Blog¶

July 19, 2026
in Development
5 min read

The Asymmetric Dev, part 1: reclaiming Unix velocity on rescued hardware

It started at my day job. For years, I had been issued a 15-inch Dell XPS. To call it a "laptop" was a generous stretch of the imagination; it was a portable space heater. It was incredibly noisy, ran white-hot, and frequently threw thermal throttling tantrums. I reached a point where I had to physically elevate the chassis and point a literal desk fan at it just to keep it cool.

Then, the company upgraded us to M2 MacBook Airs.

July 17, 2026
in Homelab
3 min read

Home lab, part 3: from Proxmox to bare-metal Docker

Part 2 covered the network the Lab VLAN sits on. This post covers what's actually running inside it — and a decision I made and then partly reversed: standing up Proxmox on both servers, then tearing it back down in favour of running Docker straight on bare metal.

July 15, 2026
in Homelab
4 min read

Home lab, part 2: network architecture and VLAN segmentation

Part 1 covered the physical layer — where the gear lives and how it gets a wired connection. This post covers what's built on top of it: the gateway, the VLAN layout, and the firewall model that ties them together. Later posts move up the stack into the compute layer and the reverse proxy sitting in front of it.

July 13, 2026
in Homelab
2 min read

Home lab, part 1: hardware and physical setup

When my wife and I moved into our current home seven years ago, I wanted the network gear tucked away in the loft rather than piled up behind the TV. Wiring the house for Ethernet turned out to be a bigger job than I'd expected, and since it wasn't urgent, it kept sliding down the to-do list. That changed last December, when a problem with the existing setup made it worth finally tackling properly.