I build apps and tools that replace bloated ones. An Android app that talks to a mesh bulb's radio with no network permission at all. A 2.5 MB bulb controller for the job a 500 MB vendor app does. A memory architecture for AI agents that trades context tokens for files on disk. Same instinct every time: cut the middle, keep the function.
Control a Bluetooth-mesh bulb straight from the phone — no hub, no cloud, no account. The app joins the mesh as a proxy client and drives the standard Light Lightness model; it can provision a factory-fresh bulb on its own.
A lightweight replacement for the ConnectLife / Hisense app. Controls a split air conditioner through the same cloud the vendor app uses — without the vendor app.
Show someone a photo without handing them your gallery. aPhoto displays the photos you picked and nothing else — no grid, no next folder, no way to scroll into anything you didn't choose.
Dynmem — a two-tier memory architecture for AI agents. A ~500-token index sits in the system prompt; the verbose detail lives in topic files on disk, routed by keyword.
A Manifest V3 extension whose side panel talks to a local agent: you type an instruction, the agent reads the page, acts on it and replies — all inside the browser you're already in.
An interactive script for bulk-uploading collections to the Internet Archive, with a directory browser and a terminal UI that makes hundreds of files painless.
Recursive folder-to-AV1 encoding on top of FFmpeg — point it at a tree of videos and walk away. A fork I extended for my own encoding runs.
Kotlin and Compose, sized against what the vendor app costs you in megabytes and permissions. If a feature needs a cloud, it should be a cloud the user already has.
Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth SIG Mesh at the GATT level: provisioning, proxy clients, vendor model quirks. The interesting bugs are always on the wire.
Memory architecture, context budgets, browser control and plugin-enforced invariants for agents that run unattended — plus benchmarks that survive scrutiny.
Linux servers, systemd units, Tailscale networks, containers and cron watchdogs. If it matters, it runs on hardware I control.
Python for the things worth automating, terminal UIs for the things worth using twice, and no service dependency where a script will do.
I'm ockentap — a developer who builds for the gap between what software could be and what the vendor shipped.
The through-line across everything here is removing a layer that didn't need to exist: the hub between the phone and the bulb, the vendor app between you and your own air conditioner, the gallery between you and one photo, the 2,200-character cap between an agent and what it knows.
I'd rather ship something small that works on real hardware — a real bulb, a real air conditioner, a real server — than something large that works in a demo.
ockentap