Hi, I'm Dmitry.
I'm an indie maker with a background in large-scale systems, now building small, focused Chrome extensions and practical, offline-first tools.
I care about clarity, reliability, and tools that quietly fit into real workflows.
What I build
I design tools the same way I design systems: clear boundaries, predictable behavior, and no hidden complexity.
Most of my work lives inside the browser and focuses on:
- working directly in context
- offline-first behavior
- performance and stability over features
- minimal UI that doesn't fight the user
Current projects
PDF to Markdown
Turn any PDF into clean, readable Markdown – for people and for AI agents.
Handles messy, real-world documents, not just perfect ones. Use it as a web app, a browser extension, a REST API or a hosted MCP endpoint.
- Web app at pdf2md.dev – convert without installing anything
- Preview, copy or download clean Markdown
- Real backend: two public domains, one entitlement-aware job core
- API and hosted MCP for agents and automation
Floating Notes
Notes that live directly on any website.
Floating Notes is a Chrome extension that lets you capture thoughts, links, and context exactly where they happen – without switching tabs or breaking focus.
Notes can be tied to:
- a specific page
- an entire site
- or live independently in a floating window
Designed to stay out of the way until you need it.
Multi Timer
Multiple parallel timers and alarms in Chrome. Named timers, presets, group launch – offline, no accounts.
Journaling App
AI-powered journaling with metaphorical cards. Draw a card, reflect with guided templates, get a clear next step in 2-7 minutes.
Secure File Transfer
Send files directly between devices, end-to-end encrypted. P2P via WebRTC – no cloud, no sign-up, no size limits.
Image to Base64 &
Base64 to Image
Two-way converter: turn any image into a Base64 / data URI string, or decode Base64 back into an image. SVG supported. No uploads, no network – everything runs locally.
How I think about tools
After years of building large systems, I've learned that most tools fail not because they lack features, but because they interrupt the user.
I believe good tools:
- respect context
- do one thing well
- stay reliable over time
- and don't demand attention they haven't earned
Under the hood
These dashboards and the architecture map aren't slideware. They're generated straight
from each repository by tooling I built – a metrics pass over the git tree
plus a live snapshot from production. The numbers here are the numbers in the source.
MAK Cards Online
Real-time card platform · Go + React + MCP · v0.8.1
PDF to Markdown
PDF → Markdown · Go + Python engines · MV3 · v2.1.3
System architecture – many entrypoints, one entitlement-aware job core. Click to zoom.
Research & articles
Article on Substack
Secure File Upload in Go: 7 Attacks and How We Blocked Them
"Add a PDF upload form" sounds like a 30-minute task. But a working upload and a secure upload are two different things. I broke down 7 real attack vectors on file upload and showed how we mitigated each one in a Go backend – with real code and honest trade-offs.
- File type spoofing – magic bytes %PDF validation, never trust extensions
- Disk overflow – MaxBytesReader + per-device slot limits
- Path Traversal – fixed paths {UUID}/input.pdf, zero user input in paths
- SSRF – pre-request DNS resolve, redirect blocking, private IP denylist
- Replay attack – nonce + timestamp + ECDSA signature per request
- Device spoofing – cryptographic identity via WebCrypto (ECDSA P-256)
- Application-level abuse – rate limit + signatures + slot system
Article on Substack
What Dog Training Taught Me About AI Agents
What dog training unexpectedly teaches a manager who works with AI agents: about signal quality, safe autonomy, and the cost of literalness. Five lessons that changed the way I work with agents and assign work to people.
- Clarity is not politeness – it is a safety practice: agents amplify both competence and vagueness
- Reinforcement beats endless correction – successful sessions become an operating standard
- Autonomy is useful only inside a good fence – freedom without boundaries is negligence
- Environment shapes behavior more than one-off instructions – management in the AI age is behavior architecture
- An agent's error is a diagnostic signal: in 9 out of 10 cases the problem is the task framing, not the tool
Writing & notes
I occasionally write about building tools, architectural decisions, and lessons learned from shipping and maintaining real products.
Selected articles:
About dimlight
dimlight is my personal space on the internet.
It's where I share what I build, experiment with ideas, and publish tools that don't fit into big platforms.
You may also see me online as dim0802.