01Realtime social app
gratitude.forum
A warm little gratitude journal. People post short notes and watch them drift across a shared live canvas in the same room.
Software engineer
Ali Umar builds realtime things for the web.
Realtime systems, browser experiments, and small tools that feel good to use. Currently building a gratitude journal and a multiplayer game.
01 — Selected work
Things I've built
A mix of shipped products, long-running experiments, and infrastructure I run myself.
02Multiplayer game
Shroom.io
A browser-based .io game with realtime multiplayer and persistent connections. A long-term project aimed at a polished, hosted release.
03Discord bot
Mushroom Bot
A Discord bot with a music player, queueing, and playback controls, deployed and configured with Ansible.
04Browser experiment
Audio Visualizer
Upload an MP3 and see visualizations driven by the audio signal. Self-hosted with DNS, a load balancer, Cloudflare, and GitHub Actions deploys.
02 — About
The whole path from keystroke to server.
I'm a software engineer who likes the layer where product, network, and browser meet. Most of what I build starts with a simple question — can this feel instantaneous? — and ends with realtime state, low-latency connections, or a canvas doing something it probably shouldn't.
My projects tend to be self-hosted: Linux, SQLite or PocketBase, DNS, Cloudflare, and GitHub Actions. I'd rather understand the whole path than stop at the framework.
- FocusRealtime web, browser graphics, self-hosted infrastructure
- ToolsTypeScript, Node, SQLite, PocketBase, Ansible
- NowBuilding gratitude.forum and Shroom.io