February 26, 2026
With the exception of Sihtnumbrid, all of these were written in the before times when there were no LLMs or coding agents. I had to actually sit down, focus, and ultra-think about everything myself1.
A site dedicated to searching for postal codes in Estonia
Sihtnumbrid (“postal codes” in Estonian) is a website I built to solve my own frustration with finding postal codes in Estonia. Most existing sites either require very specific input formats, display overly verbose results, or don’t allow bookmarking specific searches. The site provides a clean, fast interface with instant search across over 1.35 million records, query parameter support for sharing links to specific results, and pagination for large result sets.
This project was also my vehicle for learning Laravel and PHP as I had not written PHP since college and wanted a tangible project to learn with. I documented the entire journey in a blog post, covering how I learned Laravel through Laracasts, sourced open data from Estonia’s Geoportal, optimized SQLite queries from 600ms to under 300μs using indexes, and deployed to Fly.io.
A simple way to create bar charts using HTTP query parameters
GoBarChar is both a CLI tool and a hosted web service for creating ASCII bar charts from query parameters. The idea came from Alex Chan’s blog post on drawing ASCII bar charts as I wanted the same functionality but accessible without opening a terminal. You can send data via HTTP query parameters and get back an ASCII chart, with support for calculating averages and sums, sorting ascending or descending, handling spaces in labels, and displaying custom titles. The hosted version at gobarchar.usrme.xyz works with plain HTTP requests, making it perfect for quick visualizations or shell scripts. The CLI version runs locally and starts a web server for making requests.
Cometary is my take on conventional commit helpers, written in Go as yet another TUI application. It’s an alternative to Comet with several additional features inspired by Commitizen. The main improvements include retaining previous prompt values on screen (a feature I missed from Commitizen), customizable character input limits for scope and message, visible character counts, and commit message search functionality. It also supports storing and displaying runtime statistics across sessions, days, weeks, months, and years. I built this because I wanted something faster than Commitizen (which is Python-based) while retaining the best features from both tools.
I created Wishlist Lite after discovering the canonical Wishlist by Charmbracelet, but not being able to get it to work with my SSH configuration. Written in Go, it’s a TUI application that reads hosts from your ~/.ssh/config and presents them in an interactive interface. Features include pinging individual hosts on demand, measuring connection time, storing connection history in a local JSON file, and the ability to connect to hosts interactively. It also supports an ad-hoc mode for connecting to hosts without defining them in your SSH config, and can sort hosts by recently connected. The creation of this was a happy coincidence with the time where I had a need to learn Go professionally and to me, building something on the side is one of the best ways of augmenting one’s learning.
I’m not throwing shade at the current zeitgeist, I just honestly do think the differentation matters. ↩