https://blog.devops-monk.com/categories/personal-projects/Recent content in Personal Projects on Devops MonkHugoen-usSat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/monkkit-developer-tools/Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/monkkit-developer-tools/I was tired of bouncing between a dozen different sites just to format JSON or decode a JWT. One tab for a JSON formatter. Another for a Base64 decoder. Another for a DNS lookup. Another for an SPF validator. Browser full of bookmarks, half of them plastered with ads, most requiring an account to do anything useful. So I built MonkKit — a single place for all of them. 106 free developer tools across 10 categories.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/personalised-gifts-ecommerce-platform/Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/personalised-gifts-ecommerce-platform/Building an e-commerce site is one of those projects that sounds simple until you actually start. Payments, authentication, inventory, personalisation, image handling, email notifications, admin tools, live chat — each piece is its own rabbit hole. I built PersonalisedGifts, a full UK-market personalised gifts store from scratch, wiring all of these together into a single cohesive product. The site lets customers browse gifts by category (Mugs, Jewellery, Canvas Prints, Home Décor) or occasion (Birthday, Wedding, Christmas, New Baby), personalise their chosen item with custom text, images, fonts, or colours, and pay via Stripe (cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna) or directly from their bank account via Tink’s open banking integration.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/stock-market-analysis-dashboard/Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/stock-market-analysis-dashboard/Most stock screeners cost $30–$200 per month. Bloomberg Terminal costs $24,000 per year. I built something that does a meaningful fraction of what those tools do — analysing 220+ UK and US stocks every hour, scoring them across six dimensions, detecting bearish warning signals, running insider trading checks via SEC EDGAR, and presenting everything in a React PWA — at zero ongoing cost. The platform is live at share.devops-monk.com. The full source is at github.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/build-your-own-ddns-platform/Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/build-your-own-ddns-platform/If you run a home server — a Raspberry Pi, a NAS, a Kubernetes cluster in your garage — you have probably hit the same annoying wall: your internet provider gives you a different public IP address every few days, and suddenly nobody can reach your server anymore. This post explains how I solved that problem by building ddns.devops-monk.com, a fully self-hosted Dynamic DNS platform. I will walk through the idea from scratch, explain every moving part in plain English, and include full architecture diagrams for those who want the deep technical picture.