All Posts
Your IoT sensors deserve proper observability: MQTT to Prometheus with a Helm chart
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. Most of it disappears into a cloud service or gets forgotten after being displayed on a dashboard for a few seconds.
MikroTik is a real router: automated backups and routing streaming traffic properly
December 2023 — on why your home router deserves the same attention as everything else in your stack
Most home routers are appliances. You plug them in, log into a web UI once to set a password, and forget they exist until they stop working. The firmware update prompt appears. You dismiss it. Repeat for several years until the device dies. Mine don’t.
My thermostat was lying to me
October 2023 — on why your heating system’s sensor is probably wrong, and what to do about it
The floor heating in my house had a problem I couldn’t immediately identify. The thermostat was set to 21°C. The rooms were never quite right. Sometimes too cold in the morning, sometimes stuffy by evening. I’d adjust the setting, wait, adjust again. Classic thermostat frustration.
The home network shelf: MikroTik, TP-Link, and a 10-inch rack that fits in a cupboard
April 2023 — on making the network visible, organised, and not an embarrassment
Every home network starts the same way: a router from the ISP, a switch from a supermarket, a tangle of cables behind the television. It works. It’s not organised. It grows by accretion. At some point it becomes something you hide rather than show, and you stop understanding what’s actually connected to what.
Your commit is your CV: how I set my wife up with a CI/CD pipeline she could put on her resume
December 2022 — on the difference between saying you can do something and having the git history to prove it
The first question any serious technical employer asks is: “Can I see something you’ve built?”
Certificate governance without the ceremony: cert-manager + Venafi on k3s
December 2022 — because PKI shouldn’t require a JIRA ticket and three approvals
There’s a version of certificate management that lives in large enterprises. You file a request. A team reviews it. Someone checks a compliance box. Five days later, a certificate lands in your inbox as a .pfx file. You paste it into a UI. Two weeks from now it expires and nobody notices until a monitoring alert fires at 2am.