Everything below is real and most of it is running right now. I have deliberately included the boring operational detail, because that is the part that tells you whether something was actually built properly or just demonstrated once.
Mosque heating on the prayer timetable
Live in three mosques, plus a school
A control system that switches real heating relays on and off around each mosque’s own jamaa’ah times, and keeps doing it all year as those times shift. Each mosque gets its own account, its own timetable and its own rules per room. Committee members manage it from their phone; there is a manual override and a boost for one-off events.
The same system also runs for a school, where the prayer-driven parts are switched off and it works to the school day instead. It has been running long enough that the interesting problems are now operational ones — monitoring, backups, and making sure a failure is noticed by me before it is noticed by a congregation stood in a cold hall.
HeatingPro — business website and staff portal
Live at heatingpro.co.uk
The public site and the private staff system for a heating and gas business in Preston. Customer records, appliance histories, a job gallery, and QR stickers an engineer scans on a boiler to pull that appliance’s full history up on their phone.
I migrated the entire site and its database off its previous host onto a server I run, translating every piece of the old configuration by hand because the new web server works differently. Real customer data, so it had to move without breaking and without downtime. Proper certificates, security headers, and email that authenticates properly so it reaches inboxes rather than spam folders.
Website and web app services →
We Courier 4 U — courier booking platform
A public booking site with a proper API behind it. Customers get a quote, book a job and follow it through each stage. The office sees the whole pipeline; drivers have their own app. Business accounts for regular clients, automated notifications at each step, card payments, and department mailboxes that route enquiries to the right person.
Built so the content is generated from a single source rather than hand-edited across eighteen pages — change the phone number once and it updates everywhere, which is the difference between a site that stays correct and one that slowly rots.
Masjid 24/7 — signage screens and an Android app
Masjid 24/7 is a prayer times platform built by Brother Imran from Preston. I work with it rather than owning it — I set masaajid up on it, build the display screens they run in the building, and I have built an Android app on top of the platform.
The app adds prayer notifications and an in-app display screen, and there is a companion watch app and watch face. The signage screens run in portrait or landscape depending on where they hang, and pull times from the masjid’s own timetable so the screen and the wall board never disagree.
Lincoln masjid — low-latency camera streaming
Camera feeds that reach a phone browser in well under a second, so they are genuinely live rather than lagging half a minute behind. Every device gets its own access token which can be revoked individually, and the admin system issuing those tokens is what the streaming server checks against — so access is controlled properly rather than being a link anyone can pass on.
No third-party cloud subscription and no per-camera monthly fee.
Audio, video and streaming services →
A private cloud for my family
Two second-hand office PCs turned into a small private cloud running four full Windows 11 desktops — one each for my siblings, reachable from a cheap laptop, an iPad or a phone. Plus a shared family file store, a kiosk screen, network-wide ad blocking for every device in the house, and secure access from anywhere without opening the house up to the internet.
Clustered across two machines so either one can carry the load alone. Software cost nothing.
Smart home and network services →
The servers behind all of it
Everything above runs on infrastructure I set up and maintain: Linux servers behind a web server that terminates TLS for every site, certificates that renew themselves, automated backups, and a single control panel where I can restart a service, read its logs or manage users without opening a terminal.
One lesson worth sharing, because it is the kind of thing experience teaches expensively: a monitor that checks whether an application is running does not tell you whether anyone can actually reach it. I once had a dashboard showing green for days while the site was unreachable from outside, because the check was looking at the app locally instead of at the public address. Every service I run now gets checked the way a real visitor would reach it.
Other things I have built
- Websites for a care company and other local businesses
- An interactive 3D property viewer you can walk through in a browser
- A fitness, diet and gym planner, with a native Android version
- An end-to-end encrypted messenger where nothing is retained after a conversation ends
- Home Assistant instances for four mosques and my own house
- Encrypted DNS with ad blocking that works on a phone on any network, with no VPN app running
- Note-taking software for a counsellor, with passkey sign-in and an encrypted database
- A remote desktop service reachable from a browser
Got something in mind?
Call or text 07780 513620
Email muhammad.patel@mvppro.co.uk
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