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mbolli - Overview

Hi, I’m Michael 👋

I’m a self-employed software engineer from Switzerland 🇨🇭, running
👉 zwei und eins gmbh — where I help companies and IT teams build and simplify web applications.

My current focus:

  • Reducing complexity in existing web applications
  • Backend & application architecture
  • Identifying and removing unnecessary SPA / API layers
  • Server-driven, hypermedia-based systems (Datastar, SSE streaming, events, HTML APIs)

If your web application is costly to maintain and increasingly complex, I help remove unnecessary complexity — so it becomes stable, understandable, and cheaper to evolve.

Most of my work is private client work — this profile shows selected open-source projects and experiments.

Tools I use to reduce complexity

The tools obviously matter less than the outcome — clarity, simplicity and long-term maintainability.

  • PHP (async w/ Swoole, Mezzio, Slim, Twig, DI, JWT, strictly typed), occasionally Go and Python
  • Databases: MySQL/MariaDB, SQLite
  • Frontend: ES6 / TypeScript, HTML, CSS/Sass (Bulma, Open Props)
  • Build & tooling: ESBuild, phpstan, php-cs-fixer
  • Approach: server-centric, streaming, minimal client state (Datastar, SSE)

I occasionally touch React or Vue or other SPAs — but usually when migrating away from them 😉.

Background (short version)

  • BSc in Computer Science (IT Security major)
  • Recently back from a 16 month roadtrip through Scandinavia, Baltic, Balkan, around the Black Sea and Caucasus in a ’92 Mercedes T1 310 4x4 🚒
  • Married, father of two
  • Outside of code: cycling 🚴, running 🏃, photography 📷, cars 🚗, music 🎶

PGP key: keybase.io/mbolli

👷 What I’m currently working on

  • mbolli/php-geobuf — PHP library for the geobuf compact geospatial format. (1 week ago)
  • mbolli/php-via — Real-time engine for building reactive web applications in PHP with Swoole. (1 week ago)
  • mbolli/datastar-attribute-on-keys — Datastar plugin to bind keyboard keys to actions (2 weeks ago)
  • mbolli/tempest-highlight-datastar — Datastar syntax highlighting for tempest/highlight — Adds HTML attribute, expression, signal & action token support for Datastar to the Tempest Highlight code highlighter. Includes Twig integration. (2 weeks ago)
  • mbolli/ai-chatbot — PHP/Swoole/Datastar port of Vercel’s AI Chatbot (1 month ago)

🌱 Recent projects

  • mbolli/tempest-highlight-datastar — Datastar syntax highlighting for tempest/highlight — Adds HTML attribute, expression, signal & action token support for Datastar to the Tempest Highlight code highlighter. Includes Twig integration.
  • mbolli/ai-chatbot — PHP/Swoole/Datastar port of Vercel’s AI Chatbot
  • mbolli/php-timeline — High-performance PHP timeline app built with Swoole, Mezzio & Datastar. Real-time multiplayer via SSE, CQRS architecture, PSR-7/PSR-15 middleware. A reference implementation for building modern PHP applications.
  • mbolli/php-via — Real-time engine for building reactive web applications in PHP with Swoole.
  • mbolli/datastar-attribute-on-keys — Datastar plugin to bind keyboard keys to actions

🔭 Recent releases I've contributed to

🔨 Recent pull requests

📓 Gists

⭐ Recently starred

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