Sunday, February 22, 2026

Heimdall – How a Simple Port Error Turned into My Crazy Terminal Side Project

 

Hey folks,

Everything started because I got so tired of that classic Spring Boot error: “Port already in use”. Every time I had to hunt down the PID in the terminal, kill it manually, and pray it didn’t happen again five minutes later… ugh.

I was fed up scrolling through ss, netstat, lsof, ps — all that noise just to free a port during a busy workday.

Then things got out of hand (in a good way ๐Ÿ˜„).

I started building something small… and it kept growing. Now Heimdall is this beautiful curses-based TUI that watches ports, processes, files, risks — and even runs as a daemon in the background.

The coolest parts right now are Sentinel (it spots shady behavior like backdoors, masquerading processes, deleted binaries, suspicious listeners) and Daemon mode (it quietly monitors suspicious outbound connections, suspends the process, and asks you to allow or kill — either via a popup modal if the TUI is open, or a notification + timeout if not).

Whenever I think “hey, this would be cool to add”, I throw it at an AI agent while I still have tokens left ๐Ÿ˜‚. Sometimes I just feel like the product owner who never stops adding features.

If you want to join the fun, check out the repo: https://github.com/sunels/heimdall

or https://pypi.org/project/heimdall-linux/

Give it a star, try it, break it, send feedback/PRs — I’d love to hear what you think (or what crazy feature I should add next).

Thanks for reading, stay safe out there!

Love, Serkan ❤️


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