Founder & Developer, Talos.tools
Founder and developer of Talos.tools. Full-stack developer building developer tools, self-hosted app directories, and CSS generators.
Mian Shahzad Raza is the founder and lead developer of Talos.tools, a curated directory of CSS generators, self-hosted applications, and developer utilities used by thousands of developers and designers each month. He has been working in web development for over a decade, with deep experience across the modern JavaScript ecosystem (TypeScript, React, Node.js), PHP / WordPress, and the design-systems work that sits between engineering and product. He started Talos.tools because every "best of" list for self-hosted apps and CSS generators that he found was either out of date, padded with affiliate links, or written by people who had clearly never deployed the tools they were recommending. The site is his answer to that — every entry is hand-checked, every comparison is written by someone who has shipped the apps in production, and there is no paid placement. He personally tests the higher-traffic self-hosted entries and writes the comparison pages; the editorial team handles cataloguing and routine refresh cycles. Outside of Talos.tools he ships products and writes about the engineering behind them at msrbuilds.com, where the focus is on practical full-stack work — Next.js, Supabase, Drizzle, self-hosted infrastructure, and the WordPress / Elementor ecosystem he has worked in for years.
Years of experience: 10
Talos.tools itself is a single-server TypeScript monorepo: Vite + React on the client, Express on the server, Drizzle on PostgreSQL via Neon, with Supabase Auth on top. The codebase is open-source under the Talos.tools repo and represents the most current example of how he ships full-stack work end-to-end.
Years of building WordPress sites, custom plugins, and Elementor widgets. He maintains the Elementor Widget Builder tool on Talos.tools and has built several internal plugins for WordPress automation and migration.
The CSS generator tools on Talos.tools — flexbox, grid, glassmorphism, gradient, clip-path, and the rest — are the practical output of years of writing CSS by hand and noticing which properties were friction-heavy enough to deserve a visual editor.
He runs his own self-hosted stack (reverse proxies, container orchestration, backup scripts, SSL automation) and tests new self-hosted apps on it before adding them to the directory. The self-hosted entries on Talos.tools are not aggregated from elsewhere — they are deployed first.
From the Linux-to-Windows command converter to the icon finder to the AI-assisted blog generation pipeline that powers parts of the site, he builds developer tools because he wants to use them. Every tool on Talos.tools started as a problem he had personally.
Practical, technical SEO for developer-focused sites — schema markup, structured data, server-rendered metadata, and AI-search-friendly content patterns. The architecture of Talos.tools itself is the working example.