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Meet Alfred, the Server That Runs the House

Meet Alfred, the Server That Runs the House

For a while my setup was split across two machines. Home Assistant lived on my Synology NAS, alongside the Mosquitto MQTT broker and ring-mqtt, while Frigate ran on a separate custom rackmount PC. It worked, but two things kept nagging…
July 24, 2026Posted inComputers, Home Automation, Product Thinking
Diagram of four new product skills for building on AI models: designing evals, choosing models and where they run, orchestrating agents, and setting confidence thresholds.

What Building a Pile of Small AI Projects Taught Me About the PM Job

The tools let me build things I never could have built alone. What surprised me is which parts of the product job got more important, not less.
July 20, 2026Posted inProduct Management, Product Thinking
Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time

Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time

I have wanted an Alexa that doesn't phone home for years. Every commercial voice assistant is a microphone in your house wired to someone else's computer, and the whole point of a homelab is that my stuff runs on my…
July 14, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Development, Home Automation
Introducing Cruxwire: a personal news digest that runs on your own hardware

Introducing Cruxwire: a personal news digest that runs on your own hardware

I read too much news, badly. A dozen RSS feeds, three "read it later" apps I never went back to, and the creeping sense that the algorithm-driven version of all this was optimizing for someone else's goals, not mine. So…
June 24, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Development, Updates
How Claude Updates the Backlog on My Team of One

How Claude Updates the Backlog on My Team of One

Last month I wrote about how a PM ships software without an engineering team. The short version: Claude Code closed the gap between an idea and a running product, so I could spend my time on the parts of the…
June 16, 2026Posted inDevelopment, Product Management
Ceres Update: From Empty Scaffold to a Garden That Talks Back

Ceres Update: From Empty Scaffold to a Garden That Talks Back

Seventy-four commits across one weekend took Ceres, the multi-agent assistant for Kim's garden, from a bare scaffold to a working assistant that transcribes voice notes, diagnoses plant photos, answers questions, plans the watering, and runs a scheduled daily briefing from an orchestrated roster of specialist agents.
June 15, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Development, Home Automation, Homestead
Backyard Birds Is Available, and Learns to Doubt Itself

Backyard Birds Is Available, and Learns to Doubt Itself

The Backyard Birds dashboard is now on GitHub. The follow-up release did not add the notifications I promised. It added clips, reference calls, weather, and a way to tell BirdNET when it is wrong.
June 11, 2026Posted inBirding, Development
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…
May 29, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Development, Product Management, Productivity
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…
May 24, 2026Posted inBirding, Development
Ceres Update: Building the Schema, Then Tearing Half of It Out

Ceres Update: Building the Schema, Then Tearing Half of It Out

A week ago I introduced Ceres, the multi-agent garden assistant Kim and I are building for our raised beds. A week later there is, in fact, code — and a careful re-design that ripped out part of it within three days.
May 19, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Home Automation, Homestead

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  • AI Projects 21
  • Birding 2
  • Carpentry 10
  • Computers 8
  • Development 11
  • Home Automation 33
  • Homestead 18
  • Music 2
  • Photography 7
  • Pond 3
  • Product Management 6
  • Product Thinking 2
  • Productivity 4
  • Python 7
  • Rainier 2
  • Security 7
  • Synology 2
  • Updates 5
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