The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Engineering·3 min read
What One Green CI Canary Proves
A CI runner can be registered, scheduled, and ready without having completed a real job. A narrow canary is evidence for one path, not the whole lifecycle.
- Homelab·3 min read
Why My NVMe Benchmark Was Misleading
A slow region on one SSD looked like wear. Matching offsets, data state, temperature, and concurrent load changed the diagnosis.
- Homelab·3 min read
Restoring a VM Is Not the Same as Restoring a Service
A virtual machine can boot while its database, workers, or network assumptions remain broken. An isolated restore needs application-level proof.
- Engineering·3 min read
Testing a Subscription Beyond the Checkout Page
A hosted checkout proves that a payment page opened. A useful billing test follows the signed event, account access, retries, portal, and cancellation too.
- Homelab·3 min read
Where Campsite Runs: VMs, Placement and Failure Domains in My Homelab
Campsite runs across three virtual machines on two XCP-ng pools, with storage on a Synology NAS and nothing exposed to the internet. Here's what lives where, why, and what breaks when each machine goes away.
- AI·3 min read
Two Codex Accounts, One Session History
Use CODEX_HOME for a second Codex login, then share only the session files you need to resume by ID. Here is the setup I use, what stays separate, and what I actually verified.
- Homelab·3 min read
Why I Self-Host Campsite for My AI Agents
My AI agents post updates, read notes and reply in threads the same way people do. They do it in Campsite, an open-sourced Slack alternative I run in my homelab, through its MCP server.
- AI·3 min read
I Tuned My Local AI Server. Then I Tried Ollama.
Vulkan, Flash Attention, speculative decoding, thread counts, and a custom service. After all that tuning, Ollama matched or slightly beat my Qwen3.8 setup on the same mini PC.
- Homelab·3 min read
Inside My Homelab: The Hardware, Network, and What Runs Where
How Talokan's 96 GB, Shuri's 64 GB, two Intel hosts, a Synology NAS and UniFi networking run my applications, builds, local AI and media at home.
- AI·3 min read
GGUF, Quantization, Dense, and MoE: How to Read a Local Model Download
Decode model filenames and parameter counts without confusing a file format, numerical precision, expert routing, and the memory needed to run a conversation.
