Tag: Design
How Much to Write Before Claude Builds It
N.O.R.A is a self-hosted homelab monitoring platform built with Claude Code as the primary executor. The workflow is settled: design sessions produce specifications, specifications become GitHub issues via PowerShell scripts, Claude Code builds against them. The question this post is about is not whether to use this
Container Update Workflows: Decoupling Awareness from Action
The default is dangerous, but not for the reason you think Most containers in most homelabs run on :latest tags. The reasons are familiar: introductory Docker content defaults to it, most Compose examples don't specify versions, and pinning feels like extra work for uncertain benefit. The result is
The 3-2-1 Rule Covers Data. It Doesn't Cover Knowledge.
The 3-2-1 backup rule is useful because it's specific. Three copies of your data. Two different storage media. One offsite. That specificity is what made it spread — it's a checklist, not a philosophy. You can implement it, verify it, and cross it off. The backup job
Getting Home Assistant Off Your Local Network: Remote Access Decisions That Actually Matter
The Docker stack is running. Z-Wave devices are responding. MariaDB is handling the recorder. The local experience is solid. Then someone asks whether they can control the lights from their phone when they're away from home, and the comfortable self-contained feeling of the stack immediately collides with the
The Arr Stack: Why It Feels Over-Engineered Until It Doesn't
The appeal of running your own media server is straightforward enough. What catches people off guard is the stack that tends to form around it — Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, NZBGet, Jellyseerr, Tautulli. Six containers before you've watched a single episode. That count produces a predictable reaction: this is more
AdGuard Home: DNS Filtering as Infrastructure, Not Just a Privacy Tool
AdGuard Home gets introduced to most homelab builders the same way: as a Pi-hole replacement. Better interface, built-in DoH, easier to update. A cleaner implementation of the same idea — filter DNS queries to block ads and trackers at the network level. The framing is a privacy tool with better ergonomics.
After CentOS: Rocky Linux and the Ecosystem You're Actually Building On
CentOS used to be the obvious answer. If you needed enterprise Linux without the enterprise price tag, you ran CentOS. It tracked Red Hat Enterprise Linux closely, carried a long support lifecycle, and was stable enough that people built production infrastructure on it without much second-guessing. That era ended in
The Tool That Builds the Tool
AI assistants are now programmable in a way that didn't exist two years ago. Not through code — through structured natural language files that shape how the model reasons and acts during a session. In the Claude Cowork system, these are skill files: Markdown documents that tell Claude what
Encoded Judgment: What the SKILL.md Pattern Shares with Runbooks — and Where the Analogy Breaks
Every time you start a new session with Claude, you start from zero. The model has no memory of the last run, no accumulated judgment from the previous session, no operational context carried forward. If you want Claude to behave consistently — to follow the same approach, apply the same tradeoffs,
What the Standard Matrix Stack Is Actually For
Matrix documentation, like most infrastructure documentation, was written for the scale where documentation matters most. The matrix.org homeserver serves millions of users across thousands of federated rooms. The guides, examples, and architecture recommendations that follow from that context are well-suited to that context. For a homelab running five users,