Hi! I'm Phil — a software engineer at Harvard University by day, and an obsessive music listener, vinyl collector, and amateur DJ the rest of the time. I live in Baltimore, MD.
I've been building things on the web since the late 90s, when you could fit an entire website into a notepad file. These days I still basically do that, but with more semicolons. Plencner Labs is my corner of the internet where I put all the weird little projects I build for fun.
When I'm not behind a screen I'm probably behind a drum kit, flipping through records at a local shop, or arguing (politely) about whether a Chicago-style hot dog needs to be that specific.
Plencner Labs is an umbrella for all the personal web projects I build and maintain. It's not a company — it's more like a hobby workshop with a domain name. The name has been around since I started putting things online, and it stuck.
Most of the projects here are music-related, because that's what I think about the most. Some are tools I built because I wanted them to exist. A few are just jokes that got out of hand. All of them are 100% Phil-operated with no investors, no ads, and no agenda.
The hosting lives on my own server. The code is on GitLab. The ideas come from too much time thinking in the shower.
Music is the engine of most of what's here. I've been obsessively listening, collecting, and writing about it for years — so it makes sense that most of the projects are music-flavored. Between a weekly album recommendation blog, a daily song-of-the-day radio station, a virtual vinyl listening room, a DJ project, an archival Sun Ra site, a brutal prog encyclopedia, a nerdy band photo gallery, and a recreation of a Tower Records quiz from the early 2000s — there's a lot.
Sometimes I build things because they seem useful. A tariff cost calculator, a browser-based exterior paint visualizer, and my personal GitLab where the rest of the code lives. These don't fit neatly into a theme — they just exist because I felt like building them.
Look, sometimes you need a website about Chicago-style hot dogs. No further explanation required.