Richard Applegate Deep dives into things I have built: architecture, decisions, and results.
Case studies
Case Studies
Applegate Monitor — Know Before Your Users Do
A self-hosted, multi-tenant status and uptime monitoring platform for websites, mail servers, DNS, VPN, IoT devices and TP-Link Omada networks. Unlimited branded status pages from one deployment, source-available and free for personal use.
CaddyUI — A Self-Hosted Control Plane for Caddy
CaddyUI manages proxy hosts, redirections, certificates and advanced routes for one Caddy server or a whole fleet, without touching config files. This study covers the eleven-release Lighthouse wave that took the login page to 99 / 100 / 100 / 100, and the seventy-plus releases since that turned it into a fleet-aware, enterprise-grade operations tool.
Joe Hardware Ops — Warehouse, Fleet and Joe OS Operations in One App
A self-hosted operations system for Joe Coffee's hardware: inventory, checkouts and deployments, carrier tracking, label printing, and a scheduled Joe OS update pipeline with Slack reporting, all in one Flask app built around live Esper fleet data.
Reviving Watchtower — Fixing an Abandoned Docker Auto-Updater
How I forked, fixed, and re-released Watchtower after upstream abandoned it: lifecycle bugs, Docker SDK v26 migration, a from-source multi-stage build, and the v1.0.1 release.
Status Server — One Deployment, Many Branded Status Pages
How Applegate Monitor serves unlimited branded status pages from a single Node.js and MariaDB deployment: the check engine, tenancy model, automated incidents, and the decision to remove high availability.