When I was a kid I was obsessed with Tamagotchis.

David Sellam — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 07:53:54 +0000

Fed mine at 2am, panicked when it flatlined during class, the whole thing. Never grew out of it, apparently, I just built one for adults who write code instead of feed pixels.

**Meet Gitgotchi: **a tiny creature that lives in your terminal, and whose health and mood are a direct readout of your repo's state. Failing tests make it sick. Stale branches make it lonely. A fresh commit feeds it. Climbing test coverage helps it evolve. No dashboards, no linter nagging you about best practices just a small pet giving you sad eyes because you haven't committed since Tuesday.

Zero config: run npx gitgotchi in any git repo and you meet your creature in under 5 seconds, using nothing but git + grep. CI and coverage hookups are optional upgrades later.

I'm building it fully in the open, TDD all the way every milestone starts with failing tests before I write a line of implementation. The "game logic" is 100% pure functions, no side effects, so the whole creature is deterministic and fully testable, which honestly feels like the most satisfying part of this so far.

Still early days collectors, the mood engine, and the terminal UI are in progress. Next up is a shareable card so you can post your pet's stats (and its decline).
If your inner ten-year-old also just wants their repo to have a face, this one's for you.

npmjs.com

Three years ago I wrote a backend boilerplate, pushed it to a private repo, and forgot it existed.

David Sellam — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:45:28 +0000

This week I needed a quick REST API. Instead of the usual heavyweight setup, I went spelunking through my old GitHub repos and there it was. 2021 me, Express, TypeScript, a decorator-based routing idea I was weirdly proud of.
The problem: it was frozen in 2021. Node 14, Express 4, dependencies that hadn't been touched in years.

So I sat down with Claude Code and rebuilt it properly:
→ Node 22, Express 5, TypeScript 5, strict everything
→ Vitest + supertest, CI on Node 20 & 22, multi-stage Docker
→ MongoDB, Auth0 and Sentry as opt-in modules — set an env var and they turn on, leave it out and they never load
→ Health checks, graceful shutdown, request correlation IDs
→ Then packaged the whole thing as a CLI and shipped it to npm

Meet 🏎️ Chassis — a lightweight, decorator-driven Express + TypeScript starter.
One command, zero config to boot:

npm create chassis my-api

The pitch is simple: if you love NestJS's ergonomics but not its weight for a small service, this is the featherweight option. Nest-style controllers on plain Express ~10 small files you can actually read, not a framework you have to learn.

It even ships with an AGENTS.md so your AI coding agent writes code that matches the conventions out of the box.
MIT, free, and I'd genuinely love feedback (or a ⭐).

github.com/dvd90/chassis

DEV Community: David Sellam

When I was a kid I was obsessed with Tamagotchis.

Three years ago I wrote a backend boilerplate, pushed it to a private repo, and forgot it existed.