ObscuroMagna

About

A native New Yorker building tools for the hobbies and work that fill the rest of the day.

The short version

I'm a lifelong New Yorker with a career in IT and a collection of hobbies that don't quite fit on a single shelf. ObscuroMagna is where the two meet — small, independently built apps that scratch my own itches well enough that they might scratch yours too.

Work

Years of service desk, systems, and infrastructure work taught me that the messy middle of IT — triage, escalation, priority calls — is mostly pattern recognition. That experience became Cognitier, a platform of interactive training games for service desk teams.

Hobbies that turned into software

A big chunk of my spare time lives on the painting table: Warhammer 40K, Age of Sigmar, Kill Team, a bit of BattleTech. Tracking what's unpainted, primed, or finished across 80-plus factions is a problem, so I built miniMomentum.

The other chunk lives in books. I keep a commonplace book of the passages worth going back to, and eventually the notebook became Locus Communis — a digital version with page-turn animations, shared collections, and an Obsidian sync plugin.

Bad Takes is none of the above. It's a small real-time voting app for watching consensus form around, well, terrible opinions. Built for the fun of it.

Tools I build with

A living list — updated when anything changes.

Writing code

  • Claude Code Primary AI coding assistant.
  • VS Code Main editor.
  • Git + GitHub Source control and hosting.

Frontend

  • React UI for Cognitier, Locus Communis, Bad Takes.
  • Vite Dev server and bundler.
  • Astro This site. Content-focused, ships minimal JS.
  • TipTap Rich text editing in Locus Communis.
  • Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS miniMomentum — no build step, offline-first PWA.

Backend & data

  • Supabase Auth, Postgres, Realtime, RLS for Cognitier and Locus Communis.
  • Firebase Realtime Database Real-time vote syncing in Bad Takes.
  • Google Drive API Backup and sync for miniMomentum and Locus Communis.
  • Open Library API Book metadata lookup in Locus Communis.
  • Hardcover API Book metadata and covers in Locus Communis, alongside Open Library.

Infrastructure

  • Vercel Hosting, serverless functions, edge rendering (including @vercel/og).
  • Cloudflare DNS.

Workstation

  • Firefox Primary browser.
  • Obsidian Notes, reading logs, and the companion vault for Locus Communis.

How to reach me

Find me on Bluesky, Mastodon, GitHub, or email.