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.
Download HLS streams as continuous local files. Stitches video segments in real time for buffer-free playback while downloading.
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...
Modernizing a legacy WordPress plugin with PSR-4, PHPStan, and GitHub Actions. A look at cleaning up code debt...
BackPress was supposed to be the framework behind WordPress. It never was. I'm proposing we revive it...
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.
