brice allen
developer / developer

one compiles. the other gets mixed 1+1 at 20°C and expires in the tray.
denver, colorado · cs, university of colorado denver · open to interesting work

How this portfolio works

this site has no images. i have aphantasia — when i close my eyes, nothing is there. no apple, no beach, no faces. what i have instead is structure: everything connected to everything, a web you can pull on from any point and feel the whole thing move.

so this is a portfolio built the way i actually think. the work below is cut into patches and sewn down. pull a thread above and watch what holds together.

// no framework, no build step, no tracking, no webfonts — the type is whatever your machine keeps at home. one file. view source — there's more in there.

tower — a house that runs on containers

unraid · 44 containers · traefik + authelia · gluetun/wireguard · adguard → unbound · borgmatic

the home server. media, dashboards, dns that trusts no upstream (unbound talking straight to the roots), single sign-on at the front door, segmented networks behind it, and encrypted backups buried offsite nightly — backups that have actually been restored, which is the only kind that count.

it is opinionated infrastructure for two people and a dog, maintained like it serves ten thousand.

stack-health.sh

bash · v17.6 and counting · proper git history

a shell script that grew a personality. container liveness, traefik route discovery via labels, dns sanity, vpn egress checks, timed reports. proof that the best monitoring tool is the one you actually read.

cryptkeys.rip — music made of ghosts

python · dsp · fastapi · docker · a graveyard with a ui

audio distilled into structural fingerprints — envelopes, rhythm, spectral contours — and then the body is deleted. a mortician schedules deaths for .crypt files and issues ascii death certificates. a resurrector raises them later as something adjacent: recognizably the same skeleton, wearing different air.

started as a cli, now a full web app with decay models and a graveyard you can walk.

THICK PIGEON

three.js · webrtc/peerjs · node · docker

a peer-to-peer feeding arena in a browser tab. no accounts, no server state worth stealing, just a lightweight signaling service and however much game fits before anyone has to install anything.

loudspeakers, from filament up

3d printing (cf-petg) · acoustic design · crossover work · measurement

printed spherical enclosures around little dayton 3.5s — port geometry, damping, print orientation all argued over. open-baffle experiments with full-range paper. a two-way build with a 10-inch woofer that owes an apology to devore.

a crossover is just eq you had to solder. i mean that affectionately.

nikko trm-800, $10

1977 flagship · dc offset fault · full recap

bought for ten dollars with dc on the outputs. diagnosed, recapped, brought back. vintage gear is the original open source: schematics in the manual, parts you can see, failure modes you can reason about with a meter and patience.

hopgoblin

meshtastic · lora · 900 MHz · router node

a mesh node on the balcony, relaying packets for strangers it will never meet. no sim, no subscription — infrastructure as a neighborly act. a 1-watt dedicated relay is next.

visible mends

sashiko · boro · the aesthetic of this page

i mend things so the mend shows — white thread on indigo, new caps in old amps, a reindexed database. things that show their repairs tell the truth about time. hiding the stitch is just lying with extra steps.

field work

thrift bins · estate sales · dead formats · a darkroom

weekends reading strangers' lives through what's left behind: film cameras, cassettes with handwriting on them, speakers someone loved once. some of it gets repaired. some of it gets listened to. all of it gets considered.

previous lives

advanced sommelier track · beverage director, telluride · urban winery, ~25,000 cases

before software there was wine: cellar floors, service, a winery scaled from nothing. wine is systems thinking with one release per year — you get a single deploy each harvest and the rollback story is terrible. it also taught me palate, hospitality, and how to stay calm while everything ferments.

i still take the exams. the practical is a kind of live debugging, blind.

[unnamed]

ongoing since high school · no link · on purpose

an anonymous art practice. original paintings placed in thrift stores where they'll be found rather than shown. if you've ever taken one home, that was the point. it doesn't go on a portfolio. this patch is the most you get.

get a thread to me

open to collaborations and work that values clear edges and patient internals — infrastructure, sound tools, odd instruments, systems that explain themselves. i like small teams, honest logs, and problems that are secretly about people.