PHP Boy Scout

Always leave the codebase better than you found it

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Campfire

The people side of the craft: leadership, careers, mentoring, and the story of the blog itself.

krites

Krites is ancient Greek for 'the judge', and judging photographs is the whole job. I built it for an audience of one, my wife: a simple, UI-driven tool (not a command line in sight) that helps her rip through culling 4,000-plus wedding images to her own standards. It leans on local ML rather than a cloud-AI subscription, so it works wherever she is, signal or not. It's since grown an optional AI critic as well, expert feedback on composition, colour and technique, there to help her learn rather than to do the judging for her.

Ai

go-tool-base

The underpinnings for any Go command-line tool, and (as a few of my projects now prove) for comprehensive web services too. It standardises the boilerplate and wiring you end up writing in every Go project, and puts config, logging, self-update, a DI container and the rest straight at your fingertips. Highly opinionated, and it makes some calls people will disagree with, but it works, and it works really well. The CLI it ships with is a big part of that: keeping a Go app built, updated and maintained becomes almost trivial.

Soapbox

Opinion and argument. Where I plant a flag on something and defend it.

Career & Meta

ffmpeg-wasi

The engine behind afmpeg, and, despite the name, not really FFmpeg at all: a custom, direct interface built straight over the libav* libraries that just masquerades as FFmpeg. It does away with the ffmpeg CLI entirely, so tools hook into one consistent programmatic layer instead of stitching together brittle argument strings. It provides both the WASM backend afmpeg runs by default and the native backend it reaches for when a performance edge case calls for it.

Pioneering

Notes from active builds: the design decisions, war stories and how-it-works of whatever I'm making right now.

cicd

Reusable GitLab CI/CD components I include rather than copy across my projects, so the pipeline lives in one place instead of drifting copy-paste in every repo.

signing

A small, standalone module for creating and verifying signatures on files. I pulled it out of go-tool-base so it stays lightweight and anything can use it, not just go-tool-base projects: it's what signs the CLI binaries and the ffmpeg-wasm bundle I distribute. It works through pluggable backends, so the key can live somewhere like AWS KMS rather than on disk, with Google Cloud, Azure and HashiCorp Vault to follow.

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