Posts

1. building this site in go 2026-10-18

   This site is a Go program. Not a Hugo/11ty/Astro setup, not a framework — a few hundred lines of Go that reads markdown, renders it to HTML with goldmark ,…

2. canary everything 2026-10-18

   The most valuable infrastructure change I made this year wasn't a tool — it was a testing philosophy: the canary is a full, real install, run in a disposable…

3. choosing a control plane 2026-10-18

   Every self-hosted setup has a control plane — the thing that decides what runs where, when, and how. The surprising part is that there's no single right…

4. package mirror generations 2026-10-18

   A local package mirror sounds like the safest thing in your homelab — it's just files, right? It's not. A mirror is a system with a trust model, a versioning…

5. pinning the kernel 2026-10-18

   Most of my infrastructure is pinned to a specific kernel version — not because I'm afraid of new kernels, but because I learned the hard way that a kernel…

6. self hosting is not a hobby 2026-10-18

   Self-hosting gets framed as a hobby — a weekend project, a tinkerer's flex, a "it's cool that I did it" badge. I've come to believe that's exactly backwards.…

7. the age key incident 2026-10-18

   I once had a system I couldn't recover from — not because it was down, but because the key to it was gone. It was an age secret key, the kind of thing that…