I ran my South Bend tech business with an AI team of nine agents for three weeks. Here's what they did, what the work is worth, and what I learned.
Server Rack // Blog
Technical deep-dives, debugging stories, and infrastructure chronicles
Build an enterprise-grade Gemini Spark Connector for Proxmox VE using Model Context Protocol (MCP) Streamable HTTP, OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, and Cloudflare WAF.
For years, the standard advice for homelab enthusiasts and self-hosters wanting remote access to their servers was shockingly reckless: open ports 80, 443, or 22 on your home router, configure Dynamic DNS (DDNS) with a cron script, point a custom domain at your residential public IP, and pray your reverse proxy certificates hold up. In … Continued
You are in the middle of a disaster recovery drill, migrating an LXC container between hypervisor nodes, or worse—restoring production systems following a catastrophic hardware outage. You trigger the restore job from your Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) datastore or a local .tar.zst vzdump archive. The restore starts smoothly, streaming gigabytes of data. Then, halfway through … Continued
How to Fix React Stale Closures Overwriting LocalStorage (with useRef & Unmount Saves)
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Frontend
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13 min read
You build a stateful React or Next.js application—a multi-step checkout form, an interactive quiz, or an active flashcard deck. The user interacts with the UI, modifies state, and answers questions. But the moment they navigate to another page, unmount the component, or close the browser tab, their entire session vanishes—or worse, gets overwritten in localStorage … Continued
When a 1U enterprise rack server was stolen, an offline PBS backup drive and nested Hyper-V virtualization turned a catastrophic outage into a successful Proxmox disaster recovery—bringing production websites and zero-trust tunnels back online in 72 hours. The worst outage isn't bit rot or drive failure — it's physical theft. The primary homelab hypervisor (a … Continued
A field guide to the layered stack you use a hundred times a day and never see — and why AI just made all of it everyone's problem. TL;DR Everything you do online rides a tall stack — from utility power and chilled water at the very bottom, up through servers, fiber, and software, to … Continued
The Ephemeral Orchestrator: Why My AI Infrastructure Sleeps When I Do
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Homelab
infrastructure
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7 min read
Why my AI orchestrator lives on a laptop, dies when I close the lid, and why that physical constraint is a better safety model than software guardrails.
TL;DR Elon Musk says work will be "optional" in 10-20 years. I think he's half right: work won't disappear—it will transform into managing AI workforces instead of doing tasks yourself. The "couchpreneur" is someone running real businesses from a laptop by hiring, training, and directing teams of AI agents—not by grinding 18 hours a day. … Continued
Over the last month, I've been experimenting with a small side project called FlashSpark—a quiz and flashcard app that leans heavily on AI to generate questions and plausible incorrect answers (distractors). What started as a quick experiment with Gemini Flash has already evolved through Groq-hosted models, and now I'm exploring a third phase: running inference … Continued