Systems built for practical impact, not feature theater.
Every project below was shaped by a real operational constraint — a school's governance requirements, a
laptop that overheats, a business that needed its telemetry to tell the truth. The flagship case studies
go deep on trade-offs and decisions; everything else shipped is listed further down.
STARS is a pastoral care platform built for a school team that needed immediate visibility of student
wellbeing, behavior trends, and intervention history — without relying on disconnected spreadsheets
or manual, easily-lost processes.
What It Solves
Consolidates behavior, affirmations, and incident data into a unified record.
Automates communication workflows with role-aware escalation paths.
Gives leaders fast access to high-confidence operational information.
Design Choices
Role-based access for staff, leaders, and administrators.
Privacy-first architecture with explicit governance controls.
No public data exposure; demo environment uses synthetic information.
"STARS has made our processes significantly more streamlined and the immediacy of information for
pastoral leaders has been exceptional."
Mr N, Pastoral Leader
02 / Open Source
OmenCore v4.0.0
Released 20 July 2026 — hardware control for HP OMEN and Victus laptops
OmenCore replaces bloated OEM control software with direct hardware controls for fan behavior, thermals,
power modes, undervolting, and RGB management. With 184+ GitHub stars and an active issue tracker, it has
shipped 13 releases from v3.4.0 to v4.0.0 since April — each one traced back to real hardware, not a
roadmap slide.
v4.0.0 focusArchitecture debt paydown, not new control surface
Introduced a real DI composition root — 19 of roughly 40 manually-wired fields in the app's central view-model migrated off ad hoc construction.
Built a shared polling scheduler and migrated the tray icon, quick popup, and OSD timers onto it, as a first cut at consolidating a 27-timer sprawl.
Fixed a safety-gate bug: the sensitive-model startup-restore check had a live, un-updated copy of a fragile-string-match bug already fixed elsewhere in 3.8.1.
Fixed the "disable thermal protection" toggle silently not holding for custom fan curves, and made the emergency-override temperature configurable instead of a hardcoded 95°C.
Why A Major Version With No New Features
New community-contributable model-database pipeline — schema, validator, PR template, CI job — so hardware support no longer funnels through one person hand-writing every entry.
New persistent "Model Capabilities" diagnostics panel shows what your exact model does and doesn't support, and whether that's field-verified or inferred.
Accessibility labeling pass across five views — roughly 140 previously-silent controls now announce correctly to screen readers.
Removed ~80 lines of dead, orphaned UI wiring — a second, meaningfully-behind copy of code that was bound to a view never in the app's visual tree.
Built for Radium PCs customers and technicians, this desktop companion pairs a premium React interface
with a Rust/Tauri backend, vendor telemetry providers, and a bundled sensor sidecar for hardware that
needs deeper package-temperature access than user-mode WMI exposes. v0.3 was a deliberate premium-feel
and reliability pass — no changes to telemetry providers, native write paths, or the safety-gating model.
What It Delivers
Live dashboard for CPU, GPU, RAM, network, storage, and support-readiness state.
Premium thermal visualization with vendor-aware component overlays.
Fixed a rare panic in the 1Hz hardware monitor loop that could poison a lock and permanently stop telemetry until restart — the loop now recovers instead of cascading.
Unified every hover/press/transition animation in the app onto one consistent motion system, replacing over a dozen slightly-different one-off timings.
Truthful telemetry — missing sensors show as degraded or driver-required, never fabricated as zero.
Fan/EC/firmware writes stay blocked until model-specific safety validation exists.
Status: Public release at v0.3 for Windows 10/11 x64. GPU-vendor-provider expansion,
sensor-sidecar packaging, and a real in-game frame-time overlay are reviewed and deliberately deferred
pending access to real target hardware to validate against.
More Case Studies
Live products and systems in active development
HC
Hurley Computers
Boutique custom PC building, South East Queensland
My own custom PC-building business, built and run alongside the school and software work — every build
spec'd, sourced, and supported personally, gaming rigs through AI workstations. Same one-person
accountability the studio runs on, just with a screwdriver instead of a keyboard.
RigMateAU
Australia-focused PC builder and price-comparison platform
A full PC builder and price-comparison platform for Australian buyers, with compatibility checks,
trust-aware marketplace scoring, and premium shareable build pages — deliberately excluding OzBargain
and Whirlpool from any scraping, importing, or pricing pipeline.
BrightBound Adventures
Offline-first educational game platform for children
FlutterOffline FirstACARA AlignedChild Safe by Default
A colourful, offline-first learning RPG for ages 4–12, built for classrooms and homes where reliable
internet is not guaranteed. Local-first storage, no external telemetry, adaptive difficulty, and a
currently-active sprint cycle rebuilding the world map into extruded 3D zone islands and closing out
a reward-transaction system that survives a killed-and-relaunched app without re-earning anything.
A secure remote access platform with one desktop app acting as both viewer and host, a browser-based
web client, and a Rust broker for auth, device registry, and WebSocket signaling. Passkey/WebAuthn-first,
with the Phase 2 auth, device registry, and signaling contract implemented and verified. Host approval,
WebRTC negotiation, and the media/data plane are scoped for Phase 3 but currently on hold behind other work.
Scans a Plex library, finds smaller h265/AV1 releases on Usenet, and replaces bloated files overnight —
with a hard rule that a replacement is never accepted unless it is strictly smaller than the original.
Now at 20+ GitHub stars, v1.9.0.0 came out of a full codebase read-through: it fixed an
exclusions: config section that had silently never been wired up — every movie in the
library, including home videos sharing a Plex section, was being sent to Usenet indexers with no way
to opt out — and moved SQLite onto WAL mode to stop lock errors under concurrent writes.
Also Shipped
Smaller tools, built because the gap was real
Not every project needs a case study. These shipped because something specific kept being annoying — narrow scope, on purpose.
No case studies matched your search. Try terms like stars, omencore, radium, hurley computers, rigmateau, brightbound, relaydesk, or slimarr — or browse Also Shipped above.
Next Step
Have something that needs this level of care?
Tell me about the system, who relies on it, and what "working" actually means for you.
