I break things, then write down why.
Homelab rebuilds, developer tooling, and small business websites. Every post is a real problem I hit, the diagnosis, and what I’d do differently next time.
How much does Tailscale actually slow you down? I ran the numbers.
Before connecting to my homelab remotely, I ran a speed test to get a baseline. Then I connected via Tailscale and ran it again. The results were almost identical, which would have been a clean story, except the first two tests had the exit node on the whole time.
A Design Pass on Sherwin Travels
I used Sherwin Travels as the test case for an AI-assisted design pass. Not because it was broken, but because it wasn't quite there. The useful part wasn't the tooling. It was seeing what changed and what still needed a human call.
How I set up NAS-to-NAS backup at home (Part 3: What I'm doing about it)
The destination NAS's CPU is the wall. Drives have headroom, the network has headroom, the source is bored. The Atom in the DS1815+ is why an 11 TB initial replication is going to take days, with three more shares behind it. Here's how I thought through the options.
Gemma vs Claude for SEO Scoring: What the 26-Point Gap Reveals
Same posts, same prompt, two AI models, a 26-point gap. I built dual AI scoring into Cerebro to compare Gemma 4 and Claude Haiku side by side, and the disagreement says more about modern SEO than most checklists do.
Synology NAS-to-NAS backup with Snapshot Replication, Part 2: What went wrong
An overnight death I couldn't immediately explain, CPU pegged on a single core, drives bored. The bottleneck on a 12-year-old Atom NAS turned out to be more interesting than the symptom.
North D Pharmacy
A local pharmacy site rebuilt around phone calls, directions, hours, and cleaner search signals. Bilingual, static, fast.
Sherwin Travels pass
A documented before-and-after pass on another owned site, including what improved and what still needed human judgment.
The homelab backup series
Moving 45 TB between two NASes, the bottleneck that was not the network, and the drives that did not survive the move.
Developer since 2003. Still fixing my own stuff.
I write software for a living and run a homelab because I want to understand the thing before I trust it. Most posts here start the same way: something broke, the obvious fix was wrong, and the real answer took longer than expected.
If you run a small business and your website is quietly costing you calls, that’s the other half of what I do.
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