The one who keeps the birds

OfBirds is a one-person flock — every bird here is dreamt up, built, and kept aloft by the same pair of hands.

I'm a software architect. By day I build big systems inside big companies, with all the meetings that implies. By night — and the odd stolen weekend — I build small ones out here, the way I'd want them built: self-hostable, honest, and yours to keep. I do it because I enjoy it and it makes sense to me. That's OfBirds.

The birds aren't a gimmick — I simply love them, and the name turned out to fit. Software you run yourself is something you keep and tend, not something you rent. So each app gets a bird and a colour, the flock grows slowly, and a raven guards the door. Every bird also carries a plainer codename on its GitHub repo, for when the whimsy has to talk to a container.

Under the feathers it's all fairly ordinary: .NET and C# at the core, with REST, GraphQL, or gRPC to talk — whichever the job calls for — Angular or React up front, Docker everywhere, one shared sign-in for the whole flock, and a licensing system for the birds that have to make rent. OpenTelemetry runs through all of it, so nothing misbehaves in the dark.

It all runs on infrastructure I maintain myself. A homelab does the building, testing, and staging; the birds that fly in public land on rented VPS boxes I keep running, and keeping them aloft isn't free — which is where a donation or funding link quietly helps.

No team, no roadmap deck, no growth targets — just a slow, deliberate flock and the one promise underneath all of it: whatever happens, you can always run these yourself. That's the whole idea. The rest is just birds.

— Aleksandar, keeper of the flock