I build the layer that decides whether a server recovers on its own at 2 a.m. or someone has to drive in and fix it. Most of my work is backend services and the bare-metal Linux infrastructure they run on, with regular detours into the systems-level C underneath.
I write up the debugging rabbit holes I fall into, mostly so future-me remembers how I got out, at blog.darni.org.
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DeepDame: Real-time multiplayer checkers. I architected the game backend: a framework-free stateless engine, Redis-backed live state with atomic per-move updates, an LLM AI opponent with graceful fallback to a legal random move, and a STOMP/WebSocket layer validated to ~6,000 concurrent sessions via k6 on k3s. I then led the Flutter client with a feature-folder architecture using Riverpod, Freezed, GoRouter, Dio cookie-auth, and STOMP-over-SockJS. Shipped to production as a single-node Docker deployment.
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ToDoist: A terminal task manager written in C. Multi-panel ncurses interface using the menu, form, and panel libraries, with a non-blocking input loop, a live clock, and terminal-resize handling. SQLite storage through the C API: multi-statement writes wrapped in transactions with rollback on error, UUID primary keys (libuuid), a tasks/tags many-to-many schema with foreign keys, and soft deletes. Makefile with release, debug, AddressSanitizer, Valgrind, and gdb/lldb crash-report targets; builds on Linux and macOS, with a GitHub Actions build check.
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Homelab: A Proxmox host serving my self-hosted stack as version-controlled Docker Compose behind a single Traefik v3 reverse proxy. Dual-provider routing pairs Docker label discovery with a watched file provider that brings non-Docker backends (Proxmox, a Jellyfin LXC) under the same TLS and middleware. Wildcard TLS via the Cloudflare DNS-01 challenge, a middleware chain enforcing LAN/Tailscale-only access with hardened security headers, and per-container capability drops and resource limits. Remote access over a Tailscale mesh, with a subnet-router LXC alongside per-VM clients. Writeup on the blog.
