It started with a single, innocent question: does anyone actually read this?
I’d been running this Hugo blog for a while, writing posts about the homelab, the cluster, the occasionally catastrophic self-inflicted incidents.
700ms. That was the number that haunted my Kubernetes cluster, slowly burning it to the ground. Every alert the cluster generated, every log line it processed for AI-driven feedback, triggered an embedding operation.
“Why can’t I see the new photos?”
That’s how the outage started. Not with a PagerDuty alert or a Grafana dashboard turning red, but with a casual question from my wife.
April 2026 — one week of intensive AI-assisted work, one surprising bill, and one decision to do something about it
The Claude.ai usage screen showed €169.
September 2025 — adding real observability to a Java service without touching a line of application code
Logs tell you something happened. Metrics tell you how often.
May 2024 — because your home produces data worth keeping
Smart home devices generate a constant stream of data. Temperature readings, power consumption, motion events, CO₂ levels, humidity.
