Side projects,
taken seriously.
ontheside.ai is the portfolio of DeVaris Brown. Open-source infrastructure, commercial products, and the occasional weekend experiment — all built in the margins, all shipped.
Real-time data infrastructure. $19M raised. Customers include the U.S. Air Force, Space Force, and NASA. Shipped Conduit as open source in 2022.
Ten projects across dining, wine, federal investigations, Shopify, and deployment don't look related. They are. Every one of them assumes the human stays at the wheel — the software watches, drafts, and waits for approval rather than acting on its own. That constraint turns out to be the product.
The work.
Two open-source tools at scale, eight products built on the side.
Prod
A swarm of agents that watches your repo, builds release plans, runs the deploy, and rolls back when something smells off. Lives between CI and prod.
Deploys are still the place where smart teams hand-craft glue scripts and pray. Most orgs have one or two people who actually know how to ship safely — and they're a bottleneck. I wanted to see how far an agent loop could go before a human needs to step in.
Conduit
A single-binary streaming data engine. Drop-in for most Kafka Connect pipelines, runs anywhere, no JVM, and the dev loop is fast.
FastFollow
Drop in your meeting transcript, get a follow-up email, a CRM update, a proposal draft, and a competitive read — within a workflow you can shape.
GovOpps
AI-powered government contract intelligence.
Scans SAM.gov + SBIR.gov, scores opportunities for fit, and runs the proposal lifecycle in a multi-tenant SaaS. Built for small primes and SBIR shops.
Shipping nowIndieOS
Control plane + memory layer for indie hackers.
A calm console for indie hackers running 5+ projects. Persistent project narratives, conservative attention model, and assistive (not autonomous) agents.
MerchOps
Calm operator console for Shopify merchants.
Monitors your store for meaningful signals, surfaces the 3 things worth doing today, and drafts safe actions for you to approve. Built for $1M–$50M GMV DTC.
Amuse
AI-native social dining discovery + reservations.
A reservation app that actually knows your taste. Discovery is social, not algorithmic-soup; the agent does the booking dance.
Kiri
Anonymous, secure gift-giving by email + SMS.
Send and receive gifts without sharing your address. Recipients claim by email or text; the platform handles the handoff.
Optio
Investigative coaching for federal law enforcement.
A sentinel + agent system for federal investigators and forensic professionals. Case management, structured workflows, and AI that respects chain-of-custody.
Rene
AI sommelier for any dish.
Type a dish, get a wine pairing and a sentence on why. Backed by a curated corpus from real sommelier literature — no influencer pap.
ZeroProof
AI mocktail pairings for any dish.
Rene's sober sibling. Non-alcoholic pairings that aren't 'just have a sparkling water.'