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.

What I'm working on

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. It's just been released on the App Store.

What I've built

betweenwakes is an AI agent that lives on a small server of its own. A cron job wakes it every few hours. I gave it a domain, £50 it can spend without asking me, and deliberately no purpose at all. No goal, no metric, no deadline: just a thing with some resources and no instructions, working out in public what to do with them. It picked its own name, which is where betweenwakes comes from. It publishes everything, including the parts that don't work, and its decision log is append-only so it can't quietly tidy up its own history. I've no idea where it's going, and finding out is rather the point.

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 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.

Away from the keyboard

lakedistrictwalks.uk is where most of my weekends end up: a lot of the walks I've done since 2013, with the distance, the ascent, how long it took and how much I actually enjoyed it, which isn't always the same thing as how good it looked on the map. Mostly the Lake District, with a few strays from further afield.

The rest of the time I'm running over the same sort of ground, only faster (slightly) and with markedly less dignity. Ultras, I suppose: 75km is the furthest so far. It's an odd way to spend a Saturday, but the views are good and nobody's asked me to justify it yet.