This weekend I was away from my homelab for two days. All I left behind was one Windows machine that could reach the lab's management network, which gave me the Proxmox web GUI and a console. No physical access, no keyboard on any server.
My CI runner could not SSH to my production host. Same VLAN, both up, both healthy, and every packet between them disappeared. No firewall log. No error. No RST. Just silence.
Three days before the morning this post describes, I could not have told you what a CI runner was. Then, one morning, I woke up to a green pipeline and a message from my own infrastructure: the new version of my trading bot had tested, built, and deployed itself to production ove...
My bot's architecture (previous post) gives LLMs exactly one daily job: after the deterministic rule engine produces its verdicts, a model writes a short comment and a confidence score per ticker, for me to read. The model in that seat costs money every day. So the natural questi...
"Should I run real Kubernetes, or is k3s cheating?"
For months, my trading bot's test suite ran green on my machine. Then I built CI, and the very first real pipeline run failed twelve tests I had not touched in weeks.
Everyone agrees backups matter. Almost nobody tests them. The uncomfortable truth of that gap: an untested backup is not a backup, it is a hope with a filename.
I built a backup vault for my lab: a small Rocky Linux container on the most restricted VLAN I have, the database zone. Fresh container, correct IP, correct gateway. First test:
A friend had a simple, real problem: he wanted one Markdown file that always mirrors his project (folder tree plus every file's contents) so he can paste full context into Copilot or ChatGPT in one go. He works in Playwright tests, and hand-assembling that context every time was...
While building my quiz pipeline (previous post), the topic-classification stage needed a small local model to read a chunk of documentation and pick one to three tags from a fixed taxonomy of about 80 topics. Straightforward classification, thousands of chunks, running free on an...
My bot watches a list of instruments during the day and pings my phone when something moves. The first version had the obvious rule: alert when any instrument moves more than a flat 3% from yesterday's close.
The day I moved my bot's broker gateway from a tmux session to a proper systemd service, I created the most educational outage of the whole project, and the scariest part is how good everything looked while it was broken.