Playleft :: About

About me

Mostly self-taught and driven by curiosity and a love for software. I particularly enjoy understanding how things work as a whole, designing and building solutions to problems, and using resources to their full potential. I typically opt for simple solutions over complex ones.

My projects

Australian Weather API

Status :: First commit: 2025-05-18.

2025-11-29: In active private development. Public “it works for me” MVP release set for December 2025.
Overview :: This project is my baby. It’s a pseudo-microservice, RESTful API written in Python, and is specifically for serving public weather data available from the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia. Like most modern businesses, they serve said data via FTP, which made for a fun design process when building a sync service that always serves fresh weather data.
Details :: Based on Flask; Pydantic used heavily for all service communications, contracts, and resource requests; PostgreSQL with hand-rolled shapefile ETL; hand-rolled platform services and authorization and authentication systems; Dockerised for cross-platform support; follows the Microsoft Rest API Guidelines; well documented codebase, using Stripe’s API docs as the baseline for public documentation standards.
Purpose :: The main reason was for me to learn Python, programming, and to gain a better understanding of how software works in general. After completing the Automate the Boring Stuff course, I wanted to know how to actually build a program hands on. I just learn better this way. As there was already a personal interest in weather, this project seemed like a fun fit!

Secondly, this program would allow for users to self-host their own weather data systems. While the data is public access and other weather front-ends exist, none of them are open source.

Helium browser packaging

Status :: Submitted 2025-09-14.

Actively maintained. See helium-browser-bin on the AUR, or the public GitHub repo that has in depth documentation for users looking to understand the PKGBUILD.
Overview :: This is my first public package for the AUR. As I get older, I feel a sense of obligation to give back to the people and communities that have been so useful to me over the years. Maintaining this package has also taught me a lot about the Linux system in general and is an awesome learning experience that I’m grateful for.

An interesting tidbit is that the standard *-flags.conf convention that we Linux users expect is a feature implemented downstream and not a feature of Chromium (and presumably CEF?) itself¹.
Details :: The PKGBUILD was originally built for the AppImage packaging, which eventually changed to binary packaging as a matter of user expectation and Arch conventions. The AppImage is maintained by Pujan Modhar on the AUR². The process follows the Chromium and Ungoogled Chromium packaging since there are very little differences between these programs. That seemed a logical approach for me to make sure this program is stable for users.
Purpose :: To give back to the Linux community. However, my experience of packaging, engaging with the community, and trying to make sure this is the best package it can be, ended up making this really bloody fun.

Gleemacs

Status :: In daily use since 2025-11-04.
Overview :: My personal GNU Emacs configuration in one beautiful org file. It’s for my own useage and is setup for writing and programming. It’s highly performant, clean, and involves no evil mode. It was designed to harness Emacs with minimal third-party packages, and enhances the out of the box experience without being too opinionated.
Details :: The great thing about org-mode is that you can write prose and code in the same document. Therefore I’d recommend reading through gleemacs not only for the information, but for the fun that awaits!