Christoffer Madsen

Developer · Product-minded builder · Founder of Vardir

I build software because I want it to exist.

Most of my current public work lives under Vardir, where I build local-first applications, developer tools, infrastructure, and the occasional project that began as a five-minute idea and somehow acquired a release pipeline.

By day I work with consumer tech and IT support at Elkjøp in Halden. Outside work, I spend most of my development time building and maintaining Vardir projects, usually with a strong bias toward user control, good UX, understandable systems, and software that can keep working without asking permission from a server.

What I care about

• Local-first where it makes sense — user data should remain portable and under user control.
• Good UX is part of the engineering — a technically correct tool can still be miserable to use.
• Use the right stack for the job — I care more about the result than defending a framework choice on the internet.
• Explicit systems over hidden magic — software should be understandable enough to maintain later.
• Build for real use — most of my better projects started with an actual problem I wanted solved.

Current work

Skald A local-first Markdown knowledge base with semantic documents, tasks, backlinks, graph navigation, extensions, GitHub integration, Mermaid, local history, and encrypted sync.	Vitni A structured investigation workspace for entities, relationships, evidence, sources, assertions, chronology, review, and reporting.
Sindri A Rust-based 2D game engine and editor stack with Lua scripting, wgpu, physics, scene tooling, and local AI-assisted workflows.	Fattern Local-first invoicing, expenses, customers, products, and practical accounting-oriented tooling for Norwegian freelancers and small businesses.
GESH A generic encrypted synchronization relay designed so clients keep control of the content key while the server moves encrypted state.	Hodd A collection companion for tracking ownership, missing items, metadata, and the history of a collection.

You can find the rest of my current public work in Vardir's repositories, including developer tools, Android utilities, search experiments, terminal tooling, and other software that escaped containment.

How I build

I tend to work across the whole product rather than staying neatly inside one layer. Data model, backend, UI, packaging, release automation, desktop integration, CI, and the awkward bits between them are all fair game.

Technologies I use regularly include:

Rust · TypeScript · React · Tauri · Electron · Kotlin · Node.js · SQLite · PostgreSQL · GitHub Actions · Linux

I also use AI heavily as a development tool, but I prefer systems where AI augments the workflow rather than becoming an excuse to make the product opaque. For product features, local or explicitly opt-in AI is usually more interesting to me than silently shipping user data somewhere else.

About this account

This account is a mix of personal projects, older work, experiments, learning projects, and the occasional utility that predates Vardir.

For current product work, github.com/vardirhq is the better place to start. Older repositories here are part portfolio, part archaeological record. Some aged gracefully. Others provide valuable evidence that software development is a process.

Contact

• Email: chris@vardir.no
• Vardir: https://vardir.no
• GitHub organization: https://github.com/vardirhq
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christoffer-madsen-47187814/

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I build tools I’d want to keep using.