the unconquered. ex libris Brandon LaRocque.

programmer. curator. former chef. nearly twenty years in kitchens and mining camps before The C Programming Language, read at night between shifts. now a computer engineering student with a CS degree underway. the credential follows the practice.

i build native linux desktop software for people who treat their library as worth maintaining. my focus is on rich metadata, strict organization, and local-first architectures—i try to carry librarian vibes into the codebase. rust with gtk4, c built with meson, python where the standard library reaches. it runs on your machine and answers to you.

no cloud.  no docker.  no electron.  no telemetry.  no accounts.  no vc.
your data on your disk: sqlite in WAL, single-writer worker, read-only pool, FTS5.
compile-time boundaries over code-review rules.  hard ceilings over soft benchmarks.
local-first, or it doesn't ship.

• Viaduct · a fast, local-first rss reader that treats articles as text, not web pages. An opinionated Rust port of NetNewsWire Rust · GTK4 · shipping v3.3.1
• Conservatory · my take on a calibre for audio. music, podcasts, and audiobooks - all through libmpv. far from finished but i like it Rust · GTK4 · shipping v0.4.1

• CalibreQuarry · ultimately, a front-end for cquarry. A handful of auditing and organizing tools for Calibre. Python · tqdm · complete v3.19.0
• Bindery · comprehensively audit and repair broken epubs with a lightning-fast persistent Java daemon. native calibre db integration through cquarry, lossy watermark stripping, safe HTML tag unwrapping, and content damage flagging (ocr, foreign language). epubcheck-clean. Python · tqdm · complete v0.14.0
• Carrel · a single-user reading room for one curated calibre library. no login, metadata.db attached read-only at the connection, and calibre's own search grammar where upstream had none: author:"King" used to return 0 results, now 55. wings, a hierarchical category browser, ctrl-k over 6,975 destinations, and live statistics. code rides in a companion fork, Carrel-calibre-web. Python · CSS · shipping v0.9.2

• Lattice · cli for music collectors. library trees, integrity checks, cover and tag audits. the filesystem is the source of truth. Python · complete v4.14.0
• deadbeef-cui · faceted, foobar2000-columns library browser plugin for the DeaDBeeF player. C · complete v1.3.3

• Colophon · native statistics viewer for koreader. imports a copy of statistics.sqlite3, draws its own cairo charts, ships the reading analytics nobody else has. Rust · GTK4 · shipping v2.1.1
• Dead Reckoning · navigation-cockpit preset for koreader's bookends plugin: session pace, chapter eta, projected finish date, chapter ticks on the progress bar. Lua · complete
• 2-kobo-style-sleepscreen-banner-prettified · koreader user patch: redraws the sleep screen as a kobo-style floating card over your cover, with a random highlight as a pull-quote. a prettified fork of zenixlabs' patch. Lua · complete
• 1-timezone · koreader user patch: forces a correct posix timezone inside the process (setenv + tzset), fixing the clock, time sync, and autowarmth on framework-less installs where no TZ is set. Lua · complete

• cquarry · a lightweight, canonical python package providing read-only access to calibre's metadata.db and a full parser for calibre's search expression grammar. powers CalibreQuarry, Hermitage, Bindery, and Carrel. Python · stdlib · complete
• vir-search · a shared rust library for parsing calibre-style search expressions into a typed AST. used by Atrium and Conservatory. Rust · complete v1.0.1
• vir-tui · a lightweight python library providing a robust terminal ui (curses grid menus, pagers, prompts) for CLI tools without the bloat of textual. used by CalibreQuarry and Lattice. Python · complete v1.0.0
• vir-gtk · a shared gtk4 styling library for native linux apps, extracting the Kanagawa theme engine. Rust · GTK4 · complete v1.0.1

• Hearthfall · grimdark clan-survival for the terminal. seasonal turns, a fog-black map, and a finite clan split between foraging, exploring, and war. scouting reveals enemy composition, so the fun lives in the preparation rather than the swing. the engine is stdlib-only pure logic with no i/o and no rendering, driveable from a repl; every draw goes through one seeded rng, so a seed replays a run exactly. Python · Textual
• opends · reverse-engineering toolkit for ssi's dark sun crpgs (1993–94). a disassembler and byte-exact reassembler for the games' undocumented gpl bytecode vm, plus gff/sprite/save editors. bring your own gog copy. Rust · Python

the full thirty, with screenshots and the long writeups, live in the codex → virinvictus.github.io

• mastodon · @Bdkl@mastodon.social
• linkedin · linkedin.com/in/bdkl
• now playing · last.fm/user/bdkl__

Rust · C · Python · GTK4 · SQLite · Meson, with a soft spot for Ruby.

if any of this is useful to you and you'd like to chip in:

• liberapay · liberapay.com/bdkl
• bitcoin

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