Developer & Creator

Stuff & Things

I build tools, applications, and systems that solve real problems. Most of my work lives behind closed doors — this is where I share what I can.

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Latest Stuff

Thoughts on development, tools, and building things.

Latest 4 min read

Dynamic OG Images in Laravel with Intervention Image

Generate branded social cards for your blog posts on the fly using Intervention Image v4, with caching, custom fonts, and zero external services.

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5 min

Replacing Two Legacy Systems with a Single Python Service

For years, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History relied on two separate systems to track changes on the preservation storage array: a bash script (`pres-audit.sh`) that logged file changes, and a multi-server ZFS snapshot pipeline (`pres_snap`) that involved TrueNAS cron jobs, a Redis queue, and a dedicated Ubuntu processing server. They worked, mostly, but the complexity was becoming a liability. When something broke, debugging meant jumping between three different machines and piecing together what happened.

5 min

Process Files 4.0 — Batch File Processing for Digital Archives

How I built a modular Bash toolkit to convert messy archive collections into clean, web-ready access copies.

Featured Things

A selection of things I've built.

DigiAdmin

A digital asset management platform built for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to streamline archival operations and preservation workflows. The first commit to this project was in 2015.

Laravel / Filament / Tailwind / Livewire

Digital Archives Platform

A digital archive platform for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, providing public access to digitized historical documents, photographs, government records, and other archival materials from Mississippi's rich history.

Laravel / Livewire / Bootstrap / Javascript

Chores

A family chore management app with rotating schedules, kid-friendly PIN check-in, and SMS reminders.

Process Files

A modular batch file processing toolkit that converts archives of TIFFs, documents, audio, and video into web-ready access copies — with optional watermarking and deep-zoom tileset generation.

Preservation Monitor

A real-time file change monitoring system for the MDAH preservation storage array, replacing two legacy tools with a single lightweight service.

Opac2

A modern search and discovery platform for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, providing unified access to 25+ historical record collections including genealogical files, court records, newspaper holdings, and Civil War-era documents.

A bit about me

I'm a developer who cares about building things that work well and look good doing it. Most of my projects are internal tools, but I'm always working on something interesting.

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Mack Hankins