About Rhys Ellwood
Associate Director of Engineering at Media.Monks, based in Melbourne, Australia. Studied at RMIT University.
I'm Rhys, an engineering leader with 7+ years building and scaling high-performing teams.
Associate Director of Engineering, working across cloud automation and enterprise systems.
Sustainable engineering practices, growing talent, and systems that stay reliable at scale.
I build things on the side, from websites to Mac apps and AI tools. Have a look in Selected Work and Open Source.
Now
Currently building Forge: Take a software idea from concept to a verified, documented...
Also recently: RMB, Discord Dropbox, ProjectBenchmark.
Selected work
- The Tool Hive: A collection of 30+ free, client-side developer tools: JSON formatter, regex tester, QR code generator, image compressor and more, all running in the browser for privacy and speed.
- Disposable Armor: An API for detecting disposable and temporary email addresses, with Apple Hide My Email detection, confidence scoring and a continuously updated list of 1.1M+ known domains.
- Compare My Super: An interactive Australian superannuation and income comparator: super balances by age, retirement projections, and salary against the national distribution.
- Wooden Amethyst: A fully managed website business for small businesses and tradies: design, development, hosting and business automation under one roof.
- Pocket Rhys: This portfolio: a playable handheld console called Pocket Rhys, built with Next.js, React and CSS.
Open source
- Tidy (Mac app, Rust, TypeScript): A local-first Mac app (built with Tauri) that brings a block editor, daily planner, relational tables and meeting recorder together. Meetings are transcribed on-device with Whisper, and local AI writes checked notes and answers questions across each client's meeting history.
- Ekko (Mac app, Swift, WhisperKit): A macOS menu-bar app that turns speech into text in any app. Transcription runs on-device with Whisper through WhisperKit, in 100 languages, with no account, cloud service or analytics.
- RMB (Desktop app, Rust, TypeScript): A free, open-source desktop app that runs a small business's core loop (customers, catalog, stock, quotes, jobs, invoices and payments) with all data on your own machine. No subscriptions, no cloud, works fully offline.
- NotebookMCP (MCP server, Python): An MCP server that lets Claude Code and Codex ask your NotebookLM notebooks questions and get short, cited answers, without loading your documents into the agent's context.
- GMP MCP (MCP server, TypeScript): A write-capable MCP server that lets Claude Code, Codex and Cursor inspect, report on and manage Google Marketing Platform (Campaign Manager 360, DV360, GA4, Tag Manager and Search Ads 360), with dry runs and allowlists for safety.
- Alogos (JS library, TypeScript): A dependency-free JavaScript library that estimates whether an image is AI-generated from statistics of its luminance gradient field. Fast, interpretable and upfront about its limits.
- Sock Puppet Detector (GitHub App, TypeScript, Postgres): A GitHub App that detects coordinated sock-puppet attacks on repositories by scoring account age, naming patterns, activity and coordinated behaviour, modelled on the XZ backdoor attack.
- Chaptergen (CLI, Python, Ollama): A command-line tool that generates YouTube chapters from video transcripts using LLMs, running local models through Ollama by default with optional cloud providers.
- Gmail Cleaner (Apps Script, Google Sheets): A Google Apps Script tool that analyses a Gmail inbox and cleans it up automatically using rules managed in Google Sheets. Built after one online shopping sign-up flooded my inbox.
- Discord Dropbox (Node library, Node.js): An experimental Node.js library that stores images in Discord channels, built out of curiosity. It's for learning only, since it goes against Discord's terms.
Toolkit
- Architecture: Enterprise architecture, Cloud-native, Event-driven, API design
- Cloud: GCP, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, Terraform
- Languages: TypeScript, Python, Node.js, SQL
- Leadership: Team management, Stakeholders, Agile delivery
- Tools: Docker, CI/CD, GitHub, Next.js, Server-side GTM
- Data: PostgreSQL, BigQuery, ETL pipelines