Borut Balazek

A guest-engagement platform for independent restaurants, bars, cafes and event-led venues: reservations, digital menus, events, campaigns, loyalty, staff scheduling and a guest portal that closes the loop after a visit. A Next.js operator app and public venue pages, a Fastify API, a BullMQ worker, PostgreSQL via Drizzle and an MCP server for AI clients. Live in beta; designed and built by me in 2026.

A media hub for photographers that joins two workflows usually split across separate tools: private client galleries with proofing, and QR-based guest photo and video uploads at live events. A Next.js app, a Fastify API with TypeBox schemas, a BullMQ worker for virus scanning and video transcodes, PostgreSQL via Drizzle and S3-compatible storage, with billing on a credit ledger. Designed and built by me in 2026, with access through a public waitlist.

A personal platform that takes in around 100,000 financial news articles a day from 5,000+ feeds, newsletters and archives and lines them up against real-time market prices. An event-driven pipeline on BullMQ and RabbitMQ moves each article through self-hosted models for embeddings, clustering, entity recognition and sentiment, and into storage split by job: PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Meilisearch, Qdrant and Redis.

The workspace I run my own projects in. AI agents sign in over MCP, claim tasks, post progress and change status under the same permission checks as a person holding that token. On decisions an agent can only propose, and a person accepts. Project health is computed on read from blocked work and overdue milestones, so it cannot go stale. Next.js on Bun with PostgreSQL and Drizzle, running in production.

A self-hosted gateway for OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini clients. One Go process serves the API and an admin dashboard and keeps configuration and usage in SQLite. Stable model names route to providers by fixed, fallback, weighted, cost or latency strategy, with scoped API keys, request, token and spend limits, and cost traced per request. Open source under MIT, in alpha.

A self-hosted store for environment variables and secrets that I use across my own repositories. It is one Next.js app, one SQLite file, one encryption key and one CLI, with no PostgreSQL, Redis, queue or KMS, because a secrets manager has to be quick to restore when it is down. What an application expects lives in its repository; what the values are lives on the server.

An audio-reactive visual renderer for my own DJ sets. The control window and the fullscreen output are independent, so the show keeps running when the controls are closed. Procedural scenes react to audio analysis, a layered sequencer arranges them, and a small tray app on the DJ laptop sends to the machine that renders. Electron, React and Three.js, with a Tauri sender.

A desktop app for real-time voice transcription, built in Rust with Tauri and shipped for macOS. Multi-provider by design (Soniox and OpenAI in the cloud, Ollama locally) behind a bring-your-own-key model, with a floating overlay for live feedback and a transcription history with saved audio. Audio capture, streaming and native desktop integration in one, which is a very different set of problems from web work.

An open-source all-in-one productivity platform: calendar, tasks, habits, notes, focus sessions and mood tracking in one product rather than six separate tools. Full ownership end to end - data model, API, web client and deployment - which is really an exercise in keeping six interlocking domains coherent in a single codebase.

A motorsport calendar covering 20+ racing series - F1/2/3/E, WEC, WRC, DTM, BTCC, IndyCar, NASCAR, MotoGP - plus every circuit they race on. The interesting part is the data layer: session times resolved into each visitor's local timezone, live weather per circuit, countdowns per session, and a lot of metadata stitched together from several sources. Built and run solo, and still shipping.

A self-hosted smart gallery application that scans and displays images from local folders with intelligent features. Integrates Amazon Rekognition for automatic image tagging, HERE Geocoding for location data, and includes a map view for photo locations. Built with a Symfony backend, React frontend, and a Python microservice for image processing.

My own subscription inventory product, built and run end to end. Companies, warehouses, items and categories, with every stock movement recorded against an audit trail, plus clients and projects, barcode label generation and Excel export. Plan and seat limits were enforced in configuration, a versioned REST API served a phone app that scanned stock in and out, and the interface ran in three languages. It shipped through alpha, beta and production stages with functional tests in CI and a scripted deploy, and ran in production for a client. I never promoted or sold it beyond that, and wound it down rather than keep maintaining something I was not taking to market.

An open-source, self-hosted team chat app, built as a Slack and HipChat alternative, with channels and channel, user, and emoji autocomplete. Built in PHP with Doctrine ORM. An early experiment, since archived.

An open-source office-management app for small teams, covering time and event tracking, employee and employment records, and role-based access. Built with JavaScript and PHP on Doctrine ORM. Since archived.