Richard Applegate I’ve been pouring my heart into building open-source projects since April 2026, and I want to take a moment to reflect on the journey, share what I’ve been working on, and say a massive **thank you** to this amazing community for getting to know me and supporting my work.
As a Deaf developer managing a 24/7 multi-server infrastructure, I rely heavily on tools that are powerful, efficient, and easy to use. When those tools don’t exist, I build them.
Here is a look at what I’ve been working on and where I am heading next.
### 🚀 The Birth of CaddyUI
For three years, I relied heavily on Nginx Proxy Manager to handle my reverse proxies. However, as updates started slowing down, I realized I needed something more tailored and modern. I have always preferred **Caddy** for its raw power, speed, and automatic HTTPS capabilities, but I felt it was missing a comprehensive, user-friendly UI.
While alternatives like CaddyManagerUI exist, they haven’t been actively updated since late 2025 and didn’t quite fit my operational needs. So, I took the leap and built **CaddyUI** entirely from scratch!
It’s packed with rich features for specific proxy hosts, automated backups, and more. I’m incredibly proud to say it is now officially **production-ready**.
🔗 **Check out CaddyUI on GitHub:** https://github.com/X4Applegate/caddyui
I’m relatively new to the broader Open Source community and GitHub, but my big goal is to get CaddyUI on the official *”Awesome Selfhosted”* list by April 2027.
### 📊 Applegate Monitor (Status Server)
Beyond CaddyUI, I’ve also developed **Applegate Monitor** (open-sourced as Status Server). When you are hosting your own fleet of servers, uptime and observability are everything.
I created this custom operational and observability platform from the ground up to monitor my own infrastructure. Putting my skills to use to build tools that help people easily monitor and manage their websites, emails, and web services on their own custom domains feels absolutely incredible.
🔗 **Check out Status Server on GitHub:** https://github.com/X4Applegate/status-server
### 🛠️ Growing My Tech Stack
Over the years, I’ve worked hard to build up my coding skills across **Go, Python, PHP, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and shell scripting**. Building these full-stack projects has been the perfect way to combine my background in IT and networking with my love for software development.
### 🤖 Meet Jarvis & The Future of ASL Integration
But software isn’t the only thing I’m building! I’ve also built my own personal AI Agent server named **Jarvis**. Jarvis travels with me everywhere—monitoring my server health, running updates, and helping me fix bugs.
As a Deaf developer whose native language is ASL, my ultimate dream looks to the future. Once open-source Sign Language-to-Text models become available and reliable, I plan to learn how to integrate them directly into Jarvis. My goal is to eventually communicate with my AI natively in American Sign Language, and someday even build an animated Anime ASL avatar for him so he can sign back to me! 🤟✨
### Looking Forward
I can’t wait to keep growing, coding, and showing what I can build for this community. Thank you all for being part of this journey with me, whether you’ve starred my repos, tested my apps, or just followed along.
The future is bright, and there is so much more to come!