Tooling

derekwelty.com was a Bootstrap 5 single-page site built on the Start Bootstrap Freelancer template. It worked, but it hadn’t been touched in years and updating it required wading through jQuery, a Gulp pipeline, and a bunch of hand-rolled CSS. Time to replace it. The new stack: Hugo with the Congo theme, deployed to GitHub Pages via GitHub Actions. Why Hugo I already run this blog on Hugo + PaperMod via Netlify. The toolchain was familiar, the build times are fast, and Congo gave me a clean profile layout that actually looked like a personal site and not a blog template with the posts removed. ...

ChatGPT worked fine for one-off questions, but it was isolated from the systems I actually use: calendar, email, Strava, GitHub, Obsidian, Spotify, and the half-finished project notes scattered across repos. I wanted a small assistant I could run myself, with persistent memory, scheduled checks, and enough tool access to be useful without turning into a full product. So I built Molty. Architecture Molty runs on OpenClaw — an open agent platform that handles the gateway infrastructure: Telegram integration, LLM API routing, and session management. It runs on a Hostinger VPS. I didn’t build any of that. What I built is everything layered on top: the memory system, integrations, heartbeat logic, and skills. ...

I kept missing shows I would have gone to. The data was public, but checking it required a weird amount of manual attention: venue calendars, Spotify history, ticket prices, neighborhoods, and a final “would I actually leave the apartment for this?” filter. I built a weekly concert digest into Molty, my Telegram-based assistant. Every Monday morning it checks SF venues, matches artists against my Spotify library, and sends a ranked list of shows. ...