Things I've built for the fun of it

A high-performance C++ framework built around dynamically loaded plugins. It supplies the parts every application needs and nobody enjoys writing again: main(), the lifecycle, plugin loading, events, threading, networking, logging, configuration and metrics.

An application becomes a handful of plugins plus a config file that says how they connect. It is the foundation for several of the other projects on this page.

• C++
• CMake
• Plugins
• Async events
• Networking

A 4G/5G network monitor, and what happens when you spend years in telecoms monitoring and then get a free hand. Its job is to show why mobile networks fail: it discovers the network topology by itself, spots faults, raises alerts and suggests where an engineer should start looking.

It comes with the CoreCairn Simulator, which invents a fictional mobile network and then breaks it on a schedule. That is far more fun than it sounds. So far it has only been tested against the simulator, not a live operator network.

• C++
• Phookit
• 4G / 5G
• Root-cause analysis
• Simulator
• Dashboard

A self-hosted web tool for looking after a small fleet of Linux servers and the domains that point at them. One backend, one database, and a lightweight agent on each server.

It tracks domains, sets up web servers, DNS, a WireGuard VPN, Docker hosts and game servers, manages firewalls without ever locking you out of SSH, and gathers the logs in one place. It also deployed the website you are reading.

• C++23
• Drogon
• React
• PostgreSQL
• nftables
• WireGuard

A small Django-based framework that handles the boring but important parts of a website: accounts, blogs, galleries, comments, reactions, cookie consent and privacy pages, light and dark themes.

One command installs a site on a server, complete with web server configuration and TLS certificate. Every website on this page runs on it, including this one.

• Python
• Django
• Static generator
• nginx
• Modern CSS

The open-source Irrlicht 3D engine, hosted by my application framework. The framework supplies the lifecycle, events and logging; the engine supplies rendering, scenes and input; a game is simply a plugin that asks for the engine.

Mostly an excuse to find out whether the framework could cope with a frame loop. It can.

• C++
• Irrlicht
• 3D graphics
• Plugins

One installer and one management command for running Counter-Strike 2 dedicated servers on Debian, either directly or in containers, with a set of ready-made game modes.

Because setting up a game server should take one line, not one evening.

• Bash
• systemd
• Docker
• Debian

A C++17 utility that opens a great many TLS connections at once and measures how the other end copes, and a plugin-based framework for reading packet captures and turning telecoms protocols into events.

Along the way: experiments with SIMD parsing, multithreaded packet processing and running AI models locally.

• C++17
• Boost.Asio
• OpenSSL
• PCAP
• SIMD