the unconquered. ex libris Brandon LaRocque.

programmer. curator. former chef. ten years in kitchens and mining camps before The C Programming Language, read at night between shifts. now a computer engineering student with a CS degree underway. the credential follows the practice.

i build native linux desktop software for people who treat their library as worth maintaining. my focus is on rich metadata, strict organization, and local-first architectures—i try to carry librarian vibes into the codebase. rust with gtk4, c built with meson, python where the standard library reaches. it runs on your machine and answers to you.

no cloud.  no docker.  no electron.  no telemetry.  no accounts.  no vc.
your data on your disk: sqlite in WAL, single-writer worker, read-only pool, FTS5.
compile-time boundaries over code-review rules.  hard ceilings over soft benchmarks.
local-first, or it doesn't ship.

• Bindery · comprehensively audit and repair broken epubs with a lightning-fast persistent Java daemon. native calibre db integration through cquarry, lossy watermark stripping, safe HTML tag unwrapping, and content damage flagging (ocr, foreign language). epubcheck-clean. Python · tqdm · complete v0.14.0
• Carrel · a single-user reading room for one curated calibre library. no login, metadata.db attached read-only at the connection, and calibre's own search grammar where upstream had none: author:"King" used to return 0 results, now 55. wings, a hierarchical category browser, ctrl-k over 6,975 destinations, and live statistics. code rides in a companion fork, Carrel-calibre-web. Python · CSS · shipping v0.9.2
• CalibreQuarry · reads a calibre metadata.db raw, in read-only via cquarry. catalogs, audits, exports. no calibredb, no dependencies. Python · stdlib · complete v3.11.0
• Hermitage · read-only gallery browser for calibre libraries powered by cquarry. Python
• cquarry · a lightweight, canonical python package providing read-only access to calibre's metadata.db and a full parser for calibre's search expression grammar. powers calibrequarry, hermitage, bindery, and carrel. Python · stdlib · complete

• Conservatory · calibre for audio. a native linux manager that owns and moves your music, podcasts, and audiobooks on disk, all played from one libmpv queue. sqlite is the source of truth, with search via vir-search and UI styled by vir-gtk. Rust · GTK4
• AudiobookTools · declarative tag-and-folder normalizer for an audiobook shelf. one catalogue drives both the embedded tags and the on-disk tree; dry-run by default, every apply reversible. Python
• Lattice · cli for music collectors. library trees, integrity checks, cover and tag audits. the filesystem is the source of truth. Python · complete v4.14.0
• deadbeef-cui · faceted, foobar2000-columns library browser plugin for the DeaDBeeF player. C · complete v1.3.3

• Colophon · native statistics viewer for koreader. imports a copy of statistics.sqlite3, draws its own cairo charts, ships the reading analytics nobody else has. Rust · GTK4 · shipping v2.1.1
• Dead Reckoning · navigation-cockpit preset for koreader's bookends plugin: session pace, chapter eta, projected finish date, chapter ticks on the progress bar. Lua · complete
• Kobo-style Sleepscreen Banner · koreader user patch: redraws the sleep screen as a kobo-style floating card over your cover, with a random highlight as a pull-quote. a prettified fork of zenixlabs' patch. Lua · complete
• 1-timezone · koreader user patch: forces a correct posix timezone inside the process (setenv + tzset), fixing the clock, time sync, and autowarmth on framework-less installs where no TZ is set. Lua · complete

• Atrium · native linux task manager. org-mode internals (uuids, plain-text round-trip) under a Things 3 / OmniFocus surface, with a calibre-style search grammar powered by vir-search. dropped libadwaita for its own kanagawa dragon stylesheet on plain gtk4 via vir-gtk. Rust · GTK4 · shipping v0.69.2
• Framework · tiling-first document viewer for pdf, djvu, comics, and ebooks. plain gtk4 under an owned kanagawa dragon stylesheet, portal-driven dark/light. mupdf and djvulibre under the fixed-layout formats; epub, mobi, and azw3 reflow natively through webkitgtk, keeping their publisher stylesheets. C · GTK4 · shipping v0.82.0
• Viaduct · netnewswire ported to linux. single-writer sqlite, opml on disk, hard memory ceilings. dropped libadwaita in v3.0.0 for its own flat design via vir-gtk and search powered by vir-search; runs on gnome, hyprland, and any wayland desktop. Rust · GTK4 · shipping v3.2.1
• rd-cli · dependency-free cli for raindrop.io and pinboard. full rest api coverage over stdlib urllib; designed ansi for humans and --json for scripts and agents, typed errors, rate-limit backoff, --dry-run on every write, blast-radius-gated confirmation prompts, and a two-way additive rd sync between the two services that dedups on a normalized url. Python · stdlib
• vir-gtk · a standalone rust library extracting the shared gtk4 styling and d-bus portal interaction layer for atrium, conservatory, viaduct, and colophon. replaces libadwaita with a bespoke flat kanagawa-themed framework. Rust · GTK4

• Haveli · two-player, lan-only, offline digital card game on a content-agnostic deterministic engine. hidden hands force a host-authoritative, per-seat-redacted network model: the host validates every move and pushes each peer only the view its seat may see, because relaying moves would leak the deck order. an rng_seed plus a draw cursor replay any shuffle from state alone. 1.0 is the engine milestone, verified live across two machines; the presentation pass is 2.0. private while it carries a faithful transcription. Godot · GDScript · shipping v1.0.0
• Hearth · two-player, lan-only, offline worker-placement and polyomino-economy eurogame on the same content-agnostic engine shape as haveli. the home-board puzzle and a pure effect vocabulary the cards reuse are the distinctive parts. private while in development. Godot · GDScript
• Catagotchi · a cozy cat tamagotchi wrapped around a cookie-clicker-scale idle empire: five needs averaging into a mood multiplier that gates all income, endless generator ladders, six daily puzzle games on a seeded rotation, dungeons, a shared world market, two-layer prestige, and a story about a door that shouldn't exist. everything on screen is generated in code, art and music and sound alike; there are no asset files beyond one icon. Godot · GDScript
• Hearthfall · grimdark clan-survival for the terminal. seasonal turns, a fog-black map, and a finite clan split between foraging, exploring, and war. scouting reveals enemy composition, so the fun lives in the preparation rather than the swing. the engine is stdlib-only pure logic with no i/o and no rendering, driveable from a repl; every draw goes through one seeded rng, so a seed replays a run exactly. Python · Textual
• opends · reverse-engineering toolkit for ssi's dark sun crpgs (1993–94). a disassembler and byte-exact reassembler for the games' undocumented gpl bytecode vm, plus gff/sprite/save editors. bring your own gog copy. Rust · Python
• project-void · single-player party-based isometric crpg in the dark sun / fallout 2 / arcanum lineage, on lethal cairn combat math. the engineering commitment is the engine; the reach, a tight 15–20-hour campaign, is the demonstration. Godot · Lua · Ink
• project-yeschef · character-driven grand-strategy restaurant sim in the crusader kings 3 lineage. you play the general manager, not the cook. people are the system, rival gms are load-bearing, and there is no win condition. the former chef's project. Godot · Lua · Ink

the full thirty, with screenshots and the long writeups, live in the codex → virinvictus.github.io

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Rust · C · Python · GTK4 · SQLite · Meson, with a soft spot for Ruby.

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