Developer.
Engineer.
Explorer.
I'm Ryan Hellyer, a Kiwi living in Berlin. Capturing stories between commits and building open-source tools for the web.
Developer.
Latest Journal
Thoughts, travels, and photography from my personal archive.
Open Source & Projects
Plugins, tools, and scripts I've built for the web community.
Disable Emojis
A lightweight plugin to remove WordPress emoji bloat from your frontend output, improving site performance. Active on 60,000+ sites.
Unique Headers
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.
Production Stats
Production-ready performance monitoring for Laravel and Symfony applications, injected as HTML comments.
Stale Cache
A Laravel-style caching library for WordPress, featuring clean architecture, stale-while-revalidate, and smart dependency injection.
Git Meh
Git for lazy people. A commit tool that automatically stages changes, generates AI commit messages via a Symfony API, and pushes to remote.
GPX Editor
A fast, smooth GPX route editor for cycling and hiking. Plot, tweak, and export routes with elevation tools, live GPS tracking, and multi-format export.
Spam Destroyer
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.
RAM Notifier
A lightweight Linux desktop RAM notifier that sends tiered desktop notifications when available memory drops below configurable thresholds.
From the development blog
Technical deep dives, architectural thoughts, and development processes.
Fatbox: one container to rule them all
I wrote a while back about switching to Bluefin OS and why I think immutable OSs are the future. Bluefin is a derivative of Fedora Silverblue, but it...
Running your own LLM chat app
How I set up my own LLM chat app. A quick config guide for self-hosting your own AI platform.
In progress: GPX Route Editor
I built a fast GPX route editor using Laravel and TypeScript, featuring elevation tools, GPS tracking, route sections and multiple export formats.
Git Meh update: Symfony
Git Meh’s API moves from Laravel to Symfony, with added support for testing API endpoints that use self-signed HTTPS certificates.
My Story
I'm a Kiwi currently living in Berlin. My career started in science (you can read my published research papers), 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 is my personal archive: journal for photos and stories, projects and a development blog for technical depth, and occasional presentations from conferences. I also have a keen interest in psychedelics and how they shape our minds.
Let's Talk
Have a question or want to work together? Send me a message.