Good Tooling Comes from Real Pain
The best tools aren't pet projects. They're what you build after the third time you fat-finger a config.
Good tooling comes from real pain.
When you operate infrastructure daily, you hit a wall: the small tools that make repetitive work predictable don't exist yet.
That's how Caddy Admin UI happened.
Caddy is an excellent reverse proxy. Its Admin API is powerful — but there's no native UI. You edit configs by hand or script API calls.
After the third time I fat-fingered a route config, I built one: a lightweight Go + Preact interface for managing routes, redirects, headers, auth, and compression — synced to the Admin API in real time.
Not a "pet project for the sake of it." A side-effect of actually using the thing.
Nobody sets out to build a tool. You just run out of patience.