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.
🌐 HiddenGrid — a local-first edge stack
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.
📊 GitHub stats
Everything here is engineering & research, not financial advice. Most of it is free, MIT, and runs on your machine.