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pacmansyyu commented on Show HN: A fast, privacy-first image converter that runs in browser   imageconverter.dev/... · Posted by u/wainguo
pacmansyyu · 4 months ago
Congratulations on building this! I certainly do agree with the fact that there are a lot of sites that force you to upload, ask for your email, and sometimes even add a watermark to the image; amongst other unknown things.

Although from first look, I can tell you that there's a lot of text on the site and it's a bit too cramped. From my perspective, tools like these should get out of the way and the UX should be self-explanatory for an image "conversion" tool. Basically, just a box to select, drag/drop images, a few user inputs such as the output quality and format. That's about it. A single line at the top explaining what the tool does (and that it is local) should be good enough.

Also, the title says "PNG to JPG converter," but the rest of the site claims it can convert to quite a lot more than just those format. You can possibly change that to, as an example, something like: "ImageConverter - Convert images between formats, locally". And you can get rid of multiple pages, turning it into a single-page with all the possible output options.

As a sidenote, I've been using Mazanoke for this: https://github.com/civilblur/mazanoke. It's not my project, just something I happened to stumble upon a while ago, but it's similar to your project and works exactly like you would want it to.

From my test, the rest of it works great. Good luck!

pacmansyyu commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
pacmansyyu · 7 months ago
I've been working on an encrypted environment variables management tool, called kiln[1], for teams. I know, tools like age and SOPS exist, but this partly came through because of the lack of a good UX around the encryption part especially for a team-based workflow. I aim to continue building kiln as a developer-first experience, making it seamless to integrate into a large team's workflows.

The idea came to me when we were trying to find ways to manage Terraform secrets , CI vars were a no-go because people sometimes wish to deploy locally for testing stuff, and tools like Vault have honestly been a pain to manage, well, for us at least. So I have been building this tool where the variables are encrypted with `age`, have RBACs around it, and an entire development workflow (run ad-hoc commands, export, templating, etc) that can easily be integrated into any CI/CD alongside local development. We're using this and storing the encrypted secrets in Git now, so everything is version-controlled and can be found in a single place.

Do give it a try. I am open to any questions or suggestions! Interested to know what people think of this. Thanks!

[1]: https://kiln.sh

pacmansyyu commented on Show HN: kiln – Git-native, decentralized secret management using age   kiln.sh/... · Posted by u/pacmansyyu
goku12 · 7 months ago
> Why not SOPS? SOPS is great for general file encryption, but kiln is built specifically for the environment variable workflow. It has commands like "run", "export", and built-in team management. Think "SOPS for .env files" with a focus on developer UX.

As far as I know, SOPS supports the same workflow with the 'exec-env' subcommand. What would be the difference here?

pacmansyyu · 7 months ago
Yes, SOPS does have `exec-env` which does the same thing, kind of. From one of the issues, it currently lacks support for the POSIX-semantic way to run commands: https://github.com/getsops/sops/issues/1469, where you cannot add a `--` to tell sops that everything after it is supposed to be a command, so you end up having to quote everything. Other things that I found lacking were that with SOPS, adding a new team member means manually updating .sops.yaml, re-encrypting all files, and managing PGP/age keys. With kiln, you just add their SSH key to kiln.toml and run `kiln rekey`.

kiln also lets you have different access controls per environment file (devs get staging, only ops get production) without separate .sops.yaml configs, automatically discovers keys from SSH agent/~/.kiln/, and has built-in template rendering and export formats for different tools. You could definitely build similar workflows with SOPS + scripts, or any other tool, but kiln packages these common patterns into a single tool with better UX for teams.

Think of kiln as "opinionated SOPS", focused specifically on environment variables rather than general file encryption.

pacmansyyu commented on Show HN: kiln – Git-native, age-encrypted secrets for dev workflows   kiln.sh/... · Posted by u/pacmansyyu
mutant · 7 months ago
I thought this was solved with SOPS/AGE?
pacmansyyu · 7 months ago
Well, technically SOPS/age are both encryption tools first. Both of them are excellent, mind you. But they lack the user experience, specifically SOPS, with handling keys in a multi-user environment, and subsequently with the overall developer workflow. They do offer a lot more than just accessing environment variables securely though, something that kiln is trying to solve.

At first, I did consider using them instead of building my own tool on top of age. But our requirements were far beyond just encrypting and decrypting files in a single environment.

What kiln adds here is the role-based access control, so you can define multiple files, and users/groups who should be able to access them. It also adds to the developer workflow where you can directly run commands through kiln with the variables injected in the command's shell environment. You can also render templates for all the kiln-encrypted files you have access to.

You can say it's a wrapper over age, but adds functionality that allows seamless sharing of developer workflows, and environments, all from a single place. It's git-friendly, and primarily aims for your secrets to travel along with the code so all deployments can be done offline (as an alternative to something like Infiscal, or Vault). I've tried to make it as simple as possible to adopt for anyone in the team.

The only other best way for me to put it is that you should try it out, and I'm sure it'll be helpful in a lot of ways. If you have any more questions, I'm happy to answer them!

pacmansyyu commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
pacmansyyu · 10 months ago
I'm working on Damon[1], a Nomad Events stream operator that automates cluster operations and eliminates repetitive DevOps tasks. It's a lightweight Go binary that monitors the Nomad events stream and triggers actions based on configurable providers.

A few examples of what it can currently do:

- Automated data backup: Listens for Nomad job events and spawns auxiliary jobs to back up data from services like PostgreSQL or Redis to your storage backend based on job meta tags. The provider for this is not limited to backups, as it allows users to define their custom job and ACL templates, and expected tags. So it can potentially run anything based on the job registration and de-registration events.

- Cross-namespace service discovery: Provides a lightweight DNS server that acts as a single source of truth for services across all namespaces, solving Nomad's limitation of namespace-bound services. Works as a drop-in resolver for HAProxy, Nginx, etc.

- Event-driven task execution: Allows defining custom actions triggered by specific Nomad events; perfect for file transfers, notifications, or kicking off dependent processes without manual intervention. This provider takes in a user-defined shell script and executes it as a nomad job based on any nomad event trigger the user defines in the configuration.

Damon uses a provider-based architecture, making it extensible for different use cases. You can define your own providers with custom tags, job templates, and event triggers. There's also go-plugin support (though not recommended for production) for runtime extension.

I built this to eliminate the mundane operational tasks our team kept putting off. It's already saving us significant time and reducing gruntwork in our clusters.

Check out the repository[1] if you're interested in automating your Nomad operations. I'd love to hear your thoughts or answer any questions about implementation or potential use cases!

[1]: https://github.com/Thunderbottom/damon

pacmansyyu commented on Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics   github.com/umami-software... · Posted by u/ksec
XCSme · a year ago
Have you also considered Percona MySQL server? I think they say they have the best performance (but I haven't tested their implementation yet).
pacmansyyu · a year ago
No, unfortunately our company’s and external regulatory compliance policies require us to host all data within the country itself, alongside it being required to be run on an infrastructure that is easily auditable. So as a policy within the company, all our internal services are open source and self hosted.
pacmansyyu commented on Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics   github.com/umami-software... · Posted by u/ksec
calyhre · a year ago
Could you describe a bit the load and the server/db specs? I’m using Plaisible right now and I wonder how it would handle with similar specs
pacmansyyu · a year ago
We had separate database and app instances, the DB instance had 32 cores and 64GB memory, which we doubled to keep up with our requirements. We have tens of millions of visits daily, and our database was close to ~300GB within the first few months.

For plausible I believe that since it runs on Postgres, scaling should not be a problem as long as you scale the resources with it.

u/pacmansyyu

KarmaCake day77February 23, 2017
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