Projects

Favicon for pokecompanion.com

pokecompanion.com

Github

This project, in its original form, existed since 2021 and has undergone several, major iterations. There's so much to talk about, I think it's best to just link out to the individual blog posts:

It originally lived on my Raspberry Pi

Then I moved it to Vercel

Before starting from scratch on Cloudflare workers

Most recently, after a number of platform improvements I can honestly say I'm proud of it, and the journey it took.

Svelte Kit deployed to Cloudflare, ExpressJS API hosted on a VPS with Pocketbase acting as a database.

Favicon for timesheet.helbling.uk

timesheet.helbling.uk

Github

I love my work, I love my family, and I love getting sucked into complex problems. To make sure I maintain a healthy work-life balance, I like to track my hours. Ve that for time that I spend at work, on specific projects, or boring things like chores.

Making a website made sense - I can tie data to auth, share records with my work account, and access this from any device should I forget to sign off.

This project is incredibly boring, but I use it every day. I maintain this in the background and I'm slowly product-ising it so that it could become a proper SaaS that others might feasibly want to use. But for now, it does what I need it to do and I built it. That makes me happy.

NextJS App router project, hosted on a VPS with Pocketbase.

Favicon for reddit.helbling.uk

reddit.helbling.uk

Github

I like to listen to TTS reddit videos before going to bed.

My subscriptions tab gets flooded in the evenings, so Youtube does not have a nice way to just surface these videos to me. Despite "reddit" being a daily search for me, Youtube will try recommend other content to me, causing frustration.

To avoid this daily hide-and-seek before going to sleep, I've put this page together to just show the latest videos uploaded by a handful of channels and deeplink into the Youtube app.

Search API calls to youtube are quite expensive, so I cache the API responses quite aggressively.

Built with Svelte, deployed to Cloudflare.

Homelab

I have an old computer and a Raspberry Pi set up as a homelab and as a dev environment for my VPS deployed apps.

Some services like Immich have since been moved to a Hetzner VPS.

Infrastructure as Code

Github

While I've previously been able to rely on the free tiers of different SaaS Platforms, I wanted to own the infrastructure for Pokécompanion and deal with all of its associated challenges along the way.

Moving all of my existing setup into Terraform (later ditched for OpenTofu) was a fair bit of effort and I didn't want to over-engineer a proper secret storing mechanism so it's a shame I can't share my setup. However, I wanted to create a module for a Pocketbase instance on EC2 which I did rewrite and publish in the open.

This has been by far the best investment of my time. I later moved my homelab Ansible playbooks into this repo as well after my Raspberry Pi SD Cards got corrupted, saving me hours in later reconstructing my setup.

The last time I updated this section, this has now grown to managing 12 Projects via a private Github repo.

Favicon for qr.helbling.uk

qr.helbling.uk

Github

Not being able to quickly and easily share links between my laptop and my phone was really annoying.

There are a ton of other tools out there that are better and more sophisticated. Alas, unless I can easily find those (such as by having a memorable URL), they might as well not exist.

Appending any URL to the domain will generate a scannable QR code to that page.

avatar.helbling.uk

Github

Deterministic, "random" image generator using jdenticon. Will use the route i.e. avatar.helbling.uk/test123 as the seed.

Originally created as a Microservice to support Pokécompanion. Deployed to a single Cloudflare worker.

Favicon for helbling.uk

helbling.uk

Github

This site, built with NextJS, MDX and Tailwind deployed to Cloudflare.

Favicon for mp4.helbling.uk

mp4.helbling.uk

Github

Quick POC using ffmpeg WASM to compare its performance against my "toMP4" macOS quick action.

Should not seriously be used as its performance is terrible, but it runs entirely client-side.

Built with SvelteKit and deployed to Cloudflare

Crafts

Queer inside

Intel-type sticker with a pride rainbow along the top and the world 'Pride' on a transgender coloured gradient background

Inspired by LeafItGreen on etsy I wanted to practice making my own version and print stickers on a Cricut.

The original and .svg files are available for download here.