSocket — auto-reconnect, dead-connection detection. |
| trading-bot-ops | No-Kubernetes 24/7 supervision kit — PowerShell watchdog + templated systemd unit & VPS bootstrap. |
| telegram-ctl | Remote-control & alert any Python daemon from a Telegram chat. Zero deps. |
- From scratch when it teaches me the layer. A debugger, a disassembler, a VPN — reimplementing beats importing when the point is to understand it.
- Zero dependencies is a feature. Fewer moving parts, nothing to audit, one file to ship. Supply chain you don't pull is supply chain that can't bite you.
- Local-first, no cloud. If a job is local, it shouldn't need an account, a server, or a network. Offline is the default, not a fallback.
- Evidence over optimism. Test the logic without the hardware, flag the failure in plain words, and label a simulation a simulation. A tool that's down at 3am — or a benchmark that only works in-sample — isn't a tool.
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Everything here is engineering & research, not financial advice. Most of it is free, MIT, and runs on your machine.