Ben Ralton

Tidewatch is a portrait, one-thumb tower-defence game for iPhone and Android, set on a chain of tidal islands where the sea itself moves: towers built on the flats go dark at high water, buoys only fire when it comes in, and the light you defend is a lighthouse. Free, ad-free, no in-app purchases. Built solo — design, balance system, art pipeline and a deterministic simulation verified across engines.

vercel-discord-alerts is a single Vercel Function that turns Vercel's webhooks into Discord messages. Failed deployments, spend alerts and firewall events each arrive as one embed, coloured by severity, in the channel you choose.

You deploy it as its own Vercel project, point a team webhook and Spend Management at its one endpoint, and give it the Discord webhook URL and the Vercel secrets as environment variables. Vercel can POST to any URL but sends its own JSON, and Discord's webhook endpoint only accepts messages, so something has to sit between the two. The relay checks each delivery's HMAC signature before doing anything, answers 502 when Discord is unavailable so Vercel keeps retrying for up to 24 hours, and drops the duplicate deployment events Vercel sometimes sends a second apart. Without both variables it answers 503, so a public deployment cannot be used to spam a channel.

Built to get a failed production deploy or a blown spend budget in front of me without watching the Vercel dashboard.

Sourdough Planner is a small web app that plans one bulk batch of sourdough and splits it into several bakes: rolls, loaves, pizza bases, or whatever you keep as presets. It works out the flour, water, starter and salt, the weight per piece, and a clock-time schedule from mixing to baking with a lane per item.

Enter the starter you have and it sizes the batch and spreads the dough across your items, or enter the items you want and it tells you how much starter to have ready. Every percentage uses true hydration, counting the flour and water already inside the starter, and flex presets absorb any surplus or deficit in priority order. Built for a phone or tablet on the kitchen counter, with a keep-awake kitchen mode, dark mode, and print layout; everything is stored in the browser and the app ships as a zero-egress multi-arch container for the homelab.

Built to solve the Saturday-morning problem of turning one jar of starter into pizzas, rolls and loaves without a spreadsheet and a calculator.

Finance Planner is a self-hosted web app for planning savings toward upcoming payments. Record your income and your bills, goals and recurring payments, and it tells you how much to set aside each month per goal to hit its date — and what's left over, per account, per person, and across a household.

The core idea is that the unit of planning is the person, not the account. A bills pot fed by a current account can't be planned on its own, so one funding pass covers everything you own, and every screen — account page, household plan, flow diagram, forecast — is a view of that single pass. Income is money arriving from outside; a transfer between two of your own accounts is just your own money moving, and the two are never double-counted. Expenses are always funded before savings, funding loops are detected and reported rather than refused, and goals can be paced by a target date or driven by a fixed monthly contribution.

Households are an attribution layer over the same engine: tag accounts as shared or personal, set each member's contribution share, mark expenses shared or personal, and the app splits shared costs, funds everything by priority and works out the transfers each person should make. The plan is grounded in reality by a contributions ledger — record what you actually set aside, check in real balances, tick off transfers and close your month — and from that history it projects twelve months forward.

I built the whole thing: domain engine, multi-service backend, React PWA, and deployment. It's a pnpm/Turborepo monorepo with a pure TypeScript domain package (the savings engine, pinned to the penny by parity tests across every view), Fastify services for API, auth and calculation, Postgres via Drizzle, Zod contracts shared end to end, OpenTelemetry tracing across the service hops, and cloud-agnostic Kubernetes deployment via Helm. Most of the implementation was orchestrated across parallel AI agents from plan documents I wrote, with CI gating every wave.