Notes on things I've built outside work, and what they taught me.https://ragib.dev/https://ragib.dev/writing/why-i-built-a-prayer-times-app/https://ragib.dev/writing/why-i-built-a-prayer-times-app/The prayer times app I relied on stopped working on New Year's Day 2024, and I found out its developer had passed away months earlier. simplesolat started as my attempt to follow in their steps.Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:00:00 GMTsimplesolatreact-nativeandroidhttps://ragib.dev/writing/keytree-ssh-keys-from-one-file/https://ragib.dev/writing/keytree-ssh-keys-from-one-file/For years I copied SSH keys onto every server by hand, and carried my private key from laptop to laptop. A shell script fixed some of that. keytree fixed the rest, by turning the whole thing around.Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:00:00 GMTsshhomelabgokeytreehttps://ragib.dev/writing/the-leak-test-that-kept-me-honest/https://ragib.dev/writing/the-leak-test-that-kept-me-honest/How Bancuh DNS went from passing every lookup to Google, to resolving everything itself, losing that in a rewrite, and getting it back. Nudged at every step by users running DNS leak tests.Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:00:00 GMTdnsbancuh-dnsprivacyunboundbindhttps://ragib.dev/writing/replacing-bind-with-my-own-dns-server/https://ragib.dev/writing/replacing-bind-with-my-own-dns-server/By the end of 2023, BIND was using 2.8 GB of memory to block ads on a 4 GB server. So I wrote a small DNS server in Rust that does the same job in about 100 MB.Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMTrustdnsbancuh-dnshttps://ragib.dev/writing/what-self-updating-servers-broke/https://ragib.dev/writing/what-self-updating-servers-broke/Between 2020 and 2023, almost every Bancuh DNS outage came from the code that updated the servers, not the code that served DNS. A k3s experiment, self-updating servers, the OOM killer, a growing list on a small budget, and a certificate bug my own habits were hiding.Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdnsbancuh-dnsoperationsbindhttps://ragib.dev/writing/building-an-aac-app-for-my-kids/https://ragib.dev/writing/building-an-aac-app-for-my-kids/When my autistic kids needed a communication app, the good ones cost around USD 200 and the free one had stopped working properly. So I built GibTalk, and their early intervention centre helped shape it.Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:00:00 GMTgibtalkaacautismreact-nativehttps://ragib.dev/writing/learning-rust-for-a-blocklist-compiler/https://ragib.dev/writing/learning-rust-for-a-blocklist-compiler/How a colleague's offhand remark got me learning Rust, and how rewriting Bancuh DNS's blocklist compiler let every server build its own list at startup.Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:00:00 GMTrustdnsbancuh-dnshttps://ragib.dev/writing/the-user-who-wouldnt-let-me-turn-it-off/https://ragib.dev/writing/the-user-who-wouldnt-let-me-turn-it-off/In 2017 I shut down my free adblock DNS to save money. A user in Vietnam tracked me down on Facebook, and over the next few years, his requests shaped much of what Bancuh DNS became.Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMTdnsbancuh-dnsself-hostinghttps://ragib.dev/writing/how-bancuh-dns-started/https://ragib.dev/writing/how-bancuh-dns-started/In 2015 I was learning web hosting and realised a DNS server could block ads for every device at home. It started on a Raspberry Pi, and eleven years later it's still running.Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdnsbancuh-dnsraspberry-piself-hosting