Sometimes you just need to encrypt a file. Not set up a key management system, not learn the gpg command line again, not pull a heavy dependency — just turn secrets.txt into secrets.bin with a key you control. That’s the niche gocrypt fills for me.

Every time I needed to inspect a JWT, I ended up doing the same thing: paste it into a website I half-trust, squint at the payload, then close the tab feeling vaguely guilty. I wanted a local tool, scriptable, that could both decode tokens and mint them for testing. So I wrote jwt-cli.

I maintain a Go library for the Perplexity API (perplexity-go). Once it existed, it was almost a sin not to wrap it in a CLI. So pplx is what I reach for when I want a cited, web-aware answer from the shell — and now also a Model Context Protocol server I plug into Claude Code.

There’s a category of bash one-liners I keep rewriting: “run this thing, and if it fails, try again a few times with a delay.” curl against a service that’s still booting. A kubectl rollout status that flickers. A flaky integration test. A docker pull from a registry having a bad five seconds.

You can write the loop yourself in five lines of bash. I’ve done it hundreds of times. But I always forget the exit code handling, the sleep arithmetic, the cap on retries. So I wrote retry — a single binary that does exactly this, with proper exponential backoff if you want it.

gitlab-backup: Back Up and Restore GitLab Projects from the Command Line

Source code: github.com/sgaunet/gitlab-backup

When you self-host GitLab or rely heavily on gitlab.com for your projects, having an independent backup strategy is essential. GitLab’s own backup mechanism works well at the instance level, but sometimes you need something more surgical: back up a single project, or an entire group, on demand, and store the result locally or in S3. That’s what gitlab-backup does.