Who I am
I’m a software engineer with over 20 years of experience building things. I’m also a husband, and parent to 3 amazing kids (a boy and twin girls). For the longest time now, I’ve been the person in our house who gets asked why the film won’t play on the television. I’ve run a media server at home for friends and family for a very long time in one shape or another, and Credenza started as the one I wanted to run myself.
Why I’m building it
I’m actually a huge fan of Plex and Jellyfin I think both are amazing pieces of software. I’ve always dreamed of doing it myself though and possibly turning it into a real thing. This is my attempt at doing that.
I think ultimately Plex is an extremely closed system that has had an amazing *arr library of applications built around it to try and add on and fix some of the root issues there.
Jellyfin is amazing but is fairly barebones and requires extensive plugins to get it to where you want; as well as some deep knowledge of networking to host it publicly. To me, there is a middle ground here and that’s what I’m trying to solve with Credenza.
How it’s made
It’s a small project, and that’s deliberate. There’s no big team behind it — just me, a few people who’ve helped along the way, and the people in the Discord who report what breaks. I work on this at night after my day job and have been having a ton of fun developing AND using the software. I’m still calling this a beta piece of software for a while but I do plan to offer some paid-subscription tiers that will have some more advanced cloud based features that hopefully people will enjoy.
Where it’s going
I have some big ideas I really want to implement and I am excited to share all of this with you guys. I can say that an iPhone / Apple TV app is in the works, to sit alongside the Android and Android TV apps that are already out, and I want to keep widening the reach of who can actually run a client for this server. Stay tuned for more though!