I'm Nick Webster. For most of my working life I looked after enterprise Microsoft servers, Exchange especially, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds. The whole time, I was building things on the side just because I enjoyed it. Turns out I enjoyed it a lot: since 2018 it's been my actual job. These days I build web and mobile apps for a living.

vexil keeps an eye on your sites and servers and tells you the moment one stops answering. It's an uptime monitor written in Go, open source and free, with the handful of checks you actually use and almost nothing to configure: point it at a URL, say how you'd like to be told, done. It's also built to look good, on the grounds that a dashboard you end up staring at during an outage may as well be worth looking at. Take it, put your own name on it, run it as your own.

Warmly lets you leave a kind message pinned to a spot, and the next person who wanders past picks it up. A quiet word from a stranger, left to be found by whoever happens along. No feeds, no follower counts, no one trying to sell you anything: just a small, unexpected bit of nice left for whoever comes next. It won't change the world, but it might make someone's afternoon, and that'll do.

SSHush keeps an eye on your Linux servers from your pocket. It logs in over SSH with your own credentials, shows you each machine's vital signs updating live, and hands you a proper built-in terminal for when something needs a stern word. All that's free and unlimited, with nothing installed on your servers. And if you'd sooner hear about a full disk at 3am than discover it at nine, a small open-source agent can sit on your server and send a real alert to your phone, even with the app shut. That part's a subscription, and it's the only part that is. This is the app I wish I'd had during all those years of babysitting servers.

Every day is the anniversary of something. On This Day Photos digs through your own photo library and shows you the pictures you took on this date in years gone by, right there on your Home Screen. No logins, no ads, and nothing ever leaves your device, just the moments you'd half forgotten, served up fresh each morning.

isitdaytime is a little web app that pipes sunrise, sunset, moon phases, seasons and the weather forecast straight into your calendar, whether you live in Apple, Google or Outlook. Pick from nearly 200,000 locations worldwide, choose what you want to see, and it quietly appears alongside your appointments. Free, and genuinely useful if you like knowing when the sun's due to clock off.