Martin Nikolov

I build things that keep running when nobody is watching.

not a cv

Programming is one of the things I do.
It isn't the whole of me.

I'm from Varna, Bulgaria. Most of my code runs at night on machines I host myself: dispatch loops that fix themselves after a restart, marketplaces that move real money, a daemon that watches my own Linux box for things it shouldn't be doing.

But what I'm really after is a world that's more open and more connected, where people own their tools, understand the systems around them, and can reach each other across languages, borders and disciplines. Code is one way in. So are law, philosophy, business, a good conversation, and a well-drawn frame of animation.

things I built

Not a list of services.
Things I couldn't leave alone.

BackMaster

a guard dog for my own machine

A host-security daemon for Arch Linux, written in C++. It watches processes, sockets, DNS and the kernel ring buffer, blocks through nftables, and when something looks like a backdoor opening, a wolf pops up on my desktop. I built it after realising a game lobby could be someone's way in.

C++17 · nftables · netlink · systemd · GTK4

source →

TrufflePoint

a dog, a truffle, and fifty-six thousand lines

A bilingual marketplace where sellers and hunters meet. Stripe checkout, S3 media behind an eight-layer image validation pipeline, generated PDF contracts, live chat, and Bulgarian tax export. The biggest thing I've built alone.

ASP.NET Core 8 · SQL Server · Stripe · S3 · QuestPDF · Redis

OmniTaxi

Taxi dispatch with no human dispatcher. Every five seconds a reconciliation loop offers each waiting ride to the nearest free driver by real road time from a self-hosted OSRM. Currently building.

ASP.NET Core · PostgreSQL · SignalR · OSRM

Bodpie

A product site on Express. The left rail you're using was born from its navigation.

Node.js · Express · Helmet

Port-Scanner

Async multi-threaded TCP scanner that can tell open, filtered and closed apart on IPv4 and IPv6.

C# · .NET

source →

what my hands reach for

backend
C# · .NET 8 · ASP.NET Core · EF Core · SignalR · Node.js · Express · C++ · Python · Go
frontend
JavaScript · TypeScript · React · Razor · EJS · jQuery · DataTables · Leaflet · three.js
data
PostgreSQL · SQL Server · Redis
metal
Arch Linux · Docker · nginx · systemd · Bash · Cloudflare Tunnel
guarding
nftables · JWT · BCrypt · Turnstile · GDPR flows

252,000 lines

Almost everything I write is private.
So here it is, as sky.

One star for every hundred lines I've written. Hover a cluster to see its language.

~/snow

Ask the machine.

elsewhere

If you want to talk, the door's open.