In my early career, I spent more than 14 years as a professional software developer for a small firm, where I led the development of commercial products spanning web-based sales systems, Linux and Windows business management tools, and the infrastructures that supported each–usually stemming from a LAMP stack or other form of Linux-based server.
These days my career is much less geared toward programming, so my passion for creatively inventing and developing software products is one of my hobbies, or what some might call a “side hustle.” I spend a fair bit of my free time crafting software products that excite me personally.
Here are a few of my personal software products I am most excited about:
NEMS Linux
https://nemslinux.com/
NEMS Linux is an enterprise-focused network asset monitoring and proactive notification system. Powered by the same Nagios Core as Nagios XI, I’ve spent more than 10 years refining it into what has become an exceptional solution to keep IT server rooms operational and efficient. It also generates SLA reports for the C-Suite, and offers a streamlined at-a-glance tactical display that makes it easy to see the current state of any network.
Baldnerd’s 360 Portrait Studio
https://www.patreon.com/Category5/posts/download-360-173554469
I bought a 360 camera and was disappointed with how grainy the images looked once I cropped them in the manufacturer’s app. But I opened one of the source images in my regular photo editor and realized the actual 360 image was in fact great quality: It was just the app that was ruining it. So I set out to develop something better. It began as a lossless dewarping and cropping tool, but I fast realized I could go even further and introduce color grading and some visual enhancements. It has evolved into a professional-grade 360 photography companion application that I believe every 360 photographer should have. I put a great deal of work into making the interface as intuitive as possible, and held to my focus on making the output as lossless as possible. Baldnerd’s 360 Portrait Studio is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Pinecraft Installer
https://github.com/cat5tv/pinecraft/
Back in 2021 I started writing a custom Minecraft installer called Pinecraft. I designed it to ease the setup and optimization of hosting your own Minecraft server on a single board computer, such as the Raspberry Pi SBC. Over the years I’ve kept it up to date, and since 2026’s Pinecraft v5 release, the installer taps into the official APIs of multiple Minecraft flavors to offer user-selected Minecraft version installation. Pinecraft also configures all the dependencies (such as the specific version of Java required), and activates a headless Minecraft server.