I'm Ryan Hellyer, a Kiwi living in Berlin. Capturing stories between commits and building open-source tools for the web.
Thoughts, travels, and photography from my personal archive.
Plugins, tools, and scripts I've built for the web community.
A lightweight plugin to remove WordPress emoji bloat from your frontend output, improving site performance. Active on 60,000+ sites.
A WordPress plugin that adds the ability to use unique custom headers on individual pages, posts, or categories. Active on 20,000+ sites and translated into 8 languages.
Monitor your Laravel application's real-world performance with a beautiful dashboard. Track response times, throughput, and queue health.
A Laravel-style caching library for WordPress, featuring clean architecture, stale-while-revalidate, and smart dependency injection.
Git for lazy people. A commit tool that automatically stages changes, generates AI commit messages via OpenRouter, and pushes to remote.
A link protector that wraps URLs behind a JavaScript challenge. Share Discord, Telegram, or any link publicly — bots can't run JS, so only real humans get through.
Technical deep dives, architectural thoughts, and development processes.
After 14 years and 20,000+ active sites, the Unique Headers WordPress plugin finally got the modernisation it deserved. Here’s what changed.
StaleCache 1.1 brings a cleaner architecture and easier testing to this Laravel-style caching library for WordPress — with fewer static methods and smarter dependency injection.
Modernizing a legacy WordPress plugin with PSR-4, PHPStan, and GitHub Actions. A look at cleaning up code debt and bringing modern DevOps to a simple utility.
BackPress was supposed to be the framework behind WordPress. It never was. I’m proposing we revive it as a legacy compatibility layer for a modern WordPress.
I'm a Kiwi currently living in Berlin. My career started in science, but my obsession with code led me down the path of software engineering. Today, I split my time between building tools for the web and capturing the world through photography.
This website serves as a unified hub for my life. The personal journal holds my photos, videos, and stories. The project showcase and geek blog outline my technical depth, open-source contributions, and thoughts on software architecture. I also have a keen interest in psychedelics and how they shape our minds.
Have a question or want to work together? Send me a message.
