What it is
Two things that grew together.
Forge is my own control panel. One app for time tracking, invoices, investments, finance, health, training and notes. Claude is a first-class operator: Forge exposes its features as MCP tools, so I can say “log two hours on Tabularium” or “how did the portfolio do this month” from my laptop or my phone, and it happens.
The platform is a single server that runs all my hobby and side products side by side, with a shared database, backups, and a dashboard in Forge that watches over it.
Forge is also what writes the Log on this site.
Why
I run a handful of products, a freelance business and a portfolio, and I was spending real time moving data between tools. I wanted one system that knows everything, that I can talk to, and that I own.
The platform exists because paying for a managed server per hobby app adds up quickly, and most of these apps are quiet most of the time. One box, run properly, is cheaper and more fun.
How it’s built
- Forge: a Rails 8.1 API with Solid Queue, a React 19 front end, a Chrome extension for the timer and notes, and an MCP server in TypeScript that turns each module into typed tools Claude can call.
- The platform: one box with a shared Postgres (continuous backups plus nightly dumps), Caddy in front, Cloudflare Tunnel so nothing is exposed directly, and apps deployed with Kamal or Docker Compose.
- Apps that sleep. Low-traffic apps scale to zero and wake up on the first request.
- Monitoring. A small sidecar reads container logs and memory and CPU stats without access to the Docker socket, and Forge’s ops dashboard shows the whole fleet.
It is documented well enough that a friend could clone the two repos and build the same thing. It is not a product.
Where it stands
Both run every day. Forge is the thing I use most, and I am its only user.