About

I'm Chris. By day, I lead engineering teams and spend a lot of time thinking about how software actually gets built now that agents sit inside the loop. By night (and most weekends, if I'm honest), I run a homelab that has grown well past what any five-person household needs: a UniFi network that would make most businesses jealous, Proxmox + K8S powering home automation, and Agents managing it all. An undisclosed amount of time and money later, it all works...mostly.

This site is where I write it down. Not the tldr; version. The version with the config, the edge cases that cost you the weekend, and the parts I'd do differently next time.

What you'll find here

Everything is grouped into a handful of topics and tags, with the bulk of it organized into these main areas:

• Homelab. Networking, DNS, self-hosting, Cloudflare tunnels, and running real infrastructure at home without it becoming a second job. If you're new, start with the comprehensive homelab guide and go from there.
• Agentic Engineering. Building software with AI agents and the tooling they need. This is where I'm spending most of my thinking lately: what works in a real codebase, what falls over, and what it means for teams and the people leading them. Optimistic, but trust and verify.
• Privacy. Your data should be yours. Practical ways to think about it and protect it.
• Platform Engineering. Posts that go back over ten years as DevOps emerged into modern platform engineering. Concepts I leverage in my modern homelab and day-to-day at work.
• Field Notes. Gear I liked, conference recaps, the home office, and the occasional note on leading teams.

What I'm building

The projects live on their own page now, with a short note on each: projects. Nearly all of it is built in the open, because it's more satisfying and fun that way.

goondocks

Separate from the day job, I run goondocks, a small open-source studio and consultancy. Two kinds of work happen there: open-source tooling that I'd want to exist anyway, and engineering help for non-profits and charitable projects that can't usually afford it. If you're running one of those and have a problem that looks like software, that's the door to knock on.

Reading tips

Press ? anywhere on the site for the keyboard map. The numbers jump between sections, / opens search, and the theme switcher in the footer is there if you'd rather read in Tokyo Night or Rosé Pine.

New posts go out by email the day they publish. No digest, no promotions, and you can leave with one click.

Questions, corrections, or a setup you want to compare notes on? Reach out. I read everything.