Sheet 03 · Cargo manifest

What I build, and what I've built

This is a product company first. Everything below is software I wrote, shipped and still answer the support mail for, plus the things that came before it.

In service

The products I own

Unit 01 Built and run by Robot Studios

Snapkin

A calorie and macro tracker for people who've quit calorie trackers. You photograph the plate. It works out what's on it, estimates the portion against the plate and the cutlery, and logs the calories and the protein. When it genuinely can't tell, it asks one question (pan-fried, or baked?) and then remembers the answer, so it asks fewer of them the longer you use it. Native apps for iOS and Android, a web app, offline logging, Withings scales, and ten languages.

getsnapkin.app

Unit 02 Built and run by Robot Studios

GiveTwice

A wishlist you share with family and friends before a birthday or the holidays. When somebody buys a gift through one of the links, the affiliate commission that would normally end up with me goes to a charity instead. Nobody pays a cent extra for that, because the commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not out of the gift.

givetwice.app

Co-founded

On a different company

Unit 03 · Separate company, founded 2018

Oh Dear

Website monitoring that goes well past a ping on the homepage: uptime from several locations, broken links, mixed content, certificate expiry, DNS changes, cron jobs that stopped running, Lighthouse scores, hosted status pages, ... I co-founded it in 2018 with Freek Van der Herten and I still work on it every week.

To be precise about it: Oh Dear is operated by its own Belgian company (VAT BE 0699.594.682), not by Robot Studios. It's on this page because it's a large part of what I do, not because this company owns it.

ohdear.app

Parts bin

Small things I keep online

Free, no accounts, no tracking. Most of them run entirely in your browser, and each one exists because I needed it once and couldn't find a version I trusted.

Part 01

Imposter

A party game that needs one phone. Everyone gets the same word except one player, and the group has to work out who.

Open

Part 02

Dutch Streaming

Which films and series actually have a Dutch audio track, across the streaming services you can get in Belgium. Built because searching for it by hand is miserable.

Open

Part 03

pwgen

Passwords and random strings, generated in your browser. Nothing leaves the page.

Open

Part 04

Encoder

base64, MD5 and text encoding, client-side.

Open

Part 05

JSON prettifier

Turns minified JSON back into something a human can read, without uploading it to a stranger first.

Open

Part 06

Social image generator

Preview images for X and Facebook, at the sizes those platforms actually want this month.

Open

Decommissioned

Retired

I've been putting things on the public internet since 2004. Some of them ran for years and then stopped earning their keep.

Retired 2021: DNS Spy; A DNS monitoring service that watched your zones and told you when a record moved without you knowing.
Until 2020: cron.weekly; A weekly newsletter for Linux sysadmins, news and tools and tutorials, more than 10,000 subscribers by the end.
Until 2018: Syscast; A podcast about Linux, open source and running servers for a living.
2011 and 2012: Varnish URL Purger and configuration templates; Open source, out of years of running Varnish in front of large PHP sites.
2010: Mobile Zabbix; A phone interface for Zabbix, back when every monitoring dashboard assumed you were sitting at a desk.

The code worth reading is on GitHub, and the write-ups are on ma.ttias.be, which has been running since 2008 and isn't going anywhere.