A Blog Series About Building a Self-Hosted Media and Cloud Ecosystem
There comes a point in every hobby project when the technical challenges stop being the biggest obstacle and bureaucracy takes over. For Needlefin, a tvOS application I’ve been building alongside Needle Music, that moment arrived this week.
Read more →Needle was supposed to be a music player. Then it became a library manager. Then a backend. Then a web player. Then an infrastructure project. At this point, I've stopped pretending I know where the boundaries are.
Read more →The detective work pile claimed another victim. After spending hours scanning records into Needle’s newly born physical media archive system, I eventually stumbled upon a Madonna record that refused to cooperate with reality itself.
Read more →The barcode scanner experiment escalated quickly. What started as: “Wouldn’t it be neat if Needle could keep track of physical records too?” turned into an entire weekend of pulling vinyl records out of shelves, scanning barcodes, arguing with Discogs, rediscovering forgotten albums, and slowly realizing that physical media collections are gloriously chaotic creatures.
Read more →Through absolutely no fault of mine. There’s a very specific moment in personal projects where documentation stops being documentation and quietly turns into emotional support. It usually happens somewhere after midnight...
Read more →I crossed the finish line. The iOS app is done. The Android app has been updated to use the new streaming quality system. The backend now properly handles pre-generated AAC streaming files. Everything works smoothly, reliably, and honestly… beautifully.
Read more →The iOS version of Needle was so close to being done. The UI looked fantastic. The library synced beautifully. Artwork loaded instantly thanks to the cache system. Offline mode worked. Heartbeat-based online/offline recovery worked. The app felt smooth, polished, and oddly… complete. Then it all broke...
Read more →There is a very specific kind of danger that comes with personal projects. Not the obvious danger. No. The truly dangerous moments begin with innocent thoughts...
Read more →There comes a point in every personal project where reality taps you on the shoulder and politely asks: "This is all very impressive, mate… but can you actually use it?" That moment arrived shortly after I finished building the Needle backend and web player.
Read more →At some point during this whole “accidentally building my own cloud” saga, I remembered I had a Mac mini lying around in a drawer.
Read more →If Docker teaches humility, Nextcloud teaches patience. By the time Nextcloud entered the picture, most of the infrastructure already worked.
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