Here you’ll find my thoughts, experiences, and learnings from my journey as a software engineer. From technical deep-dives to project retrospectives, I share what I learn along the way.
Check out my latest posts below, or browse through the archives to find topics that interest you.
TL;DR I have a pile of WLED strips. Plants, the office table, the monitor, the kitchen counter, a few more tucked into corners. They already know how to run sound-reactive effects. What they did not know how to do was agree. Music sync is one switch: Turn it on and every strip in the All WLEDs group takes the same effect, palette, speed, and intensity Change a slider while it is on and the change is pushed to all of them Turn it off and each strip goes back to the on or off state it had before Say “Music Sync” or “All WLEDs” to Alexa, because both are exposed through local emulated Hue The daytime lighting schedule from the previous post still owns ordinary evenings. This is the override for when the room should listen to the speakers instead. ...
TL;DR The apartment already had lights, motion sensors, and a thermostat. What it did not have was a truce. This week I rewrote the lighting and heating so each automation has one job, and so a manual change wins for a while: Wake-up, sunset, and bedtime fade the Hue bulbs and the WLED strips together, from 1% up or down to off Daytime is per room: a dark kitchen can turn on while a bright bedroom stays off A manual change pauses the schedule for two hours, for lights and for heat Leaving home kills the lights, stops the music, and drops the heating to an away setpoint Vacation mode keeps the place looking lived-in for a few minutes at a time, without running the normal routines This is the follow-up to the original dorm automation write-up. Same rooms. Much less arguing. ...
TL;DR I expanded my Home Assistant lighting setup so Philips Hue motion sensors can drive both Philips Hue bulbs and WLED strips—without turning it into another hard-coded “motion → lights on” automation. The result is a small lighting control layer you can enable when guests are home and tune from the dashboard: Master switch to enable or disable the whole system Two independent zones: Kitchen and Bedroom Selectable light mode: Hue / WLED / All Light groups instead of hard-coded entities Lux threshold so daylight doesn’t waste motion lighting Auto or Manual brightness, with a simple time-of-day schedule Configurable timeout via a Number helper Hue → WLED sync paused while Guest Motion Lighting is active Everyday behaviour lives in helpers and Mushroom cards. YAML stays for structure, not for constant tweaking. ...
I have been building my homelab using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) so that VM provisioning and host configuration are repeatable, versioned, and easier to maintain over time. This project combines: Terraform for provisioning virtual machines on Proxmox. Ansible for post-provisioning configuration (base packages, Docker host setup, and future monitoring roles). What is implemented today The current workflow is intentionally simple and predictable: Define Docker host VM parameters in Terraform variables (CPU, memory, disk, network, addressing). Use Terraform to clone VMs from a cloud-init-enabled Ubuntu template in Proxmox. Use Ansible playbooks to apply baseline OS configuration and install Docker. From a technical perspective, the provisioning layer currently uses the telmate/proxmox provider and a proxmox_vm_qemu resource to configure: ...
TL;DR I finally gave my homelab a voice. Not a dramatic one. Not a “panic for every CPU spike” one. Just a calm, useful, slightly judgmental voice that says: a host is down CPU has been high for a while memory is staying under pressure disk is filling up a filesystem went read-only, which is never a fun sentence The alert flow now looks like this: Prometheus -> Alertmanager -> Home Assistant -> phone notification ...
TL;DR To keep myself honest: Metrics: Prometheus scrapes Proxmox, Home Assistant, node-exporter, and cAdvisor. Logs: Grafana Alloy ships Docker container logs into Loki. Traces: Tempo is standing by for OTLP, waiting for me to finally instrument something. UI: Grafana is the “single screen” where it all becomes legible. The Problem: My Homelab Was Talking… Just Not to Me One evening I did the classic homelab ritual: “just a quick update.” Ten minutes later, I was staring at a frozen UI, a loud fan, and a dashboard that basically said: good luck, detective. ...
Cover Story: This Router Writes Like a Columnist My Archer C6 v3 woke up one morning tired of stock firmware and begged for more autonomy. OpenWrt 24.10.2 answered the call, offered a new wardrobe (LuCI dress in dark mode), and gave me back control of every packet that dared traverse the house. This issue is themed “Network Authority”—highlighting the LAN vs. guest standoffs, the WireGuard escape hatch, and the SNMP-powered switch that reports every port squabble to Home Assistant. ...
💡 The Mission The Archer C6 was sitting on my desk, quietly reminding me that it deserved better than the stock firmware it came with. Slow boot times, clunky menus, and a complete lack of configurability were breeding grounds for frustration, so I decided to swap TP-Link’s limits for something more transparent and powerful. OpenWrt promised that control. It promised a leaner web UI, features I was craving, and the freedom to reconfigure DNS, VLANs, and QoS without being stuck in some simplified settings page. This post is the flash process—the moment I traded stock firmware for OpenWrt and finally made the router behave like something worth bragging about. ...
The Challenge: Creating an All-in-One Wireless Audio System It all started with a simple desire: to transform my used LG SK9Y soundbar into a comprehensive wireless audio streaming solution. I wanted to stream audio from multiple sources - my Mac, Apple devices, Windows laptop, and Fire TV - all wirelessly through WiFi and route it to an Alexa home theater setup. The goal was ambitious: create a seamless, multi-protocol audio streaming system that could handle various streaming standards while maintaining high audio quality and minimal latency. ...
The Beginning: Why Kubernetes? It all started with a simple desire to learn Kubernetes. As someone who’s always been fascinated by container orchestration and distributed systems, the idea of managing multiple containers across a cluster was incredibly appealing. However, there was one significant challenge: limited resources. Traditional Kubernetes clusters require substantial computing power and memory, which wasn’t feasible with my current setup. That’s when I discovered K3S - a lightweight Kubernetes distribution designed specifically for resource-constrained environments. ...