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Built to learn, kept because people use them

Every project I have started began the same way: something I wanted to understand. I built the fix for myself, then published it in case anyone else hit the same wall.

Somewhere along the way it stopped being a learning exercise. Two of those projects are now downloaded tens of thousands of times, strangers open issues asking for features, and I spend a real part of my week maintaining things other people depend on. That is a very different job from writing them in the first place.

What people actually use

actual-mcp-server connects any MCP compatible AI assistant, including Claude Desktop, LibreChat and LobeChat, to a self hosted Actual Budget instance. You ask questions about your budget in plain language, create transactions and analyse spending without opening the Actual UI. Most other implementations are simple local bridges for a single user; this one covers 74 tools and runs remotely or locally. Around 48,000 Docker pulls and 15,000 npm installs so far.

Actual-sync keeps Actual Budget synchronised with your bank automatically, across multiple servers, with health monitoring and error handling that tells you when something quietly broke. Around 20,000 Docker pulls.

Both exist because I run Actual Budget myself and wanted my own finances to stay mine, on my own hardware, with no third party in the middle.

What else I work on

Development assisted by AI. vibe-coding-prompts is a curated library of prompts that turn vague intent into production ready documentation. forge-kit reads a codebase and installs the governance tooling that fits it. AgentGate drives coding agents from Telegram or Slack, each one in its own isolated container.

Privacy and self hosting. VPNSentinel continuously verifies that a VPN is genuinely protecting you, catching DNS leaks and silent bypasses, the kind of failure you do not notice until it matters.

Writing down what took me days to work out. Reproducible fix logs and reference builds, because an answer being findable is worth more than it being clever.

A thread runs through most of it: security, privacy, and keeping your own data on your own machines. That began as a childhood fascination with hiding messages in plain sight, and it is still why I care whether a tunnel is genuinely up and whether your budget stays yours.

What sponsorship changes

Nothing here sits behind a paywall and nothing will. Sponsorship buys maintenance time: answering issues, keeping dependencies current, and writing documentation, which is the part that never feels urgent and always matters most.