Nathan Lucas
Projects

Production platforms. Open-source libraries.

Production back-end products and the open-source tooling that grew up alongside them — each focused on one problem, end-to-end.

Platforms

Skeptik

Self-funded, solo-built. Each platform lives on its own site with its own docs, pricing, and roadmap — no suite lock-in.

ShrouDB
Security & secrets

Security infrastructure as one binary.

A 9-engine security platform — credentials, encryption, secrets, encrypted object storage, encrypted search, internal CA, authorization, secure notifications, and audit — running as a single binary with one auth model, one config format, one telemetry pipeline.

  • Per-tenant AES-256-GCM key isolation baked into the storage layer
  • 44K JWT verifications/sec, 33K encrypt/decrypt ops/sec at sub-ms latency
  • Client-side E2EE via WASM — search over data the server never sees in plaintext
  • Crypto-shredding turns GDPR right-to-erasure into a single key-destroy op
StackRust
ReplacesVaultKMSAuth0OPAstep-caSendGridDatadog
Visit ShrouDBshroudb.io
Herald
Realtime & messaging

Real-time events that actually arrive.

A multi-tenant WebSocket transport with embedded WAL storage — no Redis, no broker, no external retry queue. Auth, presence, and chat engines ship built in and can be swapped without forking.

  • ~8K msg/sec sustained at 0.1ms p50 latency
  • Clients reconnect and replay up to 7 days without gaps
  • Four Docker images: transport-only, chat, presence, full stack
  • Zero-knowledge by design — message bodies are opaque bytes
StackRust
ReplacesPusherAblyCentrifugo
Visit Heraldherald.skeptik.io
Meterd
Usage & billing

Catch revenue leaks before they reach the invoice.

Real-time metering and quota enforcement that runs in the request path, not after the fact. Atomic Redis Lua quota checks with two-phase reservation prevent overselling; Postgres takes over when Redis is unavailable.

  • ~10K events/sec per tenant at the Envoy edge
  • Five pricing models — flat, graduated, volume, package, weighted
  • Credits system with FIFO burn and contract drawdown
  • Stripe integration plus a swappable billing backend
StackRust
ReplacesOrbMetronomeLago
Visit Meterdmeterd.io
Simbee
Graph & discovery

Matching and discovery, without the ML team.

A consent-scoped social graph with matching, ranked feeds, and campaigns across five microservices behind Envoy. Warm and cold-start matching live in a single pipeline, with affinities isolated per context so one platform can power dating, networking, and community discovery without cross-contamination.

  • FAISS retrieval + HDBSCAN clustering + SVD reduction in one pipeline
  • 35+ scoring parameters tunable without shipping code
  • Self-correcting clustering that re-clusters on detected drift
  • Native CPM/CPE campaign engine with A/B variants
StackRuby/Rails · Python/FastAPI
ReplacesHomegrown ML pipelinesAlgolia Recommend
Visit Simbeesimbee.io
Experiments

Side projects and one-offs.

IsNathanAlive

A status-check site wiring a SwitchBot motion sensor to Vercel functions and Upstash Redis. Motion updates a timestamp that renders as an intentionally absurd status ("got dunks 2 days ago, still kickin"). IoT webhooks, event filtering, near-real-time serverless data flow.