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SOFTWARE CONSULTANCY — CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Rails for the money. Go and Rust for the terminal. Postgres for everything.
z19r is a shop run by @zackkitzmiller. The paid work is Rails applications, AWS infrastructure, and the kind of Postgres and Sidekiq problems that show up at 2am with a Sentry link attached.
This org is the other half — tools that got built because the alternative was tolerating something annoying. Most are a single binary. Most are MIT. All of them started as a bad afternoon.
| tool | what it does | in |
|---|---|---|
tihole |
Pi-hole, in a TUI, without the browser tab | Go |
smbark |
Mount, unmount, and stop guessing at SMB shares | Go |
whoseportisitanyway |
What is running on that port, and why | Rust |
spindle |
File organizer that reads the file, not the extension | Rust |
stress-raiser |
Local HTTP load testing with no YAML in sight | Rust |
initium |
Config and dotfile scaffolding in one command (née zackstrap) | Rust |
| tool | what it does | in |
|---|---|---|
whetstone |
Optimization and caching for Claude Code — sharpens the loop | Rust |
claude-marketplace |
The plugins and skills that survived daily use | Python |
| tool | what it does | in |
|---|---|---|
waybar-unixtime |
Unix time in your Waybar, themed to match omarchy | Hyprland |
gha-guestbook |
A guestbook powered by GitHub Issues. Yes, really | Action |
Products ship under the same name. Full index at z19r.com.
| product | what it is |
|---|---|
| markbin | Paste markdown. Get a link. That's the whole pitch |
| XbutforY | The editorial "X, but for Y" product directory |
| Le Combo | Cross-chain fast food, ordered like a tasting menu |
| The Pile | Wealth drawn to scale, until you stop scrolling |
| Flourish or Forfeit | Stake real money on your habits. Skip a day, lose it |
| Patchwork | Sentry error in, reviewed pull request out |
The stack is deliberately boring, because boring is what you can debug on a Sunday.
- Rails 8, Postgres, Sidekiq. Solid Queue and Solid Cache where they fit, Redis where they don't.
- Minitest and
rubocop-rails-omakase. Framework defaults are a feature. Configuration is a liability. - Hotwire before React. A JSON API earns its existence or it doesn't get built.
- Kamal or Render, Sentry on day one. Observability is not a phase two.
- Go or Rust when the right answer is a static binary somebody else can run.
- Model first, service object never — until the model actually gets fat, and then only reluctantly.
Agentic work runs the same way: tight loops, one commit per iteration, a progress file that outlives the session, and a human reading every diff.
Hourly contract. Fractional principal engineer, Rails rescue, or the specific problem nobody on the team wants to own.
Rails application work and long-overdue upgrades · AWS on ECS/Fargate, Aurora, Terraform · Postgres query and index surgery · Sidekiq queues that stopped behaving · Incidents, and the postmortem after.
PRIOR ART — the archive
Older work, under @zackkitzmiller. Left standing on purpose.
tiny-php |
Reversible base62 ID obfuscation |
holmes |
Mobile detection, back when that was a problem |
nil |
Null object pattern for PHP |
statsd-arduino |
StatsD client for Arduino |
tree-weaver |
ASCII tree → nested file paths, in Erlang |
zackstrap grew up and moved out. It's initium now.
NO FRAMES. NO FOLD. STILL MADE IN CHICAGO.
