Follow your curiosity.
A few things I’ve built. A few things I’ve broken. Everything I’m figuring out.
Building a home AI server: the hardware I picked and why
What it costs and what it takes to build a machine for running LLMs at home. EPYC 7702P, 256GB of RAM, and a lot of used server hardware from eBay.
VRAM matters more than GPU generation for local LLMs
I bought a 16GB card first and learned it was the wrong axis to optimize. What running models on a 4070 Ti Super and then a 3090 taught me about what actually limits local inference.
Ubuntu updates kept breaking my NVIDIA drivers, so I moved to Proxmox
I was running several Docker Compose stacks on a single Ubuntu server with no IaC and no plan. Here is what pushed me to rebuild it properly with Proxmox and OpenTofu.
Talos Linux at home: genuine thoughts after running it
Talos Linux has no SSH, no shell, and no package manager. That sounded like a downgrade until I understood it was the fix for the problem that pushed me off Ubuntu.
LoadBalancer IPs on bare metal Kubernetes with Cilium
A bare metal cluster has no load balancer to hand out IPs. Cilium solves that. It could also handle L7 routing, but I gave that job to NGINX instead, and I have a reason.
What should not run inside your Kubernetes cluster
DNS and OpenTofu state both have to exist before Kubernetes does. Putting either one inside the cluster creates a dependency loop with no way out, so they run as LXC containers on Proxmox instead.
ArgoCD in a homelab: what GitOps actually buys you
I picked ArgoCD because I saw it working at my company and wanted to try it, not because I evaluated it against anything. Here is what running it at home actually changed.
Structured logging in Go with log/slog
A practical guide to structured logging with Go 1.21 log/slog. Leveled logging, structured attributes, and context propagation for Grafana tracing.
Leaving Medium to self-host my blog with Astro
After years on Medium, I moved my writing to a site I actually own. The stack is Astro, the workflow is a git push, and the reason is simpler than you might think.
Hosting from home with Cloudflare Tunnel, no port forwarding
How I serve whenkat.com from a home server without port forwarding, a static IP, or exposing anything to the internet. The trick is Cloudflare Tunnel, and the connection is outbound.
A little beyond this archive.
Try “GPU”, “networking”, or “Go”.