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.
BNN Label Automation — Zero-Touch Label Printing from Slack
A label printing pipeline for the Joe Marketplace device fleet: a Slack slash command travels through n8n and a WireGuard tunnel to a headless Windows PC that prints a Brother label in under three seconds, with no drivers on anyone's machine.
CaddyUI — Reaching a Perfect Lighthouse Score
How an eleven-release performance and accessibility wave took CaddyUI's login page from a Lighthouse score in the thirties to 99 / 100 / 100 / 100, measured from a residential ISP rather than a CDN.
Joe Coffee — Device Intelligence Platform
A real-time monitoring and observability stack for a nationwide fleet of Android point-of-sale devices: a multi-threaded Python sync engine over the Esper MDM API, MariaDB, Grafana dashboards, and Slack automation, all self-hosted.
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.