Engineering — Receipts Since the Early 2000s
Two Decades of Building in Public
Before AI became the headline, the craft was already there. Contributions to the glFTPd scene in the early 2000s in C, TCL, and SQL — networking primitives, sitebot tooling, and utilities. Docker images on the public registry since 2016, chasing scale, observability, and performance: MariaDB MaxScale, DBNinja, Rundeck, Cacti, and an HHVM repo-build image that packaged Facebook's top-performance PHP runtime into a container years before containerization of perf-first PHP was common. Today's tinkering continues in the same spirit — neural-net visualization, model-weight similarity analysis, declarative Jira, Kubernetes admission mutators driven by live Prometheus signals, Home Assistant + ESP smart-home glue, and ARM64/CUDA ports shared with the community. All hobby. At the job, I deliver more and better.
- Client
- Independent — Community
- Role
- Author / Contributor
- Duration
- Early 2000s – Ongoing
- Team
- Solo
- •glFTPd community contributions in C, TCL, and SQL since the early 2000s
- •Docker Hub publisher since 2016 — performance and observability focus
- •HHVM repo-build image (2016–2018) — top-performance PHP in a container before it was common
- •Neural-net debugger (transviz) with time-travel replay of training sessions
- •Kubernetes admission mutator driven by live Prometheus metrics (nemutator)
- •Home Assistant + ESP smart-home with OTP-gated physical access
- •ARM64/CUDA Viseron NVR port shared to save others the build time
- •All hobby — at work, delivers more and better
The long game
Contributions to the glFTPd community in the early 2000s — C for networking primitives, TCL for sitebot/tooling, SQL for backing stores. Mirror archived at grandis.nu/glftpd/Mr_V/.
Docker images published on the public registry since 2016 — always chasing scale, observability, and performance. MaxScale, DBNinja, Rundeck, Cacti. The HHVM repo-build image packaged Facebook's top-performance PHP runtime into a container across 2016, 2017, and 2018 — applying containerization to performance-first workloads well before it was common practice.
Still tinkering
Prototypes released as they mature: transviz (real-time neural-net visualization with tensor inspection and time-travel replay of training sessions), model-similarity (cosine-similarity analysis of transformer weights with interactive HTML reports), agentool (meta-framework for type-safe, composable AI workflows on top of pydantic-ai).
Concepts and tools: jira_as_a_code (declarative YAML planning — epics, tasks, SOP templates, per-env iteration), nemutator (Kubernetes admission mutation webhook that rewrites pod specs from live Prometheus metrics without redeploy).
Hardware and community saves: jarvis-iot-hassio (Home Assistant + ESP firmware + Tuya smart-home integration with ESP-powered smart gate and OTP-based physical access), viseron-arm64-cuda (ARM64 + CUDA port of the Viseron NVR shared to save others the porting time).
The common thread
Every one of these is hobby. Weekend tinkering, personal itches, things that would have helped me if someone else had built them — so I built and published them instead.
At my job I deliver more and better. Same engineering instinct, wound tighter.