Engineering notes from Nairobi.
Notes on homelabs, Kubernetes, and the decisions that go into building software.
Featured · Infrastructure
My Home Lab, V2
The Kubernetes cluster is gone. One mini PC runs the whole house now: four network segments, a solar inverter Home Assistant can act on, and a guard that shuts the servers down before the battery does.
· 7 min read
Recent posts
2026
The Checks That Lied
I segmented my network, wrote tests to prove it, and watched the tests pass while measuring nothing at all. Then the same disease turned up in my home automation, and left a freezer switched off for thirteen hours in a house full of green ticks.
Infrastructure · 14 min read
Wiring Home Assistant Into My Solar Inverter
A Growatt inverter, a Raspberry Pi running Solar Assistant, and Home Assistant on Proxmox. Bridging them took an MQTT broker, a form that silently discarded everything I typed, and a decision to keep the link read-only. Then it stopped watching the house and started switching it off.
Infrastructure · 15 min read
Opnsense - Firewall
The rules that seal my IoT segment, in the order they have to be written, and the two that look redundant until you understand what they are for.
Infrastructure · 8 min read
GitHub Actions Things I Wish I Knew Earlier
Matrix strategies, OIDC auth, registry caching, and a few footguns I hit setting up CI/CD for a monorepo.
GitHub Actions · 4 min read
Longhorn: distributed storage for my homelab
How I use Longhorn for distributed block storage across my Kubernetes homelab. Replication, disk tags, GitOps management, and what happens when a node disappears for nine days.
Kubernetes · 8 min read
Pushing Docker Images to Azure Container Registry with GitHub Actions
Set up a GitHub Actions workflow to build and push Docker images to ACR. Spoiler: the OIDC token approach doesn't work with buildx. Here's what does.
Azure · 3 min read
My Power Backup System
A 5kW hybrid inverter and a 5.12 kWh battery, bought to ride out power cuts. Three years later the panels went up and it quietly became the primary supply, with the grid as the fallback.
Infrastructure · 8 min read
Branch-Based Deployments with Private Staging on Cloudflare
How I use Cloudflare Pages for deployments and Cloudflare Access to protect my staging environment with email OTP authentication.
Cloudflare · 6 min read
Homelab Hardware
The three mini PCs I bought for a Kubernetes homelab, what they cost, and what is left of them eighteen months later.
Self-Hosted · 7 min read
My Home Lab
A tour of my Kubernetes homelab on Talos Linux with GitOps and full observability, and why I tore the whole thing down in August 2026.
Self-Hosted · 8 min read
Automating Cloudflare Pages with the API
The Cloudflare Pages dashboard is fine but I'd rather just curl things. Here's how I set up staging and production branches pointing to different domains without touching the UI.
Cloudflare · 3 min read