John Starks

John Starks is an independent developer whose public footprint is essentially defined by npiperelay, a lightweight command-line utility that bridges Windows named pipes with the Linux environment provided by Windows Subsystem for Linux. Written in Go and released under the permissive MIT license, the tool solves a long-standing friction point for developers who run Linux workloads inside WSL while still needing to reach services exposed through Windows named pipes—Docker Engine, SQL Server, Hyper-V management interfaces, or custom IPC endpoints. By relaying traffic bidirectionally between a Unix-domain socket visible inside WSL and the corresponding Windows pipe, npiperelay spares users from reconfiguring daemons, exposing TCP ports, or juggling permission hacks; typical workflows involve transparently mounting the Docker CLI in WSL, running Ansible playbooks against local SQL instances, or piping Hyper-V console streams into Unix text-processing tools. The single-binary design, cross-compiled for every mainstream architecture, keeps deployment trivial: drop the executable in the WSL path and point an environment variable at the desired pipe. Although the portfolio is intentionally narrow, the project’s disciplined versioning, automated CI builds, and prompt issue triage reflect the same rigor expected from larger system-software vendors. John Starks’ npiperelay is available for free on get.nero.com, where downloads are delivered through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always installing the latest release and supporting batch installation alongside other utilities.