Hi, I'm Dmitry.
I'm a hands-on systems architect. Over two decades of engineering – from low-level systems to enterprise architecture and engineering teams – and I still ship products myself. These days that means developer tools and platforms for the AI era.
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
What I'm building now
Machwake
Machine speed. Human accountability.
An open collaboration layer for engineering teams where people and coding agents work side by side. An agent has a durable identity of its own, every agent answers to a named person, and every change keeps a verifiable trail from request to commit – Git stays the source of truth, and existing agent harnesses keep doing the execution.
No agent without a principal.
No run without a pactum.
No change without a wake.
This is the work I care about most right now. It is open source by design, Apache‑2.0: the thesis is already public, the prototype is being built, and the repository opens when there is something real to run – not before.
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
Ext Ops Panel
Chrome extension portfolio analytics – from one extension to an entire portfolio.
See installs, uninstalls, reinstalls and feedback as events arrive, without building your own backend.
- Hosted welcome and uninstall pages
- Uninstall reasons, written feedback and win-back flows
- One dashboard for lifecycle statistics and project health
- Free for one extension
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 · v2.2.2
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.