Projects

My passion project, which is now on its third iteration using Svelte. While plenty of front-ends to the world of Pokémon already exist, none of them solve my needs quite right. On mobile, the site needs to feel light-weight and easily digestable. Additional features of the site should seek to be non-intrusive.

At its core, it is just a PokeAPI frontend. But a number of microservices have sprawled from it. Lots of sites also let their data become out of date which is incredibly infuriating - and one day that will be me, so an auto-update functionality was also quite important.

Product and project aside, it's also been a massive learning opportunity to apply new tech to a real product, such as:

• Auto-ingesting new data without need for manual input
  • Using AWS Lambda and SQS
  • Auto-deploying changes to a Github Repo
• Using Pocketbase as a simple backend
  • Handling OAuth
  • Deploying to AWS with proper backup strategies
  • Building a re-usable Pocketbase Terraform module
• Using Cloudflare
  • Pages projects to host this site
  • R2 to host social media preview images
  • Workers
    • To generate user avatars: avatar.helbling.uk
    • To debug social media previews: socialpreview.helbling.uk
• Observability
  • Error reporting with Sentry
  • Log ingest with Axiom
  • Unify the above with New Relic

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.

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

Created because Pokécompanion needed this functionality.

Tool to check <meta> social media preview tags on different websites to avoid scraping through an often overly populated document head.

Created because debugging dev builds for Pokécompanion became painful.

This is a sibling to the "toMP4" macOS quick action I use on my laptops for when I'm on my phone.

There are better, faster mp4 conversion tools on the market, but I found that ffmpeg had been ported to WebAssembly and wanted to build my own that just runs client side.

I like to listen to TTS reddit threads before bed from the same handful of accounts.

My subscriptions tab gets flooded in the evenings, so I can't rely on youtube to do this. Despite this being a very common pattern, youtube search will still try to recommend other content to me when I search for "reddit".

To avoid daily frustrations before going to sleep, I've put this page together to just show me latest videos uploaded by these channels that deeplink into the youtube app.

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

I have a handful of Raspberry Pi's set up as a homelab with Jellyfin, Pihole and a web interface for file storage.

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

Mostly a space to express myself, showcase my work and document my experiences.

Queer inside

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.