Hey, I build things on the open web.
Welcome to my little workshop. I tinker with serverless tools, edge runtimes, and distributed systems — mostly to scratch my own itches and occasionally to share with the rest of the internet.
A few notes on who I am.
I'm a hobbyist developer interested in latency-sensitive systems, lean infrastructure, and the occasional weekend hack. The internet has always felt more interesting at the seams — between protocols, runtimes, and unexpected limits — so that's where I tend to spend most of my time.
Things I've put on the internet.
A non-exhaustive list of stuff I've built, contributed to, or am currently breaking. Most of it is open source and free to play with.
PlethoraMail
A self-hosted, instantly-issued temporary email service running entirely on the Cloudflare edge. Useful for signups, throwaway accounts, and stress-free privacy when the form on some random site really wants your address.
Visit plethoramail.varox.uk →Drift Parser
A tiny WASM-based MIME parser that handles malformed multipart payloads gracefully. Survives email weirdness from twenty-five years of legacy mail clients without giving up halfway through a stream.
Coming soon →Notebook
An ongoing collection of short technical notes — debugging stories, latency dives, config archaeology. Written for my future self, indexed for everyone else who keeps hitting the same walls.
In progress →Lighthouse
A small self-hosted uptime monitor that pings my homelab over Tailscale, batches alerts, and stores history in a single SQLite file. Boring on purpose; built to outlive trends.
Internal tool →Recent things on my mind.
A few half-formed thoughts that may or may not become full posts later. Filed under "things I'd tell myself a year ago".
Edge runtimes are 80% there.
They're great until you hit cold starts in obscure regions, or until your favorite
npm package decides to depend on Node's fs module for fun. The
ergonomics are improving fast though.
Self-hosting is making a quiet comeback.
Between Tailscale, cheap mini PCs, and edge tunnels, running your own services has never been less painful. The old internet, slightly polished, is what a lot of people quietly want back.
Dependencies are a budget, not a free lunch.
Every install adds maintenance debt you'll service later. The fewer
moving parts, the longer a side project lives without your weekend supervision.
Got something to share?
I read every email. Bug reports, weird ideas, or just hellos — all welcome.
hello@varox.uk