Software Engineering · EVE Online tooling · Homelab

The best way to understand a system is to take it apart and rebuild it yourself.

I'm Iian Johnson — a software developer who builds tools that make complex systems legible. Mostly EVE Online infrastructure, occasionally other things. This is where I keep the work and the writeups.

Open to interesting projects — reach out

Selected work

Things I've built

Tools and projects — mostly built to understand how the underlying system actually works, then written up so the next person can skip my mistakes.

01 Live

Vigilant

EVE Online companion dashboard — multi-character overview, interactive star map, ship fitting tool, intel, and more.

PythonReactEVE ESI
02 Live

Storm Spotter

Storm photography planner — live radar and lightning strikes, thunder propagation rings, an HRRR forecast timeline, and photo spots that sync across devices.

LeafletNOAABlitzortung
03 Live

Maps

Interactive maps built on open data, no API keys. First up: a Florida traffic heatmap — every FDOT-counted road colored by how many vehicles use it per day.

deck.glFDOTOpen data
04 Live

Photos

Photography gallery for landscapes, roads, and weather — with EXIF details, location, and the story behind each shot.

AstroPhotography
05 Live

Factorio Tools

Utilities for Factorio players, starting with a blueprint up/downgrader that converts designs between tech tiers. Also usable as a dependency-free CLI.

PythonFastAPIFactorio
06 Live

Renters Help

Move-in and move-out inspection checklists for renters — document the condition of every room and keep your deposit.

Next.jsReact
07 Live

Wanderer

Self-hosted instance of the Wanderer wormhole mapper for EVE Online — live chain mapping and kill tracking for my corp.

EVE OnlineSelf-hosted

About

I break things on purpose, then document the rebuild.

Software developer with a focus on building tools that make complex systems legible. I primarily work on EVE Online infrastructure and enjoy the challenge of turning dense game data into useful interfaces.

Most projects here started as a question I couldn't answer from documentation alone: how does this actually behave when it fails? The writeups are what I wish I'd found before I started.


Vigilant
flagship project
Open source
everything public
Homelab
runs it all

Contact

Start a conversation

A question about a project, a writeup, or just comparing notes — all welcome. I reply within a couple of days.