Audio guide service · 2026
Wayfarer
A service that turns a place into a narrated walking tour. It runs on my own server, generates audio on demand, and has been in the hands of beta users long enough to have opinions pushed back at it.
What it does
- Generates narration on demand rather than shipping a fixed library, so a tour exists for somewhere the moment it is asked for.
- Runs as a single Node service behind Caddy, with TLS terminated at the edge and the app itself bound to loopback.
- Nightly restic snapshots to offsite object storage, with restores tested rather than assumed.
- Deployed by rsync over SSH from a local repo — no build agent, no registry, nothing to break between here and production.
Notes
The interesting problem was never the audio. It was everything around it: keeping a long generation job honest when the user closes the tab, making failures visible instead of silent, and running the whole thing on one modest box without it falling over when several people ask at once.
Having real users early changed what got built. Features I was sure mattered went untouched for weeks, and the thing people actually complained about was something I had considered finished.
Downloads
Nothing published for this project yet.