How a PM Ships Software Without an Engineering Team

How a PM Ships Software Without an Engineering Team
For most of my career, the gap between an idea and a working product was an engineering team. I'm a product manager. I think in milestones, user stories, and outcomes, not in pull requests. I've always coded and I can prototype, but turning a loose idea into something that actually runs, and keeps running, was someone else's job. That gap mostly closed this year. Two tools did it: Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Running a…

Backyard Birds: Building My Own Dashboard on Top of Local Bird Data

Backyard Birds: Building My Own Dashboard on Top of Local Bird Data
A few weeks back I wrote about replacing my Haikubox with a four-camera local pipeline feeding BirdNET into TimescaleDB. The data was beautiful. The dashboards were not. Grafana is great for whether the heat pump cycled overnight or how warm the coop got. It is not great for what showed up in the yard for the first time this week, or what the dawn chorus actually sounds like in order. I kept tweaking panels and…

Managing a Homelab AI Project with Claude Code, Gitea, and the Gitea MCP Server

Managing a Homelab AI Project with Claude Code, Gitea, and the Gitea MCP Server
I am not a software engineer. I think in milestones, user stories, and outcomes. Kim wants a smart garden assistant that tells her when to water and when the blight risk is high. I want to build it. Solo homelab projects like this usually die in a half-finished Docker Compose file. Ceres is different, and the reason is three tools working together: Gitea, the Gitea MCP Server, and Claude Code. The Setup Ceres is a…

Building Ceres, a Multi-Agent Garden Assistant

Building Ceres, a Multi-Agent Garden Assistant
We are growing a lot of vegetables this year. Carrots, cauliflower, russet potatoes, Roma tomatoes, and more are all going into fourteen raised beds in our garden. We have done our research, but there are a lot of variables in a Pacific Northwest garden and a lot of plants to keep track of. So I decided to build a garden assistant. I am calling it Ceres. The Concept Ceres is a multi-agent system. Seven specialist…

I Stopped Doom Scrolling By Building My Own News Feed

I Stopped Doom Scrolling By Building My Own News Feed
A few weeks ago I stopped using Reddit. Not because the content was bad. There's genuinely useful stuff there, but because I had no control over it. I was just overwhelmed with irrelevant content, negative content and constant suggestion of threads I have no interest in. I was full on doom scrolling daily, with a very bad signal to noise ratio. The problem is that once you identify doom scrolling for what it is, you…

Why I Swapped InfluxDB for TimescaleDB – The LLM Tax

Why I Swapped InfluxDB for TimescaleDB – The LLM Tax
For years, InfluxDB has been the data backbone of my Home Assistant setup. With the native Home Assistant integration and Grafana, I had my dashboards dialed in. While FluxQL was a bit of a learning curve, I was able to muscle through the syntax and get the visualizations I needed. As I started integrating LLMs into my daily workflow using custom services, n8n automation workflows, and MCP integrations, I hit a massive syntax wall. I…

Listening to the Birds with AI – My Local HaikuBox

Listening to the Birds with AI – My Local HaikuBox
A few year ago, I saw a very cool product. Haikubox, is a small device that listens to birds at home, identifies them and gives you a nice web interface to see what's going on. Over time, I realized one microphone on a property this size is a problem. If the birds came near our pond it heard them, but we regularly saw and heard birds in the front yard, back yard and other side…

AI-Powered Security Camera Reviews with Frigate, n8n, and Ollama

AI-Powered Security Camera Reviews with Frigate, n8n, and Ollama
Frigate is great at detecting objects. It will tell you a person showed up at the front porch, or that a car pulled into the driveway. What it won't tell you is whether that person is your neighbor waving hello or someone trying your door handle. For that, you need a brain behind the camera feed, not just a classifier. This workflow wires one up on my local n8n instance so everything stays private and…