Scratching My Own Itch: A Set of Micro-Utilities

• PoC • utilities

Background

Most of these projects started the same way — I ran into a small friction in day-to-day work, wondered "how hard could this be to solve?", and spent a weekend finding out. None of them aim to be comprehensive libraries; they are deliberately minimal tools that do one thing well. Building them was as much about deepening my understanding of the underlying patterns (pub/sub, tree diffing, image generation, service meshes, daily pain points) as it was about the end result.

Echo Server (fake-backend)

A mock HTTP server that echoes back whatever you throw at it. When building frontend features or testing integrations, waiting on a real backend to be ready is a bottleneck. This tool spins up instantly, mirrors your request headers and body in the response, and lets you move forward without dependencies on other teams.

Yaml-to-Yaml

A proof-of-concept manifest generator that takes an OpenAPI spec as input and produces Kubernetes manifests as output. The idea came from watching teams hand-write the same boilerplate YAML for every new service. Instead of maintaining two disconnected sources of truth — the API definition and the deployment config — this tool bridges the gap and generates one from the other.

WASM Filters

An exploration of the extensibility model inside Envoy's WASM runtime sandbox. Envoy proxy supports loading custom filters compiled to WebAssembly, which means you can inject logic into the request/response path without rebuilding the proxy itself. This project experiments with writing and deploying those filters to understand the boundaries of what's practical inside the sandbox.

Light Event

A lightweight pub/sub event emitter for JavaScript. I wanted a zero-dependency alternative to heavier event libraries for small projects where pulling in a framework felt like overkill. The API surface is intentionally tiny — on, off, and emit — so it stays easy to reason about in any codebase.

JSON Differ

A utility that computes the structural diff between two JSON objects. The motivation came from debugging API response changes — eyeballing deeply nested JSON is error-prone, and existing diff tools treated JSON as plain text rather than a tree. This package walks both object trees and returns a precise changeset of additions, deletions, and modifications.

Random Avatar

A single-file PHP script that generates colorful, unique avatars on the fly. The idea was simple: when a user hasn't uploaded a profile picture, show something more interesting than a grey silhouette. It uses deterministic hashing so the same input always produces the same avatar, keeping things consistent without any storage overhead.

ng_scope_DI

A deep dive into Angular's scope and dependency injection internals. Angular's DI system is powerful but opaque — this project isolates the scoping mechanism to study how providers are resolved across nested injectors. Useful as a learning tool for anyone wanting to understand what happens under the hood when Angular wires up your components.

Bookmark Randomizer

A Chrome extension that picks a random page from your bookmarks and opens it. We all hoard bookmarks with the best of intentions but rarely revisit them. This extension turns that graveyard into a discovery feed — if the page still interests you, great; if not, delete it and declutter.