For several years, most of my homelab ran as Docker containers on a single host. By the time I started this migration, that host was running roughly 25 containers covering GitHub Actions runners, website/cert monitoring, photo management, 3D printing, budgeting, a media server with OTA live TV, and the services…
One of the recurring themes in my homelab projects is that I consistently underestimate how long "simple" changes will take. Putting this blog behind Cloudflare seemed like one of those changes. The goal wasn't particularly ambitious. I wanted the benefits Cloudflare offers almost by default: caching, DDoS protection, hiding the…
When most people think of Home Assistant, they think of smart bulbs, thermostats, and Zigbee sensors. I spend my days working with enterprise infrastructure, so naturally, I wanted my network switches in Home Assistant too. The problem? Arista EOS has no official integration and very little community support. The usual…
Technical debt has one of the worst branding problems in technology. Mention it in a planning meeting, and people immediately picture reckless shortcuts, sloppy code, and developers making bad decisions that future versions of themselves are forced to clean up. It becomes something to avoid, minimize, or eliminate entirely. Over…
One of the things I've noticed when talking to people about local voice assistants is that we tend to focus on the wrong metrics. We compare model benchmarks. We debate which speech-to-text engine is more accurate. We argue over whether a particular language model is smarter than another. We obsess…